6 ms·
I'm not trying to be snarky; I actually don't understand. Isn't a nanometer the same between fabs?
by berbec 8y ago
I'm not trying to be snarky; I actually don't understand. Isn't a nanometer the same between fabs?
- wolf550e 8y agoRead this and follow links: https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/7_nm_lithography_process https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/7_nm_lithography_process
- the8472 8y agoThose differences seem enormous. SRAM bitcell, High-Density (HD) A Intel 14nm: 0.064 µm² B Intel 10nm: 0.0312 µm² C TSMC 7nm: 0.027 µm² A is what most current intel chips use, B is in limited production. C is what AMD will be using in 2019
- PedroBatista 8y agoIs B even in production at all?
- matthewmacleod 8y agoAFAIK there's a single 10nm Intel processor available – the Core i3-8121U. Performance is sub-14nm though.
- detaro 8y agoIt is. But what exactly you measure in nanometers is different, depending on how you define the "size of the structures"
- aw1621107 8y agoA nanometer is indeed a nanometer. The question is what exactly is being measured, and that is what differs.
- mikeash 8y agoA nanometer is the same everywhere, but what you’re measuring isn’t. When they say 7nm, are they talking about the smallest feature they can produce, the minimum wire size, the minimum transistor size, the average transistor size, or...? For an analogy, a GHz is a GHz everywhere but that doesn’t mean a 3GHz CPU is always faster than a 2GHz CPU.
- gisely 8y agoIf AMD can suggest that they are on smaller process size because they are measuring a smaller feature, why wouldn't Intel just start measuring the same feature on their chips? I have trouble believing they would stick to some principle about what is the right feature to measure at the cost losing out on marketing themselves.
- zamadatix 8y agoThey might, just like the MHz marketing wars. But for now consumers don't care about "7nm" as a marketing figure enough for them to care if it's actually 7nm or not.
- wtallis 8y ago7nm does not refer to any feature size. Process node names have continued to follow the pattern of the next node being named as roughly the current node divided by sqrt(2), even though density increases are no longer coming from simple uniform horizontal shrinks.
- mooman219 8y agoNanometers is a marketing term now, just like frequency used to be a marketing term when talking about CPUs. In reality, size of various features in a CPU differ widely. Intel 10nm could have a transistor gate pitch of 50nm, while TSMC 7nm could have a pitch of 60nm. All the meaningful parts you care about, like size of the transistor components and interconnects, are _not_ small, and it every company designs their own tweaks on these building blocks for reliability/manufacturability/performance/power/etc.
- atq2119 8y agoLike others wrote, there's no longer a standard for what the measurement actually means. Most structures aren't actually 7nm in a 7nm process. For example, a typical metal pitch on the low metal layers is 40nm, meaning you get one wire every 40nm, or 25 wires in parallel in a 1um channel. What Intel is calling 10nm does indeed appear to be close to the others' 7nm. Then again, Intel is seriously behind on 10nm, so the bottom line remains the same: they seem to have essentially lost their process advantage.
- JohnJamesRambo 8y agoThen why do they continue to use it at all? It's like measuring your electric car in the number of pistons it has. We all agree process node numbers are meaningless now so why do we keep using it? How about a number that actually relates to the performance and can be measured?
- atq2119 8y agoMy best guess is a combination of historical inertia and the fact that the names are actually meaningful, just not in the way that one might naively expect as an outsider. When the foundry sends you a design kit which contains all their design rules and tooling around a process, then this process has some codename that appears everywhere (think filenames, names of library elements, and so on). This codename tends to be something like GF14 (for GlobalFoundries' 14nm) or N7 (for TSMC's 7nm) plus cryptic suffixes for different revisions of the foundry process. So the 14/12/10/7nm terms are actually part of the design engineers' everyday work flow. They just also filtered through to marketing for whatever reason. I could imagine that at some point in the future, foundries will switch to a year-based versioning similar to what happened with a lot of software. So you'll have a GF2027 process and so on. That's pure speculation on my part though, and inertia is definitely a thing.