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Comment by seiferteric | Hacker News Reader

Every single time an article comes up about this someone says this, and every single time someone refutes this saying that 7nm is a lie. Intel 10nm is supposed to be more dense than TSMC 7nm (if they ever get there).

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This fact keeps getting more and more exaggerated as time goes on.

Yes, intel's 10nm absolutely smashes Samsung, GF and TSMC's 10nm processes. Yes Intel's 10nm should be very competitive/comparable with Samsung/GF/TSMC's 7nm processes. But all of the Intel 10nm metrics are slightly worse than the 7nm processes its now competing with.

To cherrypick one metric as an example -

  * TSMC 10nm sram bitcell size: 0.042 µm²  
  * Intel 10nm sram bitcell size: 0.031 µm²  
  * TSMC 7nm sram bitcell size: 0.027 µm²

Thank you for actually showing feature size metrics, it has been a bit maddening to see people say 'you can compare them directly' but then I can't find a lot of comparisons about any kinds of features.

If you want that I recommend to look at semiwiki [0] and wikichip [1][2]

[0] https://www.semiwiki.com/forum/content/7343-leading-edge-log...

[1] https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/10_nm_lithography_process

[2] https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/7_nm_lithography_process

Meta: indenting is for code, and very hard to read on mobile.

Tsmc "7nm" and Intel "10nm" are roughly identical. Intel random logic is a bit denser thanks to COAG, SDG and BEOL and TSMC SRAM is a decent bit denser, that's mostly it.

No, TSMC 7nm is slightly ahead of Intel 10nm. Not 3nm ahead, but still, better.

Also, one exists and the other is a broken hunk of silicon. That's the most important metric.

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