Normally I could care less about one company vs another but I thought this would be appropriate for all of those who think Intel is the greatest ever and are riding high on Conroe: TI Out Produces Intel. At least one market where Intel will still be lagging after Conroe, though relatively small. And, they will likely beat Intel to 45nm for those who mistakenly think that Intel has the smallest process.

Discuss...

yeah that was interesting. TI makes calculators, phone chips, etc. but they dont get the press that Intel does because they don't make high visibilty chips.

Imean, the best FireWire chips are TI. Mot people would be surprised at how many electronic devices have TI chips.

Very much so. They also make a lot of the silicon that goes onto other components. as you said, people would be shocked to know the breadth of their penetration.

Motorola also.

I remember back in college my Casio graph calculator was powered by TI chips, I think. It was great, helped me with some calculus equations.

TI OWNS the engineering calculator market. Every math, engineering, physics, etc major uses them and a souped up 3D graphing one only costs $200.

Motorola chips power my Fords.

TI OWNS the engineering calculator market. Every math, engineering, physics, etc major uses them and a souped up 3D graphing one only costs $200.

Absolutely. I HAD to have one in high school calculus, not to even touch my college engineering courses.

They also make one of the world's foremost HDTV projection chips as well.

TI OWNS the engineering calculator market. Every math, engineering, physics, etc major uses them and a souped up 3D graphing one only costs $200.

Absolutely. I HAD to have one in high school calculus, not to even touch my college engineering courses.


Tell me about it. I still have my TI-81 and I use it every now and then even though I do development now.

Waste of time article. TI has been right behind Intel for a while - they deployed 65nm in late '05, for example. Without any definite timeframe, it's impossible to say that they are going to "beat" Intel at anything (in terms of process size - they may with chip volume, I don't know). While their SRAM numbers are impressive, Intel displayed their SRAM chip half a year ago. They may have decreased the cell size by now.

It's just a press release from TI copied and pasted into a news article, nothing more. I wouldn't put much faith on it without a definite time frame. It's about as useful as an Intel pat-on-the-back press release.

I breezed past my pre-cal class with one of those TI-83's. Yep got through my sophomore year fairly quickly

You do realize this is more of a joke than anything right?

I am not that concerned with who gets to 45nm first. TI has been winning in volume for years, no big deal. The real point is to show/get people to realize that this is more than just and Intel/AMD world, and to draw out the hardcore fanboys that would take tis too seriously and come up with reasons why this article/TI suck.

Sorry. I blame it on jet lag.


Well, if you want to bring up TI.. why not bring up ARM? They license out their uArch for over 1.7 billion chips a year.

I did find this interesting. To put things in perspective, Intel's 45nm SRAM cell takes up 0.346 square microns and AMD's is even larger at 0.370 square microns.

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipse [...] i=2734&p=2

While it may seem that TI's 45nm process is better, it's mainly because they are optimized for different things. TI's would be mainly power consumption in mind while Intel's and AMD's have to worry about allowing for high speeds. Intel and AMD probably have larger distances between the source and the drain to reduce leakage which would account for the larger sizes. AMD's use of SOI might also make their process larger.

Intel has already demonstrated a working 45nm static RAM memory chip. Last year Intel began work on its second 45nm 300mm plant at Fab 28 in Kiryat Gat, Israel which is suppose to come on line in the second half of 2008. Its first 45nm 300mm plant is Fab 32.