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I strongly believe this is going to allow Intel to make a dramatic comeback. It will buy them enough time to catch up while everyone is stuck buying Intel still
by throwastrike 5y ago
I strongly believe this is going to allow Intel to make a dramatic comeback. It will buy them enough time to catch up while everyone is stuck buying Intel still as a result of supply constraint.
- cardy31 5y agoIntel seems to be multiple years behind at this point. They might make a bit of a comeback, but it would have to be a huge process size shrink to be competitive. Based on their previous years, I doubt that an extra year will help that much.
- dannyw 5y agoIntel is shipping 10nm superfin (I'm typing this on a Tiger Lake NUC). Density wise, this is comparable to TSMC 7nm (used by AMD).
- adrian_b 5y agoWhile Intel 10 nm SuperFin might be comparable in density with TSMC 7 nm, it definitely is much worse for the yields of chips with large area. Six years ago, in 2015, Intel had no problems to introduce the smaller Skylake U and the larger Skylake H at the same time. Now, Intel needs more than half of year to increase the yields of 10 nm SuperFin enough to be able to introduce the larger Tiger Lake H after the smaller Tiger Lake U introduced last year. This happens even if now the area difference between Tiger Lake H and Tiger Lake U is not so great as in the previous generations, because a good part of the twice larger CPU is compensated by the 3 times smaller GPU. On the other hand, the previous variant of the Intel 10 nm process (non-SuperFin), which is still used for Ice Lake Server, has much worse electrical properties than the TSMC 7 nm, because at the same number of active cores and the same power consumption AMD Epyc 7xx3 can have a clock frequency up to 50% higher. Moreover, the similar density of the Intel process means absolutely nothing when the competition using the TSMC process can deliver a more than 3 times greater L3 cache memory at the same price and in the same package size. The density does not have any importance if you cannot deliver more transistors in a given package, because you cannot manufacture large enough chips and because you have been unable to predict that you will never be able to manufacture large enough chips, so that you should have designed from the beginning your product as multi-chip.
- philliphaydon 5y agoWhy does everyone make this excuse for Intel? It really sounds like fanboyism. Not trying to offend.
- totalZero 5y agoIs it an excuse, or a fact?
- axaxs 5y agoBehind on...what? Against the latest and greatest Apple or AMD? Maybe. I'd probably put it at a generation at most. That aside, there's a -huge- market for chips that aren't the latest and greatest. Intel expanding into that, which if I read right is what they're doing, could be a huge moneymaker.
- ajross 5y agoThat seems unlikely, for the same reason that TSMC isn't able to put Intel down permanently. We're reaching the end of silicon scaling. Transistor densities might continue to rise with 3D techniques, etc... but the actual logic is reaching physical limits. So transistors per price and per power are hitting walls. TSMC pulled ahead, but they don't have a lot of runway to pull far ahead. Likewise Intel can catch up, but they can't retake the kind of lead they had a decade ago. Semiconductors are turning into commodities, basically.
- doikor 5y ago> We're reaching the end of silicon scaling. For the next 2 shrinks at least TSMC disagrees. According to roadmap of TSMC they are roling out 3nm risk production this year and they built a new research lab for 2nm last year and already picked a site for the new 2nm fab (Hsinchu, Taiwan). Beyond that I don't think anyone has any real plans (yet).
- tedunangst 5y agoI think the question is if anyone is going to refuse a 5nm product because 3nm is available.
- Miraste 5y agoMaybe not, but they might start refusing 14nm products.
- nine_k 5y agoNot car makers, I suppose.
- LdSGSgvupDV 5y agoProbably, Apple, AMD, and NVIDIA would pay for 3nm instead of 5nm. Apple may be the first one to use 3nm. If it gets lots of gain, there would be lots of followers.
- 5y ago
- narrator 5y agoIntel has been trying to get their 5nm fab process right for sometime now. So far, they have not been able to make it work. This is not software. It's physics. It's chemistry. It's material science. These are very hard problems to solve and there's currently only one company that can do it and their machines cost $200 million dollars and have a several year backlog of orders.
- mschuster91 5y ago> there's currently only one company that can do it and their machines cost $200 million dollars and have a several year backlog of orders. ASML has a market cap of 223 billion $, and their stock value has doubled in a year. That's a lot of growth...
- freedomben 5y agoanecdotally two friends of mine wanted AMD but bought Intel because of availability. You may be right.
- ngngngng 5y agoThat's just because no one wants Intel at the moment.
- tedunangst 5y agoIntel still gets paid even if the people buying their CPUs don't want them.
- throwastrike 5y agoI could get away with using my old 2013 Macbook Pro for 90% of my computing needs. I could run the rest in the cloud. Sure I have the latest AMD and I know the headline numbers but I wouldn’t be able to tell you that consumer chips improved all that much in the past few years purely from a practical pov.
- totalZero 5y agoSame here, but that last 10% of computing needs can complicate things. Try running two 4k external monitors on a Haswell MBP. They look about the same, but a Haswell MBP13 (Late 2013) is very much less capable than an Ice Lake MBP13 (2020). Not all of that difference is attributable to the CPU I suppose, but the graphics and thermal throttling under load certainly are.
- KptMarchewa 5y agoEven 2019 i9 MBP can't do that without extreme overheating and throttling, measured with pmset -g thermlog.
- agloeregrets 5y agoNot really, the limits you see from TSMC here are for the lesser of the important chip sales. Apple's orders that will put a hurting on Intel in the market and mindshare are still good. So Maybe Intel may sell more units in a small way by the M1X will still hurt Intel's lead by just existing. Did I mention that Intel Xe uses TSMC as well?
- justatdotin 5y agodidnt someone here explain recently that intel has a huge warchest, such that their current sales have little to do with their future?