AMD and IBM have said that they will both now use Silicon on Insulator SOI with strained silicon for their 90nm processors. This includes AMDs Athlon64 and Opteron CPUs and IBMs PowerPc CPUs. An article on Inquirer: This strained silicon process is called "dual stress liner", which the firms claim improve n-channel and p-channel transistors on chips, by "stretching" silicon atoms in one transistor and "compressing" them in the other. Why does it matter? The chip firms say that it will boost speeds of chips by up to a quarter using the same power levels as non-SOI chips. Last week, Fred Weber, CTO of AMD, said his firm and IBM had extended their technology agreement to cover 45 nanometre tech.
