Well let's hope that with the incredible power of a computer, they can distinguish commercial space traffic from global thermonuclear war.

Your typical first strike would involve lots of simultaneous launches. And the trajectories of icbm's would be suspiciously suborbital. Complicated equipment doing complicated pattern recognition. Built by the lowest bidder. What could possibly go wrong...

Yes. You may note, that was my original point. Intel fielding them before AMD and the rest does is what the real news is about here.

Nevermind the tautology. I'm tired and drunk. Sorry. ;-)

But a link to the inventors would have been ... well ... informative.

And the kind of FinFET technology used is more a matter of what is more effective in your semiconductor process. Whether it's twingsate, trigate, quadgate, whatever. There's a good chance what they published years ago is not all that similar to what they did for this.

Well, the original FinFETs were twingate (as were some similar transistors before the term FinFET was coined for them), intel invented trigate. In the end, this still is the first kind of FinFET coming to market.

I just think inventing them in the first place is more inventive then refining them.

My point of them having been quite a long time in the making still stands. Just note the age of that press release (2002).

Oh dear. They called them 3D-Transistors even back then.

What is indeed news is that intel is fielding them first.

Well, while it is nice a slashdot article has finally been written about FinFET's - there may already have been one, I just can't remember - these devices have been widely guessed to be a part of the 22 nm technology node for quite some time. (see: http://www.itrs.net/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/22_nanometer ).

They offer more effectivity for your gates as the field is not coming from one, but from 3 sides to the channel. That means a bit more scalability, but not much more. There is only a bit of improvement possible for the future in putting the gate below the channel as well (as hard as that may be, i, personally, don't think it would be worthwhile), so this won't save moore's law in the end.

It may not surprise you that they actually haven't been invented by intel, and are not new.

The term has been coined more than 10 years ago ( http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=823848 ) (find one of the free pdf's of this classic paper for yourself)

What is more interesting is how far down these transistors will scale in the extreme ultraviolet processes that are emerging right now.

Do you really believe what you said there?

five posts further up

Shut up about it? Now that's a great tradition of rule of law if you ask me.

You know, laws and military objectives are not supposed to be contradictory. Two parties, in a combined 10 year effort, with all checks and balances in place, could not come up with a legal way of locking up and _interrogating_ their prisoners of war short of keeping them on extrajudicial territory. That is pretty much a low for the united states.

And those politicians knew, at least after 9/11, that they would fight a war against terrorists.