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Apple, Huawei Both Claim First 7-nm Smartphone Chips
- sschueller 8y agoApple and Huawei don't have any fabs, TSMC makes them for both. A better title would be "TSMC first to manufacture 7nm smartphone chip, Samsung close behind while Intel is playing catchup."
- mmmBacon 8y agoI think you are underestimating the challenges involved in moving to a new node and designing to a new node. Just last year, a lot of other companies were on the fence saying 7nm was not ready. TSMC doesn't just invest in 7nm with a build it and they will come philosophy. I'm sure Apple and Huawei were both instrumental in bringing 7nm to market. Global Foundries has dropped out of the advanced node game and Intel is struggling to maintain parity. Hurray to all of them for a tremendous achievement.
- Bud 8y agoNot Huawei; just Apple. Huawei won't have any product for quite some time. Their announcement on this is fraudulent vapor.
- echevil 8y agoWon't be long. Mate 20 will be announced on Oct 16.
- nv-vn 8y agoAMD is launching 7nm soon on the TSMC process but I recall them saying that they intend to use GF as well within 6 months of launch. So it seems like GF 7nm may also beat Intel's 10nm to market.
- vlangber 8y agoGlobal Foundries have dropped 7nm.. https://www.anandtech.com/show/13277/globalfoundries-stops-all-7nm-development https://www.anandtech.com/show/13277/globalfoundries-stops-a...
- raverbashing 8y agoMaybe they can move other processors to be manufactured by them if it's cost effective. (Not sure how much it would cost though, it's probably not a trivial cost, but at Apple scales, it might be doable)
- dclusin 8y agoI noticed you've used the word node in reference to semi-conductor fabrication plants. I've seen this word used elsewhere in other blogs. Could you please elaborate on what it means with respect to chip fabs?
- kolencherry 8y agoWouldn't Apple technically be the first to mass-market with a 7nm SoC?
- Bud 8y agoNot just technically. There's nothing complex or "technical" about it. Huawei is announcing something they are not even close to shipping. Apple will be first, period.
- scotth 8y agohttps://www.google.ca/search?q=define+technically&oq=define+technically&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l5.4597j1j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 https://www.google.ca/search?q=define+technically&oq=define+...
- dstaley 8y agoI mean, Huawei was technically correct when they announced it was the first. However, it's now clear that the A12 Bionic will be the first shipping 7nm SoC, and I think it's fair for Apple to claim it's the first 7nm SoC in a smartphone.
- zitterbewegung 8y agoTo quote Jobs: real artists ship. I suppose that since TSMC makes both processors as others have pointed out TSMC is the first to ship with at the 7nm node.
- mi_lk 8y agoWhat does SoC stand for?
- colechristensen 8y agoNow we're in the neighborhood of 1-10nm, putting one number on the feature size doesn't mean much. It's just marketing. Once people start paying attention to a metric it gradually stops meaning anything. Feature size in semiconductors has hit the point where nobody should really care.
- postalrat 8y agoDid the jump from 28 to 14 mean more than 14 to 7?
- mmmBacon 8y agoThe big jump there was from 2D to FinFETs.
- AgentOrange1234 8y agoI am by no means an expert but I think the answer is yes. As I understand it, as we shrink smaller we run into greater leakage costs even when the devices aren’t switching. This is probably not a completely correct answer.
- arez 8y agoDoes anyone know where we're heading next? Will there be a slowdown of performance increase the next years? Did we hit a barrier?
- trumped 8y agoslowdown in performance increase? haven't we been there for a decade?
- smilespray 8y agoFor PCs, sure. Not for mobile chips.
- wmf 8y agoApple is claiming only 15% performance improvement for the A12 CPU cores; in the past it was more like 30-50% per generation. But 15% is far more than the ~5%/year that we've seen in PC processors.
- pertymcpert 8y agoYep, but also they're claiming 40% lower power consumption. So it's safe to assume they could have traded that power efficiency gain for more performance. Despite that, most of that gain in PPA is due to the 7nm transition, rather than micro-architectural developments.
- Bud 8y agoThat's assuming they could cool off such a design. Cooling is harder to deal with in a mobile device. Can't just throw big fans in there.
- djrogers 8y agoCooling is a factor of energy input. If they can cool the A11 using 40% more power, they can cool an A12 using the same power. That said, I’m more than happy to save that extra power - battery life is a good thing.
- thoughtsimple 8y agoWho ships a phone with the 7nm chip first? I’ll have to get the exact quote but I think Apple said first 7nm chip in a phone. When is Huawei’s phone shipping? Apple’s is here in 2 weeks.
- 40acres 8y agoDisclosure: I work for Intel. As far as I can tell nanometer is basically a marketing term now and will not be as important to performance as it has been in the past. Not only is there not a standard for what constitutes a Xnm chip these days (Intel, TSMC & Samsung all have different descriptions) but chips in the future will be heterogeneous in which features are a specific nanometer size. It's getting so expensive to reduce nanometer size that the next generation of products will have some 5 nanometer features, some 10 nanometer features, and some 7 nanometer features. Chip packaging technology, power performance and advanced fabrication techniques (ex. EMIB, stacked die, EUV, die disaggregation) will decide who has the most performant chips from now on, not feature size.
- whoisjuan 8y agoI don't understand why. Could you elaborate more? Isn't the whole point of reducing the minimum feature size to increase the number of transistors that you can pack in a layout or in other words the smaller the node, the more density you get and therefore more processing power with less energy consumption? How is that not supposed to impact performance?
- 40acres 8y agoYou're correct, smaller features will improve performance. What I'm saying is that it is becoming so expensive and difficult to get high yield on smaller feature size that from a product generation to product generation other performance features (like the ones I mentioned before) will be the main factor to improved performance. You can see this with Intel right now: CannonLake (10nm) has been delayed due to yield issues but KabyLake, Coffee Lake & Whiskey Lake (14nm) are all improvements over the original 14nm product (Skylake).
- mooman219 8y agoThe gist of what's being said on this post and the thread on Apple's video is that everyone is generally around the same size for various features. So we might get marketing speak that we're on "10nm" or "7nm" or "5nm", but that doesn't correlate to much. Just like "4G" and "5G" technically mean something, that doesn't mean the carrier offers speeds remotely close to the specification they say they provide. Features lists generally include the transistor gate pitch, interconnect pitch, transistor fin pitch, and transistor fin height. None of these features are actually "10nm" or "7nm, but range anywhere between 30nm-60nm. Although sources are conflicting online, it looks like Intel 10nm is about on par with TSMC 7nm. Some features for Intel's 10nm are larger, while others are smaller than TSMC 7nm. Also _most_ sites are saying Intel 10nm has a higher transistor density, but information is kind of flaky on this metric.
- Havoc 8y agoWhy don't say intel laptop chips use that approach of say 4 high perf cores and 4 low perf efficiency cores? I get that they dynamically adjust the frequency but surely cellphones can do that too?
- wmf 8y agoIt would probably take Windows five years to properly use the small cores.
- analognoise 8y agoSo? It's not like Linux on the desktop will suck less in 5 years.
- foobarbazetc 8y agoHow would any software know which CPU to use? Apple controls the entire OS and SoC so they can schedule different tasks onto different classes of CPU.
- seabrookmx 8y agoThe Linux thread scheduler already knows how to do this, which is why ARM's big.LITTLE architecture works fine in Android phones. There's zero reason MS couldn't implement this in Windows. In fact, it might already be done giving HP and others are currently shipping Windows on Snapdragon devices.
- foobarbazetc 8y agoI hadn’t looked at the sched code in a couple of years. Is this article up to date: https://community.arm.com/processors/b/blog/posts/ten-things-to-know-about-big-little https://community.arm.com/processors/b/blog/posts/ten-things... ?
- seabrookmx 8y ago
- endorphone 8y agoAccording to Apple, the neural engine can perform 5 trillion operations per second—an eight-fold boost—and consumes one-tenth the energy of its previous incarnation Sidenote, but the claim by Apple seemed to be that those apps that use CoreML will see such an efficiency boost in their ML tasks, as CoreML did not use the neural circuitry on the A11 Bionic, and it was restricted to system tasks. Not sure if the opening of the A12's neural processing means that CoreML will be altered to also use the A11's functionality.
- Brosper 8y agoWho cares who was first?
- gumby 8y ago"nm" is the new "pixels" (which was the new "MHz"-- a marketing buzzword sought after though non-understood by enthusiasts. The other day I heard someone discussing FinFET who clearly didn't know what a FET is, but didn't really know what a transistor is. Oh but I need the new shiny.