3 ms·

Its hard to get a good impression without more data points but the improvements we're seeing in the A17 on N3B are not very impressive relative to chips like th

Its hard to get a good impression without more data points but the improvements we're seeing in the A17 on N3B are not very impressive relative to chips like the A16 made on N4P. It's really difficult to see the full picture but most signs seem to point to N3B being a marginal improvement for a significant increase in cost. For nearly anyone but Apple that is difficult to justify which is why Apple is the only big customer for N3B right now. We'll see how things change once TSMC gets N3E in mass production but it might not make things much better. N3E will probably feature lower average transistor density than N3B thanks to SRAM regressions so its difficult to tell if its performance will be meaningfully better than N3B in real world cases. It will be cheaper though, which is the important part.

RetroTechie 3y ago
> It will be cheaper though, which is the important part. Indeed. For a long time, new nodes could be read as: more ICs/wafer = lower cost/IC = lower cost/transistor in those ICs. Or bigger ICs with more transistors. Leaving it up to designers to choose between cheaper/smaller/lower power, or use extra transistors to achieve higher performance at similar cost/IC. Maybe that lower cost/transistor 'law' doesn't hold anymore for these latest nodes? Or not as much as it used to? Not saying Moore's law is dead! But it talks transistors/IC. Not so much about the cost of those transistors. So maybe we're seeing some decoupling here between Moore's law & cost/transistor gains for newer nodes? If so, that would certainly affect market segmentation between products built on older vs. built on newer nodes. As opposed to the 'newer = better everything' we're used to. Note this is just speculation on my part.