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Comment by glasshead969 | Hacker News Reader

Regarding the 5nm vs 7nm thing, I expect apple to be at least 1 node or intra-node improvement (eg: 5nm vs 5nm+ or 4nm) ahead for foreseeable future. They pay TSMC pretty penny to have access to cutting edge nodes. Not much different from how Intel had node advantage over others albeit here apple paying for it so at-least others aren't locked out of it for too long.

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They'll presumably be the first to use each node, but that only gives them a number of months before competitors are on it. I would expect to see 5nm Ryzen before 3nm Apple Silicon.

There's also a major question about what happens with Intel. If they ever get their process advantage back then it's not clear what Apple's response is. But if they implode then AMD takes over the PC market and probably becomes TSMC's biggest customer, which could put them in a position to get on newer nodes at the same time as Apple.

I think it's interesting Apple is continuing what they started with Intel. Remember Apple's deal with Intel where Intel would hold back their newest CPUs from the rest of the market so Apple could have their big reveal and "Worlds fastest blahblahblah" blurb to push their Mac refreshes? But apple never really upgraded their proc offerings, and you couldn't upgrade your processor on the machine you bought, so after 6 months or whatever they would be lagging behind in performance vs what you could build or buy elsewhere.

Well I guess once AMD whooped Intel that was not longer going to be an option. Not only would Intel not be able to deliver their "World's fastest blah blah" marketing claim, but Intel couldn't afford to hold anything back from the general market. I guess their little deal with TSMC letting them clear the cobwebs off this strategy and continue it for a bit longer going forward..

So now each year we can't do proper benchmarks anymore because there will always be the (X)nm vs (X-1)nm argument.

What's wrong with using price-power-performance ratio benchmarks on what's available on the market?

Yea I think this argument about node size comes up because in this case you couldn't buy just the soc but the whole Mac computer. People didn't care that some of advantage Intel had was from their process superiority because you didn't have to make any choices other than the CPU itself.

AMD would rather spend money on getting more capacity for the current 7nm products, that have seen a couple of years of severe shortages at launch, and gain market share. It's a problem that Apple doesn't seem to have, though maybe with desktop/server chips they might if they also start to gain market share.

Full on nodes don't come that often and from what we've seen from Intel's 14nm++++++, revisons to a node don't make that much of a difference.

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