Intel: 10nm Product Era Has Begun, 7nm on Track
Daily reminder: Intel is having various technical problems and arguably made some bad business decisions, but remember, semiconductor manufacturing processes are no longer directly comparable using the "x nanometer" number. A comparison should mention their technical differences.<p>"x nanometer" has became a technically meaningless trademark solely exists for indicating new generations of process for marketing since ~2009's introduction of FinFET. It has no actual relation to gate length, metal pitch or gate pitch. When some people say "5 nm" is the early-stage of nanotechnology, remember that the gate length actually stays at 25 nm since 2009.<p>GlobalFoundries' 7 nm process is similar to Intel's 10 nm process. TSMC and Samsung's 10 nm processes are only slightly denser than Intel's 14 nm in transistor density. They are actually much closer to Intel's 14 nm process than they are to Intel's 10 nm process. I'm not saying that Intel is 100% faithful, the 14 nm in the original ITRS roadmap was described by Intel as "10 nm". Also, DRAM chips are yet another different can of worms, the process "number" for DRAM chips is not directly comparable with CPU's "number" as well.<p>As conventional Moore's Law is reaching the end, the semiconductor firms spent a lot of efforts to make things as confusing as possible. I'm not a semiconductor engineer, I'm just an ordinary programmer, I don't fully understand the funny business going on since 2009, any correction is welcomed.<p>In other words, Intel still stays on the state-of-art of semiconductor manufacturing, in line with GlobalFoundries and TSMC, not significantly better or worse, in contrary to what the "x nanometer" number would make you to believe, but they do have a lot of production issues.