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Comment by akmittal | Hacker News Reader

Intel is not even ready for 7nm, Their 7nm is delayed till 2022. So fastest they can do 5nm is in 2023(Seems unlikely though when they couldn't even manage to do 7nm).

ARM is not only threat to Intel. AMD caught up with Intel with Zen 2 and surpassed in Zen 3. Zen 4 5nm is planned for end 2021. If they can manage IPC gains same as Zen1-Zen2 or Zen2-Zen3, Intel is in serious trouble.

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Sandy Lake is an old architecture and with a lot of tweaks intel on single core it is still competitive. If they could fix their process or maybe just go with TSMC they should be able to become competitive. Its not like Intel hasn't been in this position before with Athlon 64. The one think they used to have was fab advantage.

Its not even about just pure performance, It is about performance per watt. Intel may catch up with performance but matching performance per watt seems very difficult.

I'd presume that a node shrink would lead to a significant decrease in power consumption.

Yes for sure it will, but to ARM levels is almost impossible.

They'll catch up. Besides they can skip 7nm as soon as their 5nm is ready. Intel has access to most of the same machines TSMC has.

Intel has access to most of the same machines TSMC has.

OK, but, where’s the beef? Intel has been stuck for a long time now. Do we know the management and corporate culture can catch up?

TSMC is shipping 7nm from mid 2018. When Intel ships 5nm, Apple/ARM is not going to stop development. M1 is their first laptop grade chip. Even if they get 10% IPC gain annually thats gonna make differece to big to catch up.

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