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As an outsider I would never had anticipated Intel being leapfroged like that in such a short window of time. As side effect it probably largely contributed to
by doe88 8y ago
As an outsider I would never had anticipated Intel being leapfroged like that in such a short window of time. As side effect it probably largely contributed to the resurrection of AMD (coupled with the fact they probably produced with Ryzen a good design at the right time). I would like to know if Intel just fumbled or if TSMC stepped-up their game, or more likely a little bit of both?
- ksec 8y agoA little bit of both. Intel's 10nm is now officially 2 years late. If they had 7nm now they would still be in the lead given its ( original ) 7nm plan were roughly equivalent to TSMC 5nm. TSMC also gained lots of momentum from the Smartphone Revolution. All of a sudden you have a 1.3B Smartphone Market, from SoC, Wireless BaseBand, and all sort of other component Fabbed with TSMC, compared to Intel's 250M PC Market. Now of course Intel make many times higher margin, but considered TSMC has a diverse group of clients utilising its current and old Fab compared to Intel doing it all by themselves, TSMC now has similar resources to Intel and innovate. And compared to Intel which has big leaps across generation, TSMC's approach were to iterate, so you get 16nm, 16mn+, 10nm, 7nm, 7nm EUV, 5nm EUV, all of them were iteration of previous generation.
- whazor 8y agoTSMC manufacture circuits based on customer design, this could be CPU, 5G modems, SoC, GPU etcetera. TSMC is like circuits printing company. Therefore it is more difficult to compare progress of TSMC versus Intel. But also, because they print so much (and so diverse) nowadays, they get priority at all the semiconductor machine companies.