Feels like Microsoft during the Balmer years. Instead of Linux and Mac ascendant, you have AMD and ARM... it doesn’t seem impossible to think a Satya Nadella could turn things around.
Obviously process nodes are much harder than pretty much anything in the cloud, but this is a serious test of (pure and simple) whether their leadership has the (gender-neutral) balls to not back down.
I'm not entirely sure that is true. TSMC plays fast and loose with their definition of node. Any fab folks want to speak up?
What I mean by that:
https://www.pcgamesn.com/amd/tsmc-7nm-5nm-and-3nm-are-just-n...
"And also goes some way to explaining why, despite TSMC offering a nominally 7nm process, the general consensus has been that Intel’s 10nm design is pretty much analogous. But what’s 3nm between fabs? At that level, probably quite a lot. But if the 7nm node is more of a branding exercise than genuinely denoting the physical properties of that production process then you can understand why there’s supposedly not a lot in it."
Look it up yourself. Intel being on 14nm vs (say) 5nm is actually quite flattering to Intel.
EDIT: All of this stuff is usually stated at ISSCC every time a new process is announced, so it isn't NDA. I haven't followed this in years which is why I was asking for a process person to step in.
3nm, sure, good luck.
Tsmc 5nm is 27/54/36 with a 6T and 7.T option. More open design rules. HD SRAM cell is about 0.025um2.
This is almost exactly what you expect for 1 node of litho scaling.
The more difficult part is that the designs and related process optimizations for intel are different.
More or less TSMC 7nm := Intel 10nm, and TSMC 5nm := Intel 7nm. It's more complex than that, one has denser logic while the other has denser SRAM and what have you, but it's a good baseline.
Since Intel is struggling with 10nm but is shipping, that puts TSMC about a node and a half ahead.
If you want to dig in deeper, wikichip has most of the public specifics on the process nodes (which are heavily shrouded in secrecy). For instance: https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/7_nm_lithography_process
No they aren't. The nanometer names are only kinda comparable within a single company, but they are not comparable beyond that.
It's like saying that Chrome is 6x further ahead than Safari because Chrome is on 87 and Safari is only on 14. Same thing with fabs here, it's just a version number that counts down and has been for a long while.
In this case specifically, Intel's 10nm is more or less the same density as TSMC's 7nm. TSMC's 5nm is then a significant 1.8x the density of their 7nm process, so right now Intel's fabs are ~identical to what AMD is using (7nm), but Apple's use of TSMC's 5nm then puts them a generation ahead. TSMC is leading, but by a single generation not by 3-5x or whatever. Or to put it in year terms TSMC is about 2 years ahead of Intel right now, Intel just now getting "volume" 10nm up & running while TSMC was at a comparable node in volume 2 years ago.
As far as "performance" goes, though, so far TSMC, even their 5nm process, cannot quite match Intel. Remember that as far as the fab goes, performance is just what clock speeds can be hit, and Intel's clocks are the highest - they have the fastest transistors. 14nm+++++ is a meme/joke, but the actual transistor speed of it is still downright impressive. How fast a CPU actually runs depends on the architecture, though, which is influenced by density but in terms of pure single-core performance that's really almost entirely just architecture.
TSMC are shipping chips at something like 170MTr/mm^2, the bulk of Intel's production (even their new chips) are still closer to 40-50MTr/mm^2
And TSMC's 170MTr/mm^2 is still restricted to a single vendor and hasn't ramped up beyond that yet. You can't simultaneously claim Intel is restricted to what their bulk volume lineup is and then use TSMC's non-volume lineup. The bulk of TSMC is still 7nm which is 100MTr/mm^2.
My understanding is that Intel's fast transistors come at a cost of not being particularly dense for the process node they are implemented on. So it's a question of design philosophy as well. Intel has fast, but somewhat sparse transistors, they use a lot of hand layout etc. to really optimize their designs so they can clock high.
Other players use a different philosophy. Slower, but denser transistors and more automated layout may not clock as high, but the improved density gives you more cores (e.g. AMD vs Intel) and/or allows a more "brainiac" core design (wider, deeper ROB, better branch prediction, more cache, etc. like Apple M1), and also gets you a better turnaround time.