BAD HARDWARE WEEK

What Intel has done is adopt a 3D gate structure that creates a fin of substrate material through which the gate passes. This actually increases the size of the inversion layer (allowing for higher drive current) but minimizes the power lost to leakage. Intel says the new 3-D technology provides a 37% increase in performance.  Intel's diagrams indicate that the company is moving to SOI as well.
Today, Intel demonstrated the world's first 22nm microprocessor, codenamed "Ivy Bridge," working in a laptop, server and desktop computer. Ivy Bridge-based Intel Core family processors will be the first high-volume chips to use 3-D Tri-Gate transistors. Ivy Bridge is slated for high-volume production readiness by the end of this year.

BAD HARDWARE: Intel will lose its advantage in bulk scaling. The only way to stay competitive is to use unveiled FIN structures to diminish ever increasing transistor leaking. However, I am sure that IBM and AMD will follow soon with the same design approach. We believe Intel may be as much as two years ahead of the competition. However, not in mobile processors. "The current 2-D transistor will hit its limit when the production process advances beyond 20 nanometers and that's when we will switch to 3-D transistors," Chiang from TSMC added.