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Comment by nimos | Hacker News Reader

I think 2019-2020 will be super interesting for hardware. Intel, Samsung, Gloflo, TSMC could all have competitive 7/10nm nodes. Unless either Intel or AMD makes some crazy IPC gains they should be fairly competitive with each other and it will be interesting to see what the ARM giants can do as well. Hopefully Chinese investment into DRAM/NAND starts to come to fruition by then too.

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We're to a point where N nm nodes is meaningless. I want a list of feature dimensions to compare. That's the only meaningful way to do a rough comparison these days.

You can think of power consumption as a resource -- if you reduce power consumption of existing features you can put more new features. The actual size isn't really that important (other than the cost of silicon wafer).

To significantly reduce power consumption you need improved process and this is where smaller nodes are so important, because they are currently the only really viable way to significantly reduce power consumption.

Now I kind of want to see the data on power consumption/transistor count over time.

You can find them if you look. E.g. tsmc 7nm is roughly equivalent to Intel 10nm in most dimensions. Samsung's 7nm is almost exactly intel 10nm in two dimensions. Etc etc.

Processes in the "same level" are not automatically competitive against each other. Cost, yield and performance can vary.

I think the cost and complexity of advancing lithography processes has increased so much that the technology risks have increased dramatically. Some foundries may blunder relative to others.

Intel has abandoned their tick–tock model for Prosess-Archictecture-Optimization. In retrospect it seems clear that they knew that 10nm process is risky step and it's impossible to predict when it's ready.

That was when they believed they'd stay 3 generations on the same process node.

Now it's more like Process-Archictecture-Optimization-Increased Clock Speed And Power Consumption-We Don't Know What We're Doing Anymore

Also, you're right about the complexity. Intel's 10nm process is likely far more complex (more steps) than Samsung's 7nm EUV process, or even TSMC and GloFlo's 7nm DUV processes, which is why it's taking them so long.

In retrospect, Intel becoming a "manufacturer for ARM chip companies" seems laughable now, doesn't it?

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