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In your opinion what should they have spent that die space on? Moore's law was about transistor count too. They didn't have a lot of architecture changes they c

In your opinion what should they have spent that die space on? Moore's law was about transistor count too. They didn't have a lot of architecture changes they could work with and the on-die memory was pretty much maxxed out.

Retric 11y ago
Nothing was a real option. Thus significantly reducing manufacturing costs, boosting yields and with a better thermal envelope processing speeds. Remember the last few die shrinks have run into huge heat issues.
- chadgeidel 11y ago
  "Nothing" (i assume you mean "blank space on the die") does not reduce manufacturing costs. Boosting yields has nothing to do with leaving "part of the die bank". Thermal envelope is inherent to the process size, not the use (or unuse) of transistors on the die.
  - Retric 11y ago
    It's more complex than that as you want to avoid local hot spots etc. Also, you can change the layout so a void on one chip is used as part of a second chip. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tessellation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tessellation. They can use lasor cutters which can trace out complex shapes. It's much easer to cut rectangular chips though. Still, even if the used the same overall design and just ignore any defects over X area would boost yield.
- dragontamer 11y ago
  > significantly reducing manufacturing costs I am pretty sure that if keeping the memory controller, northbridge, and iGPU separate, Intel would have kept these things separate. My bet? I think the cheaper manufacturing costs associated with motherboard construction beat-out the slightly increased cost of tighter integration. But I'm not an Intel Engineer. Just a hunch... considering that Apple A9, Qualcomm Snapdragon, AMD A10 "APUs" , and Intel have all decided to integrate everything together. > better thermal envelope processing speeds What, are people actually using iGPUs for difficult tasks all the time? As far as I can tell, most people surf Facebook all day and ping the CPU. iGPU isn't slowing down anything with Facebook surfing. Besides, a crappy integrated GPU on the MoBo would still use up RAM bandwidth. If anything, integrating the GPU has made the process cheaper for Intel. The Northbridge, Memory Controller, and iGPU are all integrated into modern CPUs, because Intel has done the number crunching and has determined that its cheaper to do it this way.

Retric 11y ago

Nothing was a real option. Thus significantly reducing manufacturing costs, boosting yields and with a better thermal envelope processing speeds. Remember the last few die shrinks have run into huge heat issues.

chadgeidel 11y ago
"Nothing" (i assume you mean "blank space on the die") does not reduce manufacturing costs. Boosting yields has nothing to do with leaving "part of the die bank". Thermal envelope is inherent to the process size, not the use (or unuse) of transistors on the die.
- Retric 11y ago
  It's more complex than that as you want to avoid local hot spots etc. Also, you can change the layout so a void on one chip is used as part of a second chip. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tessellation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tessellation. They can use lasor cutters which can trace out complex shapes. It's much easer to cut rectangular chips though. Still, even if the used the same overall design and just ignore any defects over X area would boost yield.
dragontamer 11y ago
> significantly reducing manufacturing costs I am pretty sure that if keeping the memory controller, northbridge, and iGPU separate, Intel would have kept these things separate. My bet? I think the cheaper manufacturing costs associated with motherboard construction beat-out the slightly increased cost of tighter integration. But I'm not an Intel Engineer. Just a hunch... considering that Apple A9, Qualcomm Snapdragon, AMD A10 "APUs" , and Intel have all decided to integrate everything together. > better thermal envelope processing speeds What, are people actually using iGPUs for difficult tasks all the time? As far as I can tell, most people surf Facebook all day and ping the CPU. iGPU isn't slowing down anything with Facebook surfing. Besides, a crappy integrated GPU on the MoBo would still use up RAM bandwidth. If anything, integrating the GPU has made the process cheaper for Intel. The Northbridge, Memory Controller, and iGPU are all integrated into modern CPUs, because Intel has done the number crunching and has determined that its cheaper to do it this way.