Budget-conscious projects use 180 nm. [1] [2]
Look for "cost metrics" table, "cost per million transistors".
As or intel: they claim they can make cheaper transistors, but yet their cpu's don't reflect that. Also they've offered manufacturing services for some time, but nobody taken , and that's pretty weird if they are so cheap beyond industry.
So many in the industry don't think it is true.
New CPUs during the clock speed doubling era had moderate increases in transistor count to accommodate new features. Now that clock speed increases have stalled, adding on more stuff is the only way to differentiate new products.
* Physics stopped CPUs from advancing any further.
* When CPUs used to advance they almost cost the same, that's why once they reached a new milestone they never looked back to produce slower CPUs.
* Adding a number next to "i" will make costumers pay more for pretty much the same CPU.
* There's only major CPUs manufactures and all CPUs they make are sold anyway so they start by mass production from day one.
I work in Intel's Failure Analysis division, and we're expanding pretty aggressively. Same job, three times as many resources, much more money involved. It just keeps getting smaller.
They're trying to make a comeback with Zen, but one of the biggest issues with development is that you learn from the successes and failures of your previous product. If your previous product sucked, you're under an enormous amount of pressure to fix those problems before you even get started on your next generation. Otherwise, those problems will persist, and you'll get new problems as well.
They've stayed relevant in the GPU market, though.
I am mainly using it to compile software though, which makes good use of multiple cores, probably closer to a "server" workload than a "desktop" one.
I just picked up the AMD Vishera -- 4.2 Ghz, easily overclockable to 4.5 with a proper cooling system, for $90.
For comparison, an Intel Core i3 4350 at 3.6 Ghz runs $205.
And in APU (or "non-mobile SoC", if you will) market too: Xbox1 _and_ PS4 - that's a huge success by any measure.
Is it because demand is higher for CPUs with low core-counts? I understand this argument in the consumer PC space, but what about in the datacenter?
Maybe companies which operate datacenters are too focused on horizontal scalability and stopped caring about vertical scalability? Surely this will change in the future? There are factors like power consumption and floor realestate to consider - From an electricity and realestate perspective, it is increasingly efficient to run your software on as few machines as possible (each machine having more CPU cores).
Am I right to believe that eventually companies will start writing/using software which leverages multiple CPU cores (when the cost benefits outweigh the hassle)?
Why is it not popular to scale both horizontally AND vertically?
I would be really interested in hearing ideas.
I started thinking about this after noticing that Amazon EC2 instance prices grew linearly as you doubled memory and CPU resources... I expected a sub-linear growth.