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(I think you've confused ARM and AMD, FWIW!) it's surprising to see how badly they're scrambling to hit even 10nm, little lone 7nm The feature size there is a
by matthewmacleod 8y ago
(I think you've confused ARM and AMD, FWIW!)
it's surprising to see how badly they're scrambling to hit even 10nm, little lone 7nm
The feature size there is a bit misleading – "Intel 10nm" and "TSMC 7nm" are roughly equivalent, with IIRC the Intel 10nm process actually having a higher transistor density. The TSMC chips aren't really "two nodes ahead" – but it is likely that Intel will lose its process lead for maybe a year or so.
I get the impression that Intel overextended on their 10nm process, in that they were perhaps a bit more ambitious that other manufacturers and it came back to bite them when there were scaling problems. On the other hand, last I heard was that the scaling problems experienced with the 10nm node haven't held up Intel's 7nm node, which could well see them re-establish their process lead.
At the end of the day, it's great that the market is seeing some more competition, so hopefully we will all be able to enjoy the benefits from a variety of manufacturers soon!
- astrodust 8y agoI don't doubt that Intel will get it together and remain competitive but right now they're really in a bad place. They're usually a step or two ahead, even when pushing ridiculous designs with no merit at all like the Pentium 4 or Itanium. To see them scrambling now to catch up is pretty much unprecedented.
- nicoburns 8y ago> I think you've confused ARM and AMD, FWIW! Quite possibly they are, but to be fair ARM processors were the first to launch on 7nm.
- astrodust 8y agoI'm talking about how ARM got their first on the process and now AMD has a chance to fab using that as well. AMD got out of the fabrication game, they couldn't keep up, which means they can use specialists like TSMC which are killing it now. Intel's largely "secret sauce" process has been their greatest asset. Now it looks like a huge liability.
- blackstrips 8y ago> I get the impression that Intel overextended on their 10nm process, in that they were perhaps a bit more ambitious that other manufacturers and it came back to bite them when there were scaling problems. I’m no micro-electronic expert but I wonder if we are hitting limits in clock speed scaling with regards to feature size - i.e. shrinking pass a certain feature size clock speeds actually have to drop for the chip to be stable. Intel’s priority is clock speed first and foremost due to what they produce - desktop and server CPUs. A new process is pointless for them if they can’t get at least equal clock speeds out of it as their old process. TSMC caters to mobile CPU and GPU production - those will never boost to 5Ghz like CPUs; the former for power efficiency reasons (and heat) and the later tends to go for more “cores” as it focuses on parallizable workloads.
- da_chicken 8y agoAs I understand it, it's not chip speed. It's chip voltage. Everything is a conductor if the voltage is high enough, and the closer the traces get, the less resistance the insulation provides. The problem is that at the temperatures we run computers at, the conductor traces need a fair bit of voltage to push the current through the entire chip.
- londons_explore 8y agoThe ratio of conductivities of insulators and conductors stays the same. It's more that making many very long conductors with very short insulators between them becomes problematic. But that was the case at any process size, but now we are pushing the limits as far as possible to try to make bigger chips.
- astrodust 8y agoNot using silicon they won't but other materials might make that possible. I doubt TSMC will sit on the sidelines as those become more mainstream.