Yeee-haaa! Gigahost now offers even better and faster performance than before. We have just updated most of our hardware to stable and super-fast servers. That means all our web servers are now much more efficient than before, without you having to pay extra.
If you use a CMS such as WordPress, Joomla, or Drupal, you will experience that your pages are now even faster for your visitors and much easier for you to develop and work with.
Intel Xeon E3
The improvement is due to our transition to Intel’s 32 nm chip technology, which is good for both speed and power consumption.
The very small transistors in Intel’s Xeon E3 processors are manufactured lithographically by using extremely short-wavelength ultraviolet light. The lithographic process uses light to draw patterns in a material through a mask with very fine details. This pattern then forms the foundation for a chemical conversion, typically by means of etching, into a functional structure of metals and semiconductors that makes up the transistors in processors.
The finest patterns one can draw are determined partly by the wavelength of the light, much like the finest cut you can make in a cake is determined by the edge of the knife. For visible light this ranges between 380 and 740 nanometres, but for extremely short-wavelength ultraviolet light it goes all the way down to under 20 nanometres.
Intel has recently launched a chip series based on the same technology with lithographic details of about 22 nanometres, opening the way for a new family of processors. In the picture, you see a scanning electron microscope (SEM) image of a small section of uncovered N- and P-type metal-oxide-semiconductor (NMOS-/PMOS-) structures on the surface of one of these new processors.
Both the gate and the fins are visible, and the holes the arrow points at, which become sources and drains in the assembled chip, are filled with an alloy of silicon and germanium (SiGe). This material is widely used because it can support ultra-high frequencies, over 100GHz, and is also compatible with complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technologies for building integrated circuits. We are watching them closely, but for now we are only using the well-tested 32 nm technology. If you have questions about lithographic processes, you are always welcome to write to us at support@gigahost.uk.