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Comment by SoylentOrange | Hacker News Reader

As a computer scientist rather than an EE, I learned a lot from this article. I would like to provide some perspective as a person who buys and looks at processor advances in the consumer market with a technical, but not too technical, background.

Unlike a sibling comment, I never knew that the lithography process did not correspond to any physical characteristic in the chip. I naively assumed that the headlines saying that Intel was behind in process technology were correct, and used that to inform purchasing decisions. I found the article enlightening, and I think many on HN with the same background as myself will agree.

As an aside, I tried to read the linked IEEE paper [1] but the page is cut off for me below section 2. If anyone has a link to the full PDF, I would appreciate that.

[1]: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=906...

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> I naively assumed that the headlines saying that Intel was behind in process technology were correct, and used that to inform purchasing decisions.

Those headlines are correct, and were at the time this article was written as well. Intel's first 10nm process was completely broken, and their current less-dense 10nm process is still barely usable. Any density advantages Intel was planning on their 10nm having over TSMC 7nm are meaningless at this point. Higher density is pointless unless you can get yields that are good enough to ship chips that are meaningfully better on power, performance and price.

It's not "barely usable" any more, they're shipping Xeons with up to 40 cores at volume. Afaik everything except high-clock desktop parts is shipping on 10nm now. It took them an eternity, but it's not Duke Nukem late.

Those Xeons only make sense if you're able to make very good use of AVX-512 or if you're bureaucratically prevented from buying AMD. They aren't a disaster to the extent that Cannonlake was, but it's still a product that has trouble standing on its merits and is shipping in part because Intel couldn't have cancelled it and told customers to wait for Sapphire Rapids without facing a shareholder lawsuit for lying about the viability of their roadmap.

You're moving the goalposts. After being delayed numerous times and the first parts being of rather questionable usefulness, Intel's 10nm process is doing fine now and shipping in volume. Noone claimed that they had closed the gap to AMD with the 10nm Xeons, only that they're shipping. (They also significantly narrowed the gap, but it remains quite large).

For a consumer it is better to look for benchmarks in the specific field that interests them anyways. The numbers at this moment show that AMD is kicking up intel's ass in both performance-per-watt and price. The only thing intel has still going is the single core performance–and there, Apple has leapt over everybody.

https://web.archive.org/web/20201113074058if_/https://ieeexp...

Please note that Dennard's scaling has long subsided, gate length reductions do not automatically comes with gains for every metric anymore, notably leakage current. Previous nodes are more power-efficient for some uses, like infrared remotes.

Those number are there to inform the purchase of chip designers looking for a fab. If you are buying complete chips, you have much more relevant numbers to look at. At this abstraction level, feature size is at best irrelevant, and at worst, misleading.

The criticism is that feature size isn't useful for chip designers to choose a fab anymore, so they should be ignoring it too nowadays. (The meta criticism is that they already know it, no need to point it out.)

"Unlike a sibling comment, I never knew that the lithography process did not correspond to any physical characteristic in the chip."

In plain english, when someone conveys made up information for their gain, we call this lying

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