Intrinsic said:
Oh I didn't know that. Always suspected though with the 16nm thing as I would have expected a full shrink of 28nm to be 14nm. But now the 7nm thing is totally new to me. Isn't that flat out lying to market a 10nm "half shrink" as a full on 7nm process? |
For years companies have been fluffing up their fab shrinks, they do it for various reasons.
Intels 14nm process for instance is vastly superior to the 14nm from Samsung/Global Foundries... Yet many people think they are somehow directly comparable.
To be fair, even Intel's "nm" naming scheme has deviated somewhat from the normal naming conventions, it's just less extreme than other foundries.
5nm though from TSMC/Samsung/Global Foundries (If they decide to go for it again) should actually be closer to 7nm.
So we still have a long time before electromigration/quantum tunneling becomes a real issue... And I think before we hit that wall we might go backwards for awhile... And start building chips on larger nodes and just stack chips before shrinking again, worked for NAND.
AMD at the moment though is taking the option of building multiple smaller chips (which assists with yields) and throwing everything that doesn't scale down in nm very well onto an older, cheaper process, not everything needs to be on 7nm, but they can only take that so far as well.
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