Thanks for the information tunafish.
np.
I was actually a bit unsure about that DTI thing, and showed it to an actual practicing EE, and he said that I was a little wrong about it. The plates in the DTI cap are not separate in the hole, but instead the larger one envelops the smaller one. As in, first the hole is dug, it's coated with a conductor, then that is coated with a dielectric, and then the hole is filled with the conductor. The first plate is the outer conductor, and the second plate is the plug that fills the hole. Which I should have gotten right, because it makes a lot more sense that way. The point about it being hard to manufacture is still valid -- if the plates touch anywhere the cap is bust. That's gotta be fun to manufacture for a micrometer-long shaft through a 50-nanometer hole.
Do you have any guess as to whether the separate die is eDRAM or not?
There are precious few manufacturers that ship eDRAM in any large quantity, and most of them are bitter rivals of Intel. Also, given that the module is tied right next to a fast logic chip, there is little need to ship any fast logic in it. I expect it to be a more traditional chip.
It sounds like both traditional DRAM and eDRAM need special capability and are not necessarily something that a traditional logic fab can automatically provide..
Yeah, DRAM production has really gone of the deep end in recent years. Back when I was in school, DRAM was still made using standard tools and it really was just a planar macro that anyone could use. Then it got hit by quantum effects pretty hard -- DRAM can't be made that way anymore because at modern feature sizes the capacitor would hold very close to (potentially less than) just one electron, which is arguably the worst kind of quantum effect you can have...
So all the DRAM manufacturers went for all kinds of exotic tech and materials. For the future, as I understand it, they can keep making the caps in the buried delay line style dram proportionally longer, so we should see it scale well at least as long as everything else does.
I just find it extremely unlikely that intel of all companies would go to an outside source to manufacture an integral, key part of its upcoming flagship product. I just don't see it happening, for any number of reasons. One being that intel is the semiconductor manufacturing masters of this planet, reason two would be intellectual property issues (would they want to hand over complete specs and blueprints of their best and most recent tech to another, outside entity?) ...And so on.
Like they did with their chipsets?
Actually, I can totally see Intel handing this over to someone else. DRAM is commodity stuff. They don't need to do any special design for it, they can just order a bunch of chips with a certain kind of interface from any of the manufacturers. And while Intel is the very best at making logic, they are not a DRAM manufacturer anymore, and haven't been for a while. Given how low the margins are in the market, I can't see them wanting to try.
Also, I think it's particularly likely especially because they had "an escape hatch". If something went wrong, shipping a lineup without GT3e would not have been catastrophic.
