Ahead of the launch of Intel’s Alder Lake generation of processors, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger promises that the company will keep up the pace and even break Moore’s law in order to produce faster processors in the coming decade, processors they claim competitors can not beat.
Intel’s legendary founder Gordon Moore is the man behind Moore’s team, a claim in the industry that says the number of transistors that fit in a processor doubles about every two years. The more transistors, the faster and more powerful processor. Moore’s team has been relatively accurate over the past half century, although it has faced some setbacks in recent years.
Transistors are already so microscopic that it is becoming increasingly difficult to shrink them even more physically, something that has led to some dismay in an industry accustomed to seeing rapid and effective progress.
With that in mind, Gelsinge’s promises have been received with a lot of attention. “Moore’s team lives and thrives,” Gelsinger says PCWorld. “We predict that we will be able to hold on to or even develop faster than Moore’s team in the coming decade.”
“We are entering a period where we maintain or even go before Moore’s law,” Gelsinger added. “We expect to be able to increase the pace and double earlier than the two-year limit and we will not rest until the entire periodic table is exhausted. We as managers of Moore’s team will chase innovations in silicon magic.”
The reason according to Gelsinger is that new advances in the manufacturing process of transistors provide opportunities to overcome the obstacles in manufacturing that exist as well as increase the speed of the transistors. While the semiconductor industry is working to implement extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography to enable more transistors per silicon chip, Intel goes one step further and is working to implement something called High-NA EUV, an even more advanced lithographic method.
In addition, Intel is also working on the possibility of expanding the circuits vertically, something that will provide more space for transistors within the same horizontal surface as today’s circuits.
Can Intel take the lead again? It is possible…!
After some tough years, Intel seems to be returning to its former glory, thanks in large part to the launch of the Alder Lake generation of processors. The new processor design that implements an architecture from Arm called big.LITTLE will distinguish them from the main rival AMD, which in turn is expected to implement the architecture as early as the Zen 5 generation and perhaps more likely, first in Zen 6.
Combined with the next generation of EUV lithography, Intel can deduct further. Since Intel also has all manufacturing within the company, it is more likely that the progress made can be kept within the company, which gives Intel a clear advantage compared to primarily AMD but to some extent also Apple, companies that both rely on the semiconductor manufacturer TSMC.
“I think we will have a comfortable edge over everyone else in the industry,” says Gelsinger. “It’s not that we think the other companies will give up, it’s just that we will continue to add unique benefits to, for example, IDM 2.0 manufacturing, as we look forward to the coming decade.”
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