Wednesday, March 31st 2021
Intel Could Rename its Semiconductor Nodes to Catch Up with the Industry
In the past few years, Intel has struggled a lot with its semiconductor manufacturing. Starting from the 10 nm fiasco, the company delayed the new node for years and years, making it seem like it is never going to get delivered. The node was believed to be so advanced that it was unexpectedly hard to manufacture, giving the company more problems. Low yields have been present for a long time, and it is only recently that Intel has started shipping its 10 nm products. However, its competitor, TSMC, has been pumping out nodes at an amazing rate. At the time of writing, the Taiwanese giant is producing the 5 nm node, with a 4 nm node on the way.
So to remain competitive, Intel would need to apply a new tactic. The company has a 7 nm node in the works for 2023 when TSMC will switch to the 3 nm+ nodes. That represents a marketing problem, where the node naming convention is making Intel inferior to its competitors. To fix that, the company will likely start node renaming and give its nodes new names, that are corresponding to the industry naming conventions. We still have no information how will the new names look like, or if Intel will do it in the first place, so take this with a grain of salt.
Source:
Oregon Live
So to remain competitive, Intel would need to apply a new tactic. The company has a 7 nm node in the works for 2023 when TSMC will switch to the 3 nm+ nodes. That represents a marketing problem, where the node naming convention is making Intel inferior to its competitors. To fix that, the company will likely start node renaming and give its nodes new names, that are corresponding to the industry naming conventions. We still have no information how will the new names look like, or if Intel will do it in the first place, so take this with a grain of salt.
60 Comments on Intel Could Rename its Semiconductor Nodes to Catch Up with the Industry
My old 2600K ran 5 GHz and easily beat Ryzen 1600 @ 4 GHz in 99.9% og games and applications
I'd never buy or recommend Ryzen 1000 series from NEW, probably not 2000 series either, unless it's cheap as dirt on sale, it's 3000 or 5000 seriesOnce again, I work with b2b sales and we have tons of huge retailers onboard, Ryzen 1000 is NOT selling like hotcakes, far from it.
What sells like hotcakes, especially in the laptop segment, is Intel, Intel and more Intel. Why? AMD can't deliver. Intel easily can, because they make their chips themself.
I think we ship 1 AMD laptop for every 100 Intel laptop, or so.Irellevant, when someone with a Glofo 12nm calls Intel 14nm inferior? Yeah :laugh: :laugh: Suuuuuure.
TSMC is literally the reason why 3000 and especially 5000 performs great. If AMD were stuck with Glofo still, it would be a whole different story, with subpar clockspeeds like all 1000 and 2000 series chips.
It gives manufacturers some leeway on what to pick as their metric and not end up being called a liar on technicalities )))In which universe? Even if that were somehow true, it's a dead-end platform, so as anything up to Kaby Lake. Not only do you lose modern features, there's also no prospect for upgrade.And I'm Lisa Su's nephew.No need to retract to laptops. Let's keep going with overclocked 2600K that beats Zen+ in 99.9% of games and applications.
Logic gate size (which is what the X nm denotes after all) matters very much, because that dictates power consumption and thus cooling requirements ...
Just to be clear, this is also for everyone who thinks that ICL is on the same 10nm as intended for CNL. It is not, ICL is the first 10nm+ product & probably wouldn't make it to the market if it was on the original 10nm node!
Compared to the Intel promo material for 10nm it's quite a bit less dense:
Hopefully Alderlake or nextlake shake's things up.
hexus.net/tech/news/cpu/119699-intel-10nm-density-27x-improved-14nm-node/
High Density variant is canonically used for mobile and other dies aiming at low power (and lower frequencies), High Performance variant are used - as the name says - high performance dies running at higher voltages, higher frequencies and higher power consumption.
Anandtech's 10nm Cannon Lake article laid out the Intel 10nm spec, scroll down to 'There's more to it' section - 100 MTr/mm² for High Density, 67 MTr/mm² for Ultra High Performance:
www.anandtech.com/show/13405/intel-10nm-cannon-lake-and-core-i3-8121u-deep-dive-review/3
This is not Intel-specific. The same applies to TSMC, with N7 official numbers at 96 MTr/mm² and high performance variant in the 65 MTr/mm² range. N7+/N7P/N6 should be 15-20% more dense.
All the official numbers are standard cells - or something more dense like SRAM if manufacturer wants to show even larger density numbers. The actual dies (like CPUs or GPUs) are usually less dense than that due to number of reasons. Logic circuitry does not lend well to being tightly packed together, there are areas like IO that do not scale down that well etc.