7 ms·
Interesting that IBM is still on 12 nm
by walshemj 7y ago
Interesting that IBM is still on 12 nm
- tyingq 7y agoTowards the end, they note some of the effort to squeeze two extra cores into the same die size / process size as the previous chip. Guess they got enough mileage out of those kind of improvements that a process size shrink wasn't needed.
- zozbot234 7y agoMakes sense since for mainframe hardware you'll want to optimize for reliability and endurance, and extreme process shrinks are going to impact both in ways that are hard to figure out. It's just more sensible to stay on an older node that's quite well understood by now.
- dralley 7y agoBasically everyone but AMD and Apple is still on 12nm (or a similar density process) for scale production.
- mrweasel 7y agoThis is still a little weird to me, given that AMD uses TSMC to make their chips. So isn't it TSMC who is capable of making sub- 12nm processors, or are TSMC depending on the AMD designs to be in a certain way? Failing everything else, Intel could pay TSMC to make a 7nm processor for them, no?
- my123 7y agoIntel does use TSMC for some analog chip manufacturing and such. They even used their services for manufacturing SoFIA Intel Atom x86 CPUs previously. TSMC is a pure-play foundry which sells wafers to the whole industry. On 7nm, there's Samsung too making 7nm chips that are actually shipping (in the Note10(+)).
- dralley 7y agoYes, it's TSMC that is producing the chips, but only a few select companies get enough of a competitive advantage from bleeding edge nodes to be worth the extra cost and lower yields. Intel could do that in theory, but their CPU design is so closely tied to their manufacturing process that they would have to do a substantial redesign in order to do so.
- Merrill 7y agoAt sub-12 nm it is probably harder to get to 5.3 GHz with acceptable power dissipation. https://www.globalfoundries.com/technology-solutions/cmos/fdx/12fdx https://www.globalfoundries.com/technology-solutions/cmos/fd...