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Comment by oblak | Hacker News Reader

It's still pretty bad compared to Ryzen 7000. The non-x models are just the regular guys at 65W, like my good ol 3700x.

That said, Intel sure has magic dust given how far behind their node disadvantage. Serves them right, though. What a horrible company.

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Their node disadvantage is mostly good marketing from TSMC though. Intel 10 (10nm, but that's not the real nanometers) is ~100M transistors per mm2, while TSMC 5 (5nm, but again, that's not the real nanometers) is ~130M transistors per mm2.

Sure, 30% better, but not a 2x improvement as marketing suggests.

10nm to 5nm feature size should be [naively thinking] 4x improvement in density, so it's even worse. :)

Actual feature size stopped shrinking a long time ago, though. First they flipped the transistors on their side (FinFET) and now they're embedding them inside a block of gate (GAAFET) to get more out of the same size. But the transistors have not just diverged from their actual names (which happened a long time ago) but have not even really shrunk since like 28nm, there is no dimension of a 5nm chip that is actually 5nm. ;)

I know you're poking fun at it, but, node names are completely made up and the points don't matter these days. It is a "5nm-class node", if nodes had continued to shrink according to the original plans in 2000 or whatever.

I will nitpick because the naming is a giant mess: There is no "Intel 10".

Intel's old naming scheme had "nm" after every number, and the one you're describing is "10nm".

Then they renamed everything to use smaller numbers, and no "nm". Newer versions of "10nm" became "Intel 7", still at ~100M transistors per mm².

Similarly "7nm" became "Intel 4", with an expected density of ~160M. And so on.

A bit of an efficiency advantage though, as seen when you max out zen4 vs alderlake/raptorlake cpus.

> It's still pretty bad compared to Ryzen 7000. The non-x models are just the regular guys at 65W, like my good ol 3700x.

* 65W TDP, 88W PPT

This little bit of sleight-of-hand from AMD was really really effective, boost TDP used to be called boost TDP, and Intel expected their TDPs to cover full load when boosting or under AVX. Then AMD made up this new number but it's not TDP it's uh, PPT, and marketed all their chips under a 30% lower number.

It's obviously worked because people do this "my CPU is only 65W!" thing all the time and no, it's not, it's 88W, unless you've turned off boost.

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