| Bofferbrauer2 said: 1. Nope, it's not the foundries, but their clients who decide if it's viable or not for mass-producing their chips. 2. Yes, it is too early. Or why do you think AMD, Intel, NVidia and IBM (I singled out those because they are the only ones who produce chips with more than 100W TDP, which a 4K console APU will consume for sure) still don't have any 7nm chips out, announcing them for 2019-2020? Simply because the 7nm processes are not ready yet for mass production - especially not any 7nm HPP (High Power Plus, which is a general term used for the production quality of the chips for Computer and Server CPUs) 3. FD-SOI is a better bulk process. High performance chips wouldn't make the change to FD-SOI anyway because they couldn't reach the same performance as they do with more performant processes, which need FinFETs. The article says otherwise but that's not how it went in real life. It also hinted at IoT, or Internet of Things, as it's main use. Those only need a couple of Milliwatt in power consumption and are about as powerful as your cellphone 12 years ago, no comparision with a console APU. For those chips, FinFETs would be a huge waste, so there FD-SOI would make much sense. 4.Learn how chip manufacturing works before you see a price on 14/16nm over 20/22nm and 28/32nm and think it's more expensive to produce chips in that size. Because it isn't. 5. Again, it's not Sony who designs any of these things, they just state what the chips must perform. It's completely up to the manufacturer as on how to get there. |
1. Again, 7nm (equivalent to Intel 10nm) is only a tad more expensive than 14/16nm ... (the only reason I can't see Sony not transitioning to 7nm early in it's life is because of physical design costs and not manufacturing costs)
2. Except PS4 slim doesn't consume 100 watts, it's already sub-100 watt TDP and could become sub-50 watt with 7nm and it's not like they'll need a high powered specialized node either since even the low powered version of 7nm will provide an automatic uplift from the original 28nm design ...
3. FD-SOI is dead much to the chagrin of the author of that article ...
4. The chart is listed as "price per millions of gates", I think you maybe getting confused here since I understood what that clearly entailed ...
5. Absolutely not true! Sony probably does modify their designs at the logic level since they've included customizations like the ID buffer but you fail to realize that there's more to a chip than just it's logic design and you need the physical design as in the designer will have to port the circuits to the physical geometries of the real chip! (chips are not just created from code but it is also printed as well) It's not completely up to the manufacturer, Sony has to acquire these PDKs (process design kits) from the specific foundries to translate the RTL code to physical design themselves cause fuck knows AMD is probably not allowed to order any significant fab capacity from TSMC ...
