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Comment by aroch | Hacker News Reader

Correct me if I'm wrong, but these seem to be TDP/speed/heat limited because they're based on a modified, older 28nm process design?

Process shrink requires a lot of resources and R&D spending, but surely they could have benefited from not using 2008 ARM cores in 2016?

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They seem to have plans to move to a modern GlobalFoundries 14nm process, so it might be more competitive when that happens. The decision to use an older, in-order core is probably based on the fact that their cache and memory controller design is pretty bad, and unable to even feed the slower cores as it is, so faster cores would be a waste. It turns out it is really hard to shove a lot of highly performant cores in a single package, it is much easier to shove a lot of crappy ones.

I'm curious how AppliedMicro's X-Gene 3 will fare. It should be out later this year on 14nm.

It will be interesting to see how that one goes, indeed. I think their timing could be unfortunate, however, given AMD is about to reenter the server market in a big way in the same timeframe.

How so?

By the time X-Gene 3 is out I'm sure they'll be saying "wait for X-Gene 4".

Seems like if you're going to move to 14nm you need a reasonable amount of demand, or it's a big waste. The price jump for tape-out is pretty significant between 28 and 14, so if you're bootstrapping it makes sense to do a 28 and see if there's uptake, essentially making it up on price if the market is soft.

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