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Comment by solotronics | Hacker News Reader

They blew an incredible amount of effort and money on new processes that didn't pan out. The failure rate was too high for production. AMD doesnt fab their own chips so they can piggyback on the progress unlocked by the fabs that build for cellphones (TSMC in this case).

Also, transistor density is a better measure than 5nm/7nm/10nm. That feature detail in nanometers is more or less pure marketing term and doesn't compare accurately. Intels transistor density is still better than the latest Ryzen but it looks like they will be matched or surpassed by the next gen AMD.

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Intel is at 14nm and amd is at 7nm, yet the transistor densities are higher on the Intel side?

Do you have any source to back this claim? I know that node sizes are mostly meaningless at this point, but still this is invalidating 3 generations of node jumps on the TSMC/AMD side vs none on the intel side, surely it can't be that meaningless of a number?

Wikipedia claims MTr/mm^2s of:

  Intel 14: 37.5
  Intel 10: 100.8
  TSMC 16/14/12: 28.88
  TSMC 10: 52.51
  TSMC 7: 96.5 to 113.9, depending on iteration.
  TSMC 5: 173

It really shows you how good Intel's IP is that they can even make competitive CPUs on a generation old process.

No, it's just that they use a different scale for vanity metric number. Intel's chips aren't competitive for the price; they just have customer inertia.

Even on a transistors per mm measure the 14nm++++ they are using is vastly inferior to TSMC’s 7nm.

Its only Intel 10nm that is equivalent and we don’t have desktop CPUs on that process yet (if we will at all).

this isn't an entirely fair representation of intel's 14nm. over the years, it has become extremely well optimized for high clocks. the 14nm parts actually have a slight disadvantage in IPC compared to amd, but an individual core is still faster due to the large difference in clock speed.

this has actually created an odd marketing dilemma for intel. despite having less IPC and worse power efficiency, intel's 14nm parts are actually faster than the new 10nm parts because the new process can't achieve such high clock speeds.

You can't really divorce IPC from the process used, the amount of nested logic in each pipeline stage is a direct function of gate delay and therefore the manufacturing process. On one process I may be able to fit 10 stages while on another I could fit 20. It's quite likely Intel's IPC would be much better on TSMC's 7nm vs their current 14nm.

This is also a problem when moving designs to a new generation FPGA. You may find your current level of pipelining is no longer optimal and you should do more each cycle.

People seem to have this weird idea that IPC is unrelated to how things are manufactured.

Intel's 10nm does have a higher density than TSMC 7nm[1]. However, Intel's desktop chips are still on 14nm and that is closer in terms of density to TSMC's short lived 10nm node.

[1] https://fuse.wikichip.org/news/2408/tsmc-7nm-hd-and-hp-cells...

I always thought AMD was attaching itself to inferior fabs by going fabless, but that was before the rise of smartphones pushing CPU and process development.

Intel missing the boat on smartphone CPUs was a massive mistake, and ARMs are coming for their servers and laptops.

> Intels transistor density is still better than the latest Ryzen

In the lab, yes, but aren't these the chips the Intel is failing to ship at scale, leading to desperate measures like rebadging old QA rejects as F-series CPUs?

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