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Comment by marcusarmstrong | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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