Intel confirms China Fab in 2010
Thursday 29th March 2007, 04:00:00 PM, written by Arun
On monday, Intel finally confirmed its plan to construct a new fab in China, at the northern city of Dalian. The company wants to have the fab operational in 2010, and they plan to use new technology and ideas to make it their cheapest fab operation in existence. The catch? It'll run on 90nm. This might thus drastically change the dynamics of integration.
The likely reason why a more advanced technology process won't be used is that neither Intel nor the U.S. defense department would trust China in terms of intellectual property protection. The consequences of this fab only being on 90nm could be significant to the rest of the industry, however, and in ways that might not be immediatly obvious.
Some background first: southbridges are shrinking. Not in importance perhaps, but most certainly in terms of die size, and thus relative manufacturing costs. NVIDIA's highest-end southbridge, used in the nForce 680i and the nForce 5 Series for AMD platforms, is a relatively small 130nm chip for example. On the other hand, the memory controller and the graphics core are still relatively power-hungry and expensive.
It seems unlikely to us that Intel plans to create a specific new CPU and motherboard platform around these 90nm chipsets for third world markets, so this seems to imply that they want to eventually create a platform around a southbridge-only chip (produced in China, or elsewhere) and one or multiple other chips for the GPU, the CPU and the memory controller. Wireless might also be handled separately, possibly through highly-integrated DAC+PHY chips.
A logical evolution in that timeframe would be to integrate the CPU, GPU and memory controller on a single chip, especially so given the Gesher architecture (which Intel plans to release in late 2010) will be based around mini-cores and, apparently, special-purpose acceleration cores (that includes video and graphics!) - so that certainly makes some sense to us. It remains to be seen if we're right on this, but if we are, this certainly could be a quite flexible and cost-effective approach of integration for Intel.
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