I would never have bet money that the tiny little CPU designed by Acorn Computers that ended up powering the Newton would be the first CPU to jump two nodes ahead of Intel in terms of process, but here we are.
ARM's doing great work and I hope they continue to push core counts to even more ridiculous levels.
it's surprising to see how badly they're scrambling to hit even 10nm, little lone 7nm
The feature size there is a bit misleading – "Intel 10nm" and "TSMC 7nm" are roughly equivalent, with IIRC the Intel 10nm process actually having a higher transistor density. The TSMC chips aren't really "two nodes ahead" – but it is likely that Intel will lose its process lead for maybe a year or so.
I get the impression that Intel overextended on their 10nm process, in that they were perhaps a bit more ambitious that other manufacturers and it came back to bite them when there were scaling problems. On the other hand, last I heard was that the scaling problems experienced with the 10nm node haven't held up Intel's 7nm node, which could well see them re-establish their process lead.
At the end of the day, it's great that the market is seeing some more competition, so hopefully we will all be able to enjoy the benefits from a variety of manufacturers soon!
Quite possibly they are, but to be fair ARM processors were the first to launch on 7nm.
Intel's largely "secret sauce" process has been their greatest asset. Now it looks like a huge liability.
I’m no micro-electronic expert but I wonder if we are hitting limits in clock speed scaling with regards to feature size - i.e. shrinking pass a certain feature size clock speeds actually have to drop for the chip to be stable.
Intel’s priority is clock speed first and foremost due to what they produce - desktop and server CPUs. A new process is pointless for them if they can’t get at least equal clock speeds out of it as their old process.
TSMC caters to mobile CPU and GPU production - those will never boost to 5Ghz like CPUs; the former for power efficiency reasons (and heat) and the later tends to go for more “cores” as it focuses on parallizable workloads.
It's more that making many very long conductors with very short insulators between them becomes problematic. But that was the case at any process size, but now we are pushing the limits as far as possible to try to make bigger chips.
The current generation i9 processors are all 14nm.