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Comment by bhouston | Hacker News Reader

>We are in the era of TDP Computing.

Intel has been saying this for years, like almost 8 years. But this is just what non-innovator say. It is an excuse for mediocrity and failure and stagnation.

There is tons of uArch improvements in Apple's chips. That is why they consistently beat even the other ARMs chips on the same process nodes.

AMD also has been significantly innovating with uArch.

I love the innovation we are seeing these days. We are definitely not in an TDP era (where only TDP matters! but of course TDP is important), we are in another golden age of CPU/GPU innovation and it is beautiful. Reminds me of the 1990s and early 2000s.

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While I'm disappointed by how Intel is executing over past 4 years, it's still impressive how they manage to increase performance on their 14nm node.

You're absolutely right. People already propagating Intel's death are too fast. They may do not the innovation we like, but it maybe will help them push their smaller nodes, too. And for many special cases and for a suckless Linux experience on new devices, Intel is still the best choice.

AMD beats Intel basically everywhere you need an x86-64 architecture. The latest CPUs beat Intel even on single core performance.

Intel is basically running a super legacy design and they are doing surprisingly well with it, but they are losing on all fronts at this time. What they have for them right now is momentum and enterprise deals.

That will hold up for a while yet, so it gives them time to get their act together.

Intel still beats AMD for idle (or lower load) power consumption (important on mobile).

Don't they beat others because they are almost always a process generation ahead like now with 5nm?

Although Apple has been leading edge for a while, it's actually rather unusual for Apple to buy the entire production capacity of a new node.

The A13, Qualcomm Snapdragon 865, and Mediatek Dimensity 1000L were all on DUV N7P (Hisilicon Kirin 990 5G was actually on the more advanced EUV N7+). For more information on chips and their processes: https://www.eetimes.com/apple-huawei-use-tsmc-but-their-7nm-...

Here are some benchmarks of how the A13 and 865 (and the 2020 updates) stack up: https://www.phonearena.com/news/apple-a14-vs-a13-vs-snapdrag...

From the charts, it looks like particularly for single-core and browser/JS performance, the Apple designs are very strong, and beat out the Qualcomm competition even on the same process node.

At some point, the process can't get any smaller. Physics has hard rules. Once we get to that limit, improvements will have to come from elsewhere.

We are butting up on the physical limit, but to be fair, that’s what people have been saying for over a decade, and we keep going.

According to Wolfram Alpha, 5 nanometers is ~23 silicon atoms across (~2.2 Å each). But that’s also assuming they’re actually fabricating 5 nm gates - which they’re not.

Like if you look at the rate of down scaling it has slowed some. It's also not the size of the whole transistor it's the size/thickness of the N, P and Insulator layers that will limiting factor in FET style transistors.

The oxide/insulator thickness on modern process is pretty insane. For instance for the intel 14nm++ the silicon nitride and silicon oxide layers seem to 4 to 5nm thick.

-Edit- For instance here is 2 fins for from the intel 14nm++. The grains/spheres you see this image are the atoms. Some parts of the a modern transistors are even smaller than process number may let you know.

https://imgur.com/a/hgeSOVV

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