| Pemalite said:
That's provided Global Foundries is actually on time with it's 7nm technology. (Likely using a 14nm FEOL or BEOL.) |
Actually GF's 7nm technology is a lot closer to Intel's 10nm technology than it at 14nm ...
| Pemalite said:
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That was just a one time deal since circumstances got out of control for GF, this time their really going on their own seperate ways with maybe a research collaboration with IBM ? GF hasn't even announced a partnership in a 1 year advance either and they've already given their early PDKs to their biggest customers like AMD, IBM and the others but their also finalizing their own PDKs so this time GF really does intend to bring out their own node ...
| Pemalite said: Samsung is still years behind Intel. The "nm" has turned into a marketing term that fabs are flaunting. |
That used to be the case but I'm not so sure anymore and Intel is also participating in those marketing stunts too. Just recently Samsung has already leapfrogged Intel earlier this year by releasing their own 10nm chips which marks for the first time that Intel is not a leader in transistor technology ever since they've been in the business of manufacturing chips!
With Samsung outspending Intel in terms of investments in integrated circuit manufacturing, becoming the first committed adopters to bleeding edge technology (like EUV and Gate All Around FETs which will succeed FinFETs) and becoming faster at iterating new technology for chip manufacturing their establishing permanent leadership in transistor technology and not a temporary one! Mind you Samsung isn't doing this alone either, R&D also gets subsidized by IBM and GF ...
Intel can't keep playing this game alone when feature sizes get smaller and smaller. They need to find other sources of revenue and fast since AMD is on the horizen with Zen 2 which could seriously undercut their R&D affecting their ability to transition to smaller feature sizes. Samsung also isn't making 7nm for itself, their also trying to lock out TSMC of high end customers like Apple when Samsung's 7nm node is 35% more dense than TSMC's 7nm node. Last time Apple was able to ignore using because TSMC came out with somewhat better electrostatics at 16nm despite having somewhat less density than Samsung at 14nm and the fact that they would prefer not to pay their competitors but this time Apple won't be able to ignore the density advantage ...
| Pemalite said: Seems Anandtech isn't privvy to all the details this time around. Global Foundries is tooling a few fabs up for "12nm". Granted it has a few caveats. |
Their 12nm FD-SOI is for low power and low cost applications like IoT and Automotives. Their true successor to 14nm FF is 7nm FF which is due for 2H 2018 ...
