[HN Gopher] Intel's Process Roadmap to 2025: with 4nm, 3nm, 20A ...
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Intel's Process Roadmap to 2025: with 4nm, 3nm, 20A and 18A?
Author : MikusR
Score : 38 points
Date : 2021-07-26 21:11 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.anandtech.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.anandtech.com)
| lholden wrote:
| Totally not going to be confusing to buy an "Intel 3" i7 or an
| "Intel 7" i3. :D. I'm a little sad they went "Intel 4" instead of
| "Intel 5" though.
| slownews45 wrote:
| Angstrom's? I think the connection to actual feature sizes is
| long gone, and not sure intel 3nm is really comparable with TSMC?
| Anyone have a process comparison?
|
| Also, key issue - ignore the roadmap and just start shipping you
| 10 and 7nm process stuff.
|
| Seriously, every time I read about a TSMC process it seems to
| already be in risk production. Then in the next year all of a
| sudden Apple and friends are releasing nice product. The hamster
| wheel here with apple funding huge $$ into TSMC must be amazing
| as well.
|
| With intel we've been hearing about 7nm forever, how the intel
| chips are going to crush (2x performance etc) AMD chips. But they
| never ship these things.
| monocasa wrote:
| Intel 3 is what used to be called Intel 7nm+, which is more or
| less equivalent to newer batches of TSMC N5.
| slownews45 wrote:
| Perfect - thank you!
| smoldesu wrote:
| I mean, this is nothing new. If you want newer processes, AMD
| does a pretty good job of keeping their Zen architecture on the
| cutting edge without under-engineering the end product. Intel's
| bag has always been about selling very specific things to
| specific audiences: bare-metal virtualization for people on
| Windows/MacOS (rip), super-wide SIMD busses, special
| overclockable models, IMEI, the list goes on. Intel, much like
| Apple, is selling a product that supposedly offers a better
| "experience" than their competitors, which moves like
| gangbusters in the corporate sector.
| cbozeman wrote:
| I sincerely hope this doesn't turn out the way the announcements
| for Intel's 10nm and 7nm process nodes turned out. We were
| promised a lot of fantastic technology and got a lot of
| disappointment.
|
| Even if Intel manages to adhere to this aggressive technological
| roadmap, it's still unclear to me what the market for x86-based
| machines is going to look like 3-5 years down the road.
| COVID-19-related PC sales are more of an anomaly than an actual
| trend; the knock-on effect though of that development promoting
| an embrace of remote work could possibly turn things around for
| x86, but I'm still left wondering why most people would want /
| need x86 when Apple's M1 chips clearly demonstrate that ARM-based
| solutions are not just sufficient, but potentially superior.
| anotherman554 wrote:
| Sony and Microsoft consoles are running x86 hardware so demand
| is certainly not just driven by COVID-19, people would want
| those machines regardless. There is no current consumer option
| to pair an ARM processor with a high end graphic card. I don't
| know what the future holds but it's pretty obvious why people
| want x86 at the moment.
| monocasa wrote:
| These are the 10nm and 7nm processes. They're just retconning
| the names. 10nm+ is Intel 7, 7nm is now Intel 4, 7nm+ is Intel
| 3, 5nm is Intel 20A.
| totalZero wrote:
| On the one hand, x86 is (eventually) going the way of the dodo
| for some of the biggest datacenter customers, which is a large
| part of the reason that Intel has once again opened itself up
| to the prospect of foundry.
|
| On the other hand, x86 is so ubiquitous for PC that it would
| take a sea change for Apple Silicon to take over. Users and
| businesses are entrenched and this isn't the first time that
| Apple has run a different architecture from the rest of the PC
| crowd. I, for one, prefer my x86 MBP to the newfangled M1
| because of RAM, compatibility, external display support, and
| number of ports. These limitations are all a function of
| implementation, not inherent to Apple Silicon, but they
| influence my preferences nonetheless.
|
| COVID-19 has changed the way that work is balanced against
| everything else in our lives, and I view its impact on the chip
| market as demand creation rather than a demand spike. We will
| never go back 100% to the way that things were prior to the
| pandemic; big shocks all have that in common. The hybrid model
| of work from home as a complement to office work means that
| people/companies will need to buy and maintain more hardware.
|
| I share your hope that this doesn't turn out the way the
| delayed nodes did. Intel's 10nm and 7nm setbacks started in the
| Krzanich days during the doldrums of the PC glut. People were
| mobile, phone innovations were booming, and no substantial PC
| advancements came to the fore during that time. I think we can
| give Intel some benefit of the doubt and assume that they
| aren't dumb enough to repeat the error of announcing a road map
| for which there is no road map...especially because the tick-
| tock model is already a thing of the past and exerts no
| expectations nowadays.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > Users and businesses are entrenched
|
| What dependency do you think most users and business have on
| the instruction set architecture, even if you ignore that you
| can translate?
| smoldesu wrote:
| > On the one hand, x86 is (eventually) going the way of the
| dodo for some of the biggest datacenter customers
|
| For the most part, I'm convinced the bulk of this transition
| has already happened. If you were running highly-parallelized
| code or needed to switch to specialty hardware, you've
| probably done so already.
|
| > On the other hand, x86 is so ubiquitous for PC that it
| would take a sea change for Apple Silicon to take over.
|
| Not just Apple silicon, but for _ARM_ to take over. Even the
| best compatibility layers for x86 /ARM still present a
| massive performance hit, and there's otherwise no real
| incentive for the bulk of PC owners to switch over. I say
| this as the kid who grew up with a first-gen Raspberry Pi on
| their wishlist: x86 is an immovable force, and it will be
| _decades_ before it loses support in the mainline Linux
| kernel. Even if Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and every other
| Fortune 500 company made a mad-dash transition to ARM (which
| they won 't), you still couldn't dethrone x86 in terms of
| support and install-base.
| stefan_ wrote:
| If architecture doesn't matter, why on earth would you think
| x86 is a _negative_. The most ARM can ever hope for is that
| people don 't care or notice it's ARM.
| smoldesu wrote:
| > I'm still left wondering why most people would want / need
| x86 when Apple's M1 chips clearly demonstrate that ARM-based
| solutions are not just sufficient, but potentially superior.
|
| Simple, I use Linux and MacOS cannot run the software that I
| need to use on a daily basis. The most powerful Apple Silicon
| you can buy right now still can't quite beat my 2014 beater-PC
| in raw performance, which also doesn't exactly instill
| confidence in it.
| GiorgioG wrote:
| I have an M1 MacBook Air and I love it. But it's no
| replacement for my Threadripper 1950X / RTX 3080 for
| work/gaming.
|
| x86 gives me choices. I can run Windows, Linux, etc. With
| M1...I'm at the mercy of Apple's closed-system. Sure, there
| are folks working on getting Linux working on the M1, but
| there's no guarantee that Apple will let you keep
| running/installing Linux. You're one Apple firmware update
| away from bricking your device/alternate-OS.
| shawnz wrote:
| Who says Apple will be the only vendor of successful ARM
| desktops? It seems like it's only a matter of time before
| other vendors catch up. The point is simply that Apple
| demonstrated the viability of ARM in those use cases.
| baybal2 wrote:
| You hit the nail.
|
| Potential fab clients look now at Intel, and keep guessing
| what's been going on with both their 10nm process, and their
| fab offering for the last 5 years.
|
| Now people keep seeing Intel setting ambitious new targets, and
| keeping missing them.
|
| Would they bet their tapeout on a fab like this now? No.
|
| The least worst thing Intel can do for itself now is to
| disclose what in the world was actually happening which led to
| the current situation.
|
| They long missed the window when their leading edge offer can
| capture first few clients ready to pay any premium for it.
| 14u2c wrote:
| Retail PC sales are only a small portion of the x86 market. The
| vast majority of corporate PCs will continue to use x86 in the
| foreseeable future for compatibility reasons. On the datacenter
| / cloud side providers are trying to make inroads with ARM,
| such as Amazon's Graviton, but are meeting similar resistance.
|
| Additionally we have yet to see x86 on the TSMC 5nm process.
| Making that leap once Apple's reservations expire may remove
| much of the performance gap.
| killingtime74 wrote:
| So cool they are past nanometre now, Angstrom!
| wtfishackernews wrote:
| x Nanometer or y Angstrom isn't based on physical size anymore
| and is just a marketing term.
|
| From the article:
|
| >A lot of the industry, for whatever reason, hasn't learned
| that these numbers aren't actually a physical measurement. They
| used to be, but when we moved from 2D planar transistors to 3D
| FinFET transistors, the numbers became nothing more than a
| marketing tool.
| monocasa wrote:
| Lol, way to play the game I guess. It's not Intel 4nm, but 'Intel
| 4', which was Intel 7nm and Intel 7nm+ is now Intel 3. Retconning
| Intel 10nm+ as Intel 7.
|
| Makes you wonder if the same thing with the initial 10nm failures
| where a lot of management bonuses were tied to a specific number
| in the release is happening here too, or if it's just them trying
| to recalibrate those marketing literature when the competition is
| a node worse for the equivalent nm value.
|
| Edit: It literally says this in the article:
|
| 2021 H2, Intel 7: Previously known as 10nm Enhanced Super Fin or
| 10ESF
|
| 2022 H2, Intel 4: Previously known as Intel 7nm.
|
| 2023 H2, Intel 3: Previously known as Intel 7+
|
| 2024, Intel 20A: Previously known as Intel 5nm.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| Yeah, it's dishonest, but the consumers of their processors
| most often look at benchmarks, not nm width. The only people
| this might actually fool will be casual stock traders.
| monocasa wrote:
| Yeah, I don't blame them that much when tech news always had
| to be "TSMC 5nm.. essentially equivalent to Intel 7nm" when
| talking nodes. The numbers have been made up for a while
| (even on the Intel side).
|
| Some of those numbers are very curious though. Intel has
| historically had an issue with managers gaming bonus
| structures and some of this reeks of that too. "We're totally
| shipping Intel 7 this year (because it's what was 10nm+)"
| MikusR wrote:
| Qualcomm is the company named in the press release as a partner
| for Intel 20A
| Theodores wrote:
| I am a big Intel fan and floating point and single core
| performance have kept me buying. However I think that TSMC have
| the gap on Intel and that this is widely perceived to be true in
| Asia, which is where the manufacturing happens these days.
|
| TSMC are ahead in part due to the yields they are getting from
| their EUV machines and the fantastic customers they are getting.
| Their business model is working out. Meanwhile Intel are
| shuffling a few top managers around which isn't the same thing as
| making the investment in people and processes that TSMC are
| doing.
|
| The metric of single core performance has been the same for years
| from Intel and 11th Gen has come in for criticism because they
| didn't move to the next level process. I am rooting for Intel but
| the momentum is with TSMC.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _TSMC are ahead in part due to the yields they are getting
| from their EUV machines_
|
| They aren't technically _their_ machines. Pointing that out to
| underscore how quickly things can change in this game.
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