Hardware

Intel Praises Ramp of 22nm Ivy Bridge Chips: Fastest Ramp in History.

Last Updated on Thursday, 19 July 2012 17:00 Published on Thursday, 19 July 2012 17:00

While the lineup of Intel Core i-series 3000 "Ivy Bridge" microprocessor is not yet very broad, thanks to rapid ramp up of chip production at 22nm tri-gate process technology, they now account for a quarter of Intel's client central processing units (CPUs) shipments. In fact, the company believes that the ramp up of Ivy Bridge is the fastest in the company's history.

"Our technology and manufacturing group once again delivered fantastic results. Our 22nm process health is ahead of where out 32nm [process health] was at the same point in its ramp, and ahead of our own plans. That enabled us to ramp up Ivy Bridge to nearly a quarter of our PC volume, our fastest ramp ever," said Paul Otellini, chief executive officer of Intel, during the quarterly conference call with financial analysts.

 

It is not a secret that Intel has had a aggressive plan to transit five of its fabs to 22nm process technology in 2011 - 2012 timeframe. In particular, the company has either upgraded or is about to do so its D1D (Oregon), D1C (Oregon), Fab 13 (Arizona), Fab 32 (Arizona) and Fab 28 (Israel) production facilities to the new manufacturing process. As a result, it was relatively easy for Intel to quickly ramp up production using leading-edge manufacturing technology quicker than in cases of 32nm or 45nm, where the company only had two or three advanced fabs that made products using latest technologies. [xbit]