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That's getting a little convoluted. I still don't see how this substantiates that Intel 4 "has obvious difficulties in reaching high clock frequencies". Intel

by ajross 3y ago

That's getting a little convoluted. I still don't see how this substantiates that Intel 4 "has obvious difficulties in reaching high clock frequencies". Intel is shipping competitive clock frequencies on Intel 4 vs. everyone in the industry except the most recent generation of their own RPL parts, which have the advantage of being being up-bins of an evolved and mature process. That sounds pretty normal to me? New processes launch with conservative binning and as yields improve you can start selling the outliers in volume. And... it seems like you agree, by pointing out that this happened with Intel 7 and 14nm too. Basically: this sounds like you're trying to spin routine manufacturing practices as a technical problem. Intel bins differently than AMD (and especially Apple, who barely distinguish parts at all), and they always have.

adrian_b 3y ago
I have also pointed that while for Intel this repeats their previous two process launches, which is not a good sign, TSMC has never had such problems recently. While one reason why TSMC did not have such problems is that they have made more incremental changes from one process variant to another, avoiding any big risks, the other reason is that Intel has repeatedly acted as if they had been unable to estimate from simulations the performance characteristics of their future processes and they have always been caught by surprise by inferior experimental results compared to predictions, so they always had to switch the product lines from plan A to plan B during the last decade, unlike the previous decade when all appeared to always go as planned. A normal product replacement strategy is for the new product to match most of the characteristics of the old product that is replaced, but improve on a few of them. Much too frequently in recent years many Intel new products have improved some characteristics only with the price of making worse other characteristics. For example raising the clock frequency with the price of also increased power consumption, increasing the number of cores but removing AVX-512, or, like in Meteor Lake, raising the all-cores-active clock-frequency with the price of lowering the few-cores-active clock frequency. While during the last decade Intel has frequently progressed in the best case by making two steps forward and one step backward, all competitors have marched steadily forwards.
- ajross 3y ago
  > I have also pointed that while for Intel this repeats their previous two process launches, which is not a good sign, TSMC has never had such problems recently. I'll be blunt: you're interpreting a "problem" where none exists. I went back and checked: when Ivy Bridge parts launched the 22nm process (UNDENIABLY the best process in the world at that moment, and by quite a bit) the highest-clocked part from Intel was actually a 4.0 GHz Sandy Bridge SKU, and would be for a full 18 months until the 4960X matched it. This is just the way Intel ships CPUs. They bin like crazy and ship dozens and dozens of variants. The parts at the highest end need to wait for yields to improve to the point where there's enough volume to sell. That's not a "problem", it's just a manufacturing decision.

by ajross 3y ago

adrian_b 3y ago

I have also pointed that while for Intel this repeats their previous two process launches, which is not a good sign, TSMC has never had such problems recently. While one reason why TSMC did not have such problems is that they have made more incremental changes from one process variant to another, avoiding any big risks, the other reason is that Intel has repeatedly acted as if they had been unable to estimate from simulations the performance characteristics of their future processes and they have always been caught by surprise by inferior experimental results compared to predictions, so they always had to switch the product lines from plan A to plan B during the last decade, unlike the previous decade when all appeared to always go as planned. A normal product replacement strategy is for the new product to match most of the characteristics of the old product that is replaced, but improve on a few of them. Much too frequently in recent years many Intel new products have improved some characteristics only with the price of making worse other characteristics. For example raising the clock frequency with the price of also increased power consumption, increasing the number of cores but removing AVX-512, or, like in Meteor Lake, raising the all-cores-active clock-frequency with the price of lowering the few-cores-active clock frequency. While during the last decade Intel has frequently progressed in the best case by making two steps forward and one step backward, all competitors have marched steadily forwards.

ajross 3y ago
> I have also pointed that while for Intel this repeats their previous two process launches, which is not a good sign, TSMC has never had such problems recently. I'll be blunt: you're interpreting a "problem" where none exists. I went back and checked: when Ivy Bridge parts launched the 22nm process (UNDENIABLY the best process in the world at that moment, and by quite a bit) the highest-clocked part from Intel was actually a 4.0 GHz Sandy Bridge SKU, and would be for a full 18 months until the 4960X matched it. This is just the way Intel ships CPUs. They bin like crazy and ship dozens and dozens of variants. The parts at the highest end need to wait for yields to improve to the point where there's enough volume to sell. That's not a "problem", it's just a manufacturing decision.