Hacker News Reader

Comment by sylware | Hacker News Reader

Next TMSC foundry is x1.7 transistors from current process (the 'obsolete' process of the foundries intel is currently building in the USA). Samsung will probably follow, if not done already. EUV core tools of state of the art foundries are ASML (Netherland with bits from Germany). One of this tool was 100 millions last time I did check the price. Hence 1 billion is too small to be relevant in the foundry business, for large scale mass production.

View on HN

If you read the article, the $1B is not to go the fab itself (there's another, much larger pot of money for that); instead, it's for ancillary developments of "disruptive technologies for the foundry ecosystem."

Basically build up an ecosystem capable of delivering another ASML. Why not?

To be honest, ASML is "just" an integrator. Parts of these machines are produced all over the world and where real innovation is necessary.

They way I read it it's about enabling fabless semi companies to use Intel fabs, and providing Intel tech for designing high end SoC's like TSV's and whatnot.

Samsung’s N3 is less dense than Intel’s N7

What I could gather from the net (much on wikipedia): Samsung seems not to have finished its n3 process, pushing it back to 2024 (bad news for AMD since they are fed up with apple using much of TSMC production capacity). TSMC should start risk production this year. If they don't increase too much on-die static ram, GPUs based on this process ""should"" dwarf current GPUs. How much more transistors are they going to allocate to ray-tracing :) ?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com