Allen
Hotshot
Joined: Oct 1999
Posts: 8,855
Ohio USA
Regarding competition: It seems Intel 10nm is only expected to perform like Intel current 14nm. Consequently, Intel is moving towards 7nm faster than Intel originally intended. But, Intel 7nm not coming soon.
Quote
SemiAccurate will go out on a limb here and say that 10nm yields won’t be close to 14nm for the first year of it’s volume production. We will go further out on that limb and say that production costs for 10nm chips will be significantly higher than 14nm devices of similar performance.
When we wrote the original piece there were four fabs slated to transition to 10nm. One of these has been backported to 14nm, .. Two of the remaining fabs installed lots of EUV tools which are meant for the 7nm process, not the 10nm process. This effectively precludes these facilities from producing 10nm.
This left one fab which was slated for 10nm
Intel 10nm seems to be a mediocre design (as was AMD Bulldozer CPU a few years back). Thus, 10nm cut from 4 fab plants to 1 fab plant. Meanwhile, 2 of those 4 fab plants being updated for 7nm. It was suggested that 10nm is only being manufactured to solve outstanding problems that need to be solved for 7nm anyway. That is, Intel 7nm is having some of the same problems that Intel 10nm had. I'm sure Intel will get 7nm working -- question is: When?
