Intel Announces first 22nm 3D Tri-Gate Transistors, Shipping in 2H 2011

Earlier this week Intel sent us a cryptic message:

I wanted to invite you to an Intel press conference on Wednesday May 4th at 9:30am Pacific time. Intel will be making its most significant technology announcement of the year. No further details will be provided in advance. The event will be held in San Francisco so for those of you are local in the SF Bay Area please attend in person if you like. It will also webcasted live. Tune-in details and logistics are below. Please let me know if you can attend.

A while ago Intel decided that a nice way to drive up its stock price would be to behave more like Apple, keeping major announcements under wraps and introducing them on its own terms to hopefully build up anticipation and excitement for Intel's announcements. You've seen examples of this with how closely Intel held Sandy Bridge's architectural details before its presentation at IDF, and how little we knew about Quick Sync (Sandy Bridge's hardware video transcoder) until Intel decided it was time to talk about it.

Apple can get away with it since most of its products are tangible, consumer facing devices. Intel's technologies are arguably even more important, but they're just not as easy for the general populace to get excited about. Today's announcement is the perfect example of just that.

Earlier today Intel announced that its 22nm process would not use conventional planar transistors but rather be the first time Intel is using 3D Tri-Gate transistors. This is a huge announcement that fuels Intel's leadership in the mobile/desktop/server CPU space and makes it a lot more attractive in the SoC space, let's understand why.

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