| JEMC said: BioWare's Dragon Age team is currently 'hiring a lot of people', says creative director |
Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age: Inquisition are some of my favorite games of all time. This pleases me greatly in places that should not be mentioned in the public domain.
fatslob-:O said:
Actually GF's 7nm technology is a lot closer to Intel's 10nm technology than it at 14nm ... |
You would hope so. But it's still not a true 7nm process. :P
| fatslob-:O said: 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 ... |
Well the deal was for 14nm plus it's vcariations like LPC, LPP etc'.
No reason why they couldn't expand on that at a later date if they need to. If.
Also I think Global Foundries also has a few deals with IBM for patents anyway? I would assume the same holds true with their Samsung connections.
fatslob-:O said:
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! |
Intel still has an edge in transistor technology though and is still a few years ahead of it's competitors.
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/246902-intel-claims-three-year-advantage-10nm-process-wants-change-define-process-nodes
Intel 14nm process is actually a 14nm process. Samsung's isn't. Intels 10nm process will actually be a 10nm process, Samsung's isn't.
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/249075-foundry-futures-tsmc-samsung-globalfoundries-intel-gear-7nm-beyond
As for EUV, while it's great to hope for it... At the moment it's still fairly expensive to implement (More so than multi-patterning approaches it seems). Right now Samsung seems to plan for it's introduction with it's CLN7FF+ process in 2019-2020.
Intel might introduce it much later at 5nm.
| fatslob-:O said:
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 ... |
As for Investment. Intel is still competitive with Samsung on that Front. So to counter Samsungs $7 billion dollar investment... I give you Intels $7 billion dollar investment. :P
http://www.pcgamer.com/intel-is-pouring-7-billion-into-7nm-chip-production-plant-in-arizona/
Intel is also opening up it's fabs for select 3rd partys as well.
https://www.theverge.com/2016/8/16/12507568/intel-arm-mobile-chips-licensing-deal-idf-2016
http://www.pcworld.com/article/209573/article.html
So that should help drive some additional investment for Intel.
fatslob-:O said:
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 ... |
Hence the "Caveats".
Still. If there is a demand/need that process can be improved upon for high-end, power hungry chip designs.
But even that 12nm process isn't a real 12nm process anyway.
I don't know about you, but I am tired of all the bullshit "nm" marketing angles that TSMC, Samsung, Global Foundries and IBM use. It gives people the incorrect idea.
JEMC said:
Oh, c'mon! The thing launched what, yesterday? Give it a couple of days to reach the final users and have it up and running, and then we will be able to say "too long". |
Vega needed to launch 12 months ago...
| haxxiy said: We know 22 nm FDX is a slightly denser 28 nm, so probably the 12 nm follows the same path, just with a more outrageous naming. |
Pretty much!
| Captain_Yuri said: God the more I hear about x299, the more I am glad that I went with Ryzen instead of waiting. You know, it's kinda funny. When Amd announced Zen, most people including me really thought, well, whats the worst they could do? At best, their IPC will be with Haswell/Broadwell, their 8 cores would probably be around the price range of 6900k with $100-$300 off and Intel probably has something in the works that will stop the hype train anyway. |
To be honest. It's turning me off from upgrading as well, x299 was going to be when I finally switched over to DDR4.
The x79 and x99 platforms were stupidly solid as well.
| fatslob-:O said: It's probably because their both reaching the limits of extracting anymore scalar ILP without having to seriously impact the balance between die size and clocks ... |
This. All the low hanging fruit has been picked... So we are at an impasse now... And chips are starting to go wider. Slowly.
It's the software that needs to catch up.
| fatslob-:O said: I still think AMD goofs around too much with the future since they are banking way too hard on DX12 to save their behinds at the graphics side ... |
AMD doesn't have a graphics side. They aren't even really competing against nVidia right now.
Vega will help bridge the performance gap... But that was needed 12 months ago.
Vega needed to more than double Fury X's performance to be a sound winner, that's a hard task when AMD didn't increase the amount of pipelines in their design, so most of their gains comes from efficiency gains and clocks.
Hopefully Navi brings the goods.
*********************
Ryzen PRO has arrived.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/11591/amd-launches-ryzen-pro-cpus-enhanced-security-longer-warranty-better-quality
Basically "higher quality" silicon, Longer Warranty, Enhanced Security.
Interested to see if they can push over that 4ghz barrier.
www.youtube.com/@Pemalite
