4 ms·
Isn't comparing TSMC to Intel process nodes like comparing apples to oranges?
by acchow 8y ago
Isn't comparing TSMC to Intel process nodes like comparing apples to oranges?
- garmaine 8y agoThey both manufacture silicon gates.. what does it matter if the production infrastructure on top is different.
- gameswithgo 8y agothe way they measure size is different
- garmaine 8y agoAh. What confused me was the word “process” which typically refers to the stack of things that take a high level description of a circuit and turn it into instructions for the machine to execute to make the wafer.
- MrEldritch 8y agoThe engineering involved in shrinking the gates these days is Herculean enough that Intel's 10nm and 7nm processes are genuinely distinct processes in that sense as well.
- etaoins 8y agoIn semiconductor fabrication “process” almost always refers to the manufacturing process, not the design process.
- rm999 8y agoYeah they aren't quite comparable; I didn't want to dig into the complexities of that, which is why I followed the last thought with "incidentally".
- Valmar 8y agoIt's more one kind of apple to another. They're both process nodes, with certain minor-ish differences here and there. TSMC calls theirs 7 nm, Intel calls theirs 10 nm. Their performance characteristics might be around the same. In practice... who knows. We do know that Intel's current 10 nm CPUs are pretty much broken ~ best they could currently do was useless laptop-grade 2.5 GHz dual-core with no functional iGPU. Not sure about the HT, though.
- djsumdog 8y agoI really hope they don't give up on making discrete GPUs again. That internal program and been brought back up and killed a few times. I use to own an i740 way back in the day, and my cousin even worked on that video driver. With nVidia's buy out of 3Dfx and PowerVR pretty much only doing mobile phones/tablets, it'd be nice to see a 3rd player in the nVidia/AMD space again. I know Matrox still exists, but for what I can tell, they just make cards for 10~20 monitor setups (kiosks, stores, airports, etc).
- Zardoz84 8y agoInteresting... i740 drivers was very broken. I remember having a lot of issue with many games.
- AtlasBarfed 8y agoIt might be, but if AMD/TSMC start cranking out their 7nm stuff next year, I've read that marketing can't bridge that gap: the 7nm people will have the leading processing technology in the world, and Intel will be trailing for the first time in a long, long time. But who can predict what will happen...