Intel Defends Its Process-Technology Leadership at 14nm and 10nm

[Megalith]

Intel would like to remind everyone to stop their worrying: they haven’t flinched from their power stance in light of murmurings that the company is stumbling in regard to its process technologies. It seems that some folks are worried that rivals are beating them at smaller processes, but Intel argues that pitch measurements only tell a small part of the story. There are already reports that their 10nm chips are a generation ahead of Samsung’s.

The worry among investors and the analyst community, in turn, seems to be that Intel's competitors will beat it to the next process node advance. For just one example of this perceived threat, Qualcomm's upcoming Snapdragon 835 chip will be fabricated on Samsung's 10-nm process, and that chip (plus Samsung's Exynos 8895 SoC) will both be shipping soon in Samsung's Galaxy S8. MediaTek has previously announced plans to make its Helio X30 SoC on TSMC's 10-nm process, as well. That SoC could arrive sometime this year. Not so fast, Intel says. The company points out that pitch measurements are just one characteristic of a semiconductor product, and it feels that using these measurements alone to characterize process capabilities isn't painting a complete picture.

 

[Formosa]

1st , and also... SO WHAT?
this isnt a dick measuring contest... oh wait

 

[vegeta535]

Umm what? The competition is just now catching up to Intel's 14nm process. Something that Intel been on for almost 2 years. Odds are Intel is a lot closer to 10nm and even 7nm then anyone else. The smaller the process get the harder it will to perfect. There is a huge difference getting a phone/table CPU down to 10nm then it is getting a full blow PC CPU.

 

[Bowman15]

Umm what? The competition is just now catching up to Intel's 14nm process. Something that Intel been on for almost 2 years. Odds are Intel is a lot closer to 10nm and even 7nm then anyone else. The smaller the process get the harder it will to perfect. There is a huge difference getting a phone/table CPU down to 10nm then it is getting a full blow PC CPU.

Can't wait for those 3% performance increases and 5% extended battery life.

 

[viscountalpha]

Some engineer was bragging that the yield for 10nm is better then 14nm. And I believed him.

 

[Galvin]

Being ahead of everyone means more money, its not a dick measuring contest

 

[Hornet]

1st , and also... SO WHAT?
this isnt a dick measuring contest... oh wait

So it means you'll have a technical advantage over your competitors.
You can do more things, or in a better way.

There's a reason why these companies are investing huge amount of money in R&D to advance their process node.

 

[ZeroBarrier]

How related is IPC to node-size?

Also, Intel probably wants to do something to offset positive news concerning AMD's high core-count leadership.

AMD high core count leadership? Since when?

Ryzen hits and suddenly people go all demented and conjure up some really interesting loony ideas. I wonder if drug use or alcohol consumption might also play a part in this.

 

[ZeroBarrier]

Wow, what conceited arrogance and blindness to the obvious.

AMD couldn't compete with Intel in IPC, so they made 8-core / 16-thread consumer-grade CPUs. I don't know how good your counting skill are, but I can inform you that's double Intel's consumer-grade CPU core/thread count. And it gives AMD CPUs an edge when programs are designed to properly utilize all the cores and threads, as well as good PR-imaging for future readiness.

I do suspect there is drug and alcohol consumption involved in this matter, and that you should try to abstain a bit before making your next, likely also-hilarious post.

That still doesn't make them a leader. Also, higher than 4C/8T Intel chips have bee available to consumers for quite some time, they are just not a part of Intel's mainstream lineup. Just because they aren't mainstream doesn't mean they do not exsist nor or they difficult to obtain; it just means they are nmore expensive, period.

You can try to spin Ryzen as the coming of some mythological high core count messiah, but anyone worth their salt knows that AMD is only making higher core count desktop chips more mainstream; nothing more, nothing less. So let's stop pretending as if Ryzen is the first desktop 8 core CPU please.

 

[Stimpy88]

You can try to spin Ryzen as the coming of some mythological high core count messiah, but anyone worth their salt knows that AMD is only making higher core count desktop chips more mainstream; nothing more, nothing less. So let's stop pretending as if Ryzen is the first desktop 8 core CPU please.

Put it this way, they made them affordable, and have got the public interested in the idea of more CPU cores at last. I salute AMD for having the balls and the means to do that, and so should you.

 

[gamerk2]

Put it this way, they made them affordable, and have got the public interested in the idea of more CPU cores at last. I salute AMD for having the balls and the means to do that, and so should you.

So...apparently people are already selectively forgetting the FX lineup existed.

Amdahls Law continues to hold true: You're maximum performance gain you can obtain by adding more computing resources (cores) is limited by the part of the program that can not be made parallel. That's why, outside of benchmarking and a few select use cases (which I note perform orders of magnitude better when offloaded to the GPU), Intel remains performance king.

 

[Bowman15]

So...apparently people are already selectively forgetting the FX lineup existed.

Amdahls Law continues to hold true: You're maximum performance gain you can obtain by adding more computing resources (cores) is limited by the part of the program that can not be made parallel. That's why, outside of benchmarking and a few select use cases (which I note perform orders of magnitude better when offloaded to the GPU), Intel remains performance king.

Yes, so what?

 

[Stimpy88]

So...apparently people are already selectively forgetting the FX lineup existed.

Amdahls Law continues to hold true: You're maximum performance gain you can obtain by adding more computing resources (cores) is limited by the part of the program that can not be made parallel. That's why, outside of benchmarking and a few select use cases (which I note perform orders of magnitude better when offloaded to the GPU), Intel remains performance king.

Nope, they were crap, fake core BS. No point in having 50 cores if they don't equal the performance of 2.

Now AMD have the same performance or close to it, as Intel. And yes, I'm quite fimiliar with the concept that the software has to be written to take advantage of more cores. You're sounding like a butthurt Intel shill.

I am only saying that AMD have made a serious jump over Intel, and I, as well as a handful of others happy they did that.

 

[Emission]

That still doesn't make them a leader. Also, higher than 4C/8T Intel chips have bee available to consumers for quite some time, they are just not a part of Intel's mainstream lineup. Just because they aren't mainstream doesn't mean they do not exsist nor or they difficult to obtain; it just means they are nmore expensive, period.

You can try to spin Ryzen as the coming of some mythological high core count messiah, but anyone worth their salt knows that AMD is only making higher core count desktop chips more mainstream; nothing more, nothing less. So let's stop pretending as if Ryzen is the first desktop 8 core CPU please.

Being more expensive doesn't make them more difficult to obtain? News to me.

 

[ManofGod]

All I can think of is, LOL!

 

[haste.]

Wow, what conceited arrogance and blindness to the obvious.

AMD couldn't compete with Intel in IPC, so they made 8-core / 16-thread consumer-grade CPUs. I don't know how good your counting skill are, but I can inform you that's double Intel's consumer-grade CPU core/thread count. And it gives AMD CPUs an edge when programs are designed to properly utilize all the cores and threads, as well as good PR-imaging for future readiness.

I do suspect there is drug and alcohol consumption involved in this matter, and that you should try to abstain a bit before making your next, likely also-hilarious post.

I hate to agree with the post you are replying to since he was a dick about the whole thing, but he's right. Consumer grade products make a very small percentage of CPUs sold. I commend AMD for taking a risk (which looks to be not only promising, but may be very successful once enterprise drops). BUT, the money is in enterprise and Intel has had reasonably affordable, many core/thread solutions available for a very long time that AMD hasn't competed with in the better part of a decade.

Over a year and a half ago my org needed to expand and I got 4x servers with dual 8/16 for nearly nothing all things considered (if my memory serves 64gb, 15k's on board (oh well), 2x8core, iDrac 7, 1u's with licenses and same day for well under 3k... but I have IT Managers that do most of that).

Think of consumer products as a sunk marketing cost... unless you can compete at the enterprise level good luck. I'll be curious when those 16/32's drop (if they haven't) to see their performance.