Items tagged with 7nm
Roughly a month ago, we got the somewhat surprising news that Bob Swan would be stepping down from his post as Intel CEO. We say somewhat because Intel has not exactly been adhering closely to its processor roadmap, and been faced with delays in getting its volume 10nm production on track, while its future 7nm process node has also been delayed. To help right the ship, former Intel exec Pat Gelsinger was announced as the new CEO, and today is his first [official] day on the job. Not surprisingly, Gelsinger is ready to hit the ground running at CEO, and looks to use his deep engineering background to ensure that Intel is poised to remain not only a dominant force in PC processors,...
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As we reported earlier this morning, Intel had a banner year in 2020. Although the company's fourth quarter earnings were down slightly by 1 percent year-over-year, it still outperformed expectations. Even better, revenue for the full year was $77.9 billion, which represents an 8 percent YoY gain. This strong performance came even though Intel has been stricken with delays in shifting to smaller process nodes and has faced immense pressure on the performance front from AMD. Intel’s struggles to move beyond 14nm for the entirety of its product stack are well-known, and the company announced in July 2020 that its next-generation 7nm process node had been delayed. "7nm-based...
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Here's an announcement that rocked the tech industry this morning: current Intel CEO Bob Swan is stepping down, effective February 15th. He will be replaced by Pat Gelsinger, who currently serves as the CEO of VMWare. Gelsinger is a 40-year industry veteran, and spent 30 years previously at Intel. He was responsible for the formation of the Intel Developer Forum, and served as Chief Technology Officer for the company before leaving to head to EMC back in 2009. He later became CEO of VMWare in 2012. Gelsinger's engineering-based background is seen as the perfect fit for righting the ship at Intel. “After careful consideration, the board concluded that now is the right time to make this...
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Assuming things go to plan, Intel will eventually launch a discrete graphics card for gamers, built around its Xe architecture. There are many questions left to be answered, such as what the full lineup will look like, how will the cards compare to offerings from AMD and NVIDIA, and what price points they land at. One question that appears to have already been answered, however, is where the GPUs will be manufactured. It won't be at Intel's own fabs, if the latest chatter is true. Intel has been forthcoming about the possibility of outsourcing production, and though it manufacturers its own high-end CPUs, there are certain chips that get built elsewhere. For example, when Intel was cranking out...
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Unless you've been living under a big rock for the past few years, you know that Intel has run into difficulties shifting to smaller process nodes. The company has relied on its venerable 14nm process node for far longer than it had originally anticipated -- the upcoming Rocket Lake family should be the last new consumer desktop processors to use the node -- and its shift to 10nm so far has been limited to mobile processors. With this in mind, Intel has been looking at other options to ensure that it can stay competitive with perennial rival AMD, which has been kicking butt and taking names (and market share) with its Zen family of processorsin all market segments that Intel competes...
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AMD is sitting on top of the world right now. The company is making a spirited run at NVIDIA with its Radeon RX 6000 series, and its newly launched Ryzen 5000 series powered by Zen 3 is giving Intel a wedgie. One of the questions AMD's good fortunes raises is, will Intel retake the performance crown? If so, when? Well, it might not be until 2023. Let's discuss. The earliest Intel could leapfrog back in front of AMD in overall performance (multi-threaded, gaming, and practically everything else on the desktop) is with Rocket Lake, which is set to lift off in the first quarter of next year. Intel is claiming Rocket Lake will offer a double-digit gain in IPC (instructions per clock) performance,...
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On Thursday, Intel reported third-quarter financial results, which showed revenue up over expectations but down year-over-year. However, Intel also noted a rather significant dip in datacenter revenue, which spooked investors. This information was enough to kick Intel shares into a slump since the report came out, dropping the stock price approximately 11%. Bob Swan, Intel CEO, reported that Intel’s “teams delivered solid third-quarter results that exceeded our expectations despite pandemic-related impacts in significant portions of the business.” At present, Intel is predicting growth through the end of 2020 as its “remain(s) confident in our strategy." Its goal...
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TSMC is celebrating the production of 1 billion defect-free chips manufactured on its 7-nanometer technology, or put another way, 1 billion functional 7nm chips. If laid out on the ground, that would be enough to cover 13 Manhattan city blocks, the semiconductor fab says. It also equates to over 1 quintillion transistors. "A remarkable achievement for a technology that entered volume production in April 2018. Since then, we have manufactured 7nm chips for well over 100 products from dozens of customers...TSMC’s large-scale, efficient manufacturing means more than just producing a lot of chips quickly. It is critical to improving quality and reliability, and the learning enables technology...
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The latest fallout from Intel’s surprise announcement that it is delaying 7nm products came down this afternoon. The company sent word to press media that it is making changes to its executive team in an effort to “accelerate product leadership” as well as “improve focus and accountability in process technology execution”. The immediate impact of Intel’s executive shakeup is that Dr. Murthy Renduchintala, the company’s Chief Engineering Officer, is departing the company effective August 3rd. It’s a rather unceremonious exit for Renduchintala, who joined Intel in November 2015 as a high profile hire from Qualcomm. “I [want] to thank...
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Intel’s 7nm production delay has been well-documented over the past week, with the company explaining that the first products shipping using the process node won’t arrive until late 2022 or 2023 at the earliest. News of the pothole in the road for Intel sent its shares sliding, while AMD shares skyrocketed to new highs. During an investor call following its Q2 2020 earnings report, Intel did, however, comment that it was looking at contracting out work to third-party fabs when possible to help keep its roadmap somewhat intact. The most logical choice for Intel would be TSMC, which already produces chips for AMD, NVIDIA, Apple and many other high-profile players...
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Intel isn't having much luck in its endeavors with process nodes smaller than 14nm. The company's 10nm lines were famously delayed for years, which forced the company to rely on 14nm for its mainstream- and enterprise-class processors way longer than expected. The upcoming Rocket Lake-S family will hopefully be the last that we'll see of 14nm... at least on the consumer desktop side. Now today, Intel has given us more bad news with the announcement that its 7nm-based products have been delayed by another 6 months compared to the company's previously disclosed launch date. Intel explained in its Q2 earrings report: The company's 7nm-based CPU product timing is shifting approximately...
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We've been hearing about NVIDIA's next-generation Ampere for the past two years, but the company is finally ready to talk about its next-generation GPU architecture. Though you won't hear any info today about GeForce RTX 30 Series of consumer gaming graphics cards, NVIDIA is discussing details about Ampere for machine learning data center and HPC markets. In short, this version of Ampere is the biggest most powerful GPU NVIDIA has ever made, and the company offers that it's also the world's biggest 7nm chip. There's no doubt, it's massive. According to NVIDIA, its Ampere-based A100 GPU is already in full production and shipping to customers, and it is claiming that the A100...
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Intel has been refreshingly honest about its beleaguered progress with the 10nm process node, which was delayed many times, allowing AMD to gain an advantage with its 7nm Zen 2-based family of processors. With that being said, Intel does have 10nm Ice Lake processors currently making the rounds in the notebook segment, and its 10nm+ Tiger Lake processors are on track for release later this year. The company was even more frank today about the status of its 10nm process node at the Morgan Stanley Tech, Media & Telcom conference this week. Intel CFO George Davis warned that 10nm is not going to be this big savior for the company’s chip operations. This is despite the fact that...
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TSMC has been critical to AMD’s resurgence as a dominant force in the processor market, and the company has also been beneficial in ensuring that Apple has a steady flow of A12 and A13 SoCs on hand for its hot-selling iPhone and iPad product lines. As TSMC is looking to grapple with the demands of these high-profile customers while shifting to smaller process nodes, it needs to invest in its fabs. Luckily for the company, its board this week approved approximately $6.7 billion to expand it facilities used to produce chips. The capital appropriations have been narrowed down to these five areas according to TSMC: Fab construction and installation of fab facility systems Installation...
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AMD introduced its first Navi 10-based GPUs over the summer starting with the Radeon RX 5700 and Radeon RX 5700 XT. While these are excellent mainstream GPUs based on 7nm process tech, they by no means offer flagship-caliber performance. However, if these latest rumors are accurate, AMD will have a true Radeon VII successor on its hands with the alleged Navi 21 GPU. Navi 21 will be based one second-generation RDNA architecture, and will take advantage of refined 7nm+ process tech. Based on comments posted to the Taiwanese forum PTT, Navi 21 will roughly be twice the size of Navi 10, coming at a 505mm2 versus 251mm2. To put in perspective how big this GPU is, the Radeon VII (Vega 20)...
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We've been hearing a lot about AMD's next-generation Renoir APUs in recent weeks, and it's likely that a release is just around the corner. Based on recent reports, it likely that AMD will announce these mobile and desktop processors at CES 2020 in Las Vegas. Today, we're getting the most detailed account of a Renoir APU to date with the "leak" of the Ryzen 7 4700U. Like all of the upcoming Renoir APUs, the Ryzen 7 4700U is based on AMD's 7nm Zen 2 architecture. As is often the case with AMD's APUs, the switchover to a newer architecture/process node (in this case, Zen 2) is coming months after it landed for the desktop Ryzen 3000 processors. The Ryzen 7 4700U was spotted in PCMark...
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Enthusiasts and enterprise customers have only been swimming in 7nm Zen 2 goodness for the past few months or so, but AMD is not sitting still when it comes to the rapid-fire development and release of its processors. Zen 3-based CPUs based on TSMC's 7nm+ process node are on track for launch likely during the second half of 2020. And now a new report today coming from China Times (hat tip to WCCFTech), says that TSMC is already progressing nicely with its next-generation 5nm process node. The company has three companies lined up with first production run: Apple, HiSilicon, and AMD. According to the report, TSMC is already seeing promising yields from 5nm (currently sitting...
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NVIDIA's latest generation Turing GPUs are built on a 12-nanometer manufacturing process, down from 16nm (TSMC) and 14nm (Samsung) parts cultivated for Pascal. Meanwhile, AMD is pumping out 7nm Navi GPUs. Wondering when NVIDIA might make the leap to 7nm as well? If a recent rumor is any indication, we could see graphics cards built around a 7nm Ampere GPU from NVIDIA next year. Manufacturing nodes are just one piece of the puzzle, though. As things currently stand, NVIDIA's latest GeForce cards are more capable than AMD's Radeon parts overall—NVIDIA's GeForce RTX series feature dedicated hardware for real-time ray tracing, and are generally faster at the top end in good old fashioned rasterized...
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It is only a matter of time before AMD launches a new round of accelerating processing units (APUs). Codenamed "Renoir," the company's next-generation APUs will replace its current-generation 12-nanometer Picasso lineup, and make the jump to a 7-nanometer Zen 2 foundation, possibly paired with Navi. While we sit back and wait for an official announcement, some supposed 3DMark 11 entries based on three Renoir APUs have popped up. Before we get to that, let's first talk a little about Renoir. Things can get confusing in a hurry when jumping around AMD's lineup, as generational nomenclatures get tossed around rather loosely. As it pertains to that, Zen 2 (7nm) CPU architecture is the third-generation...
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When it comes to 7nm chip production, TSMC has been on the bleeding edge of technological development. TSMC is the leading producer of 7nm designs for a number of leading tech giants like Qualcomm, AMD, and Apple (among others). While the company is well on its way to sampling 5nm parts to customers, it is also laying the groundwork for 3nm production in the near future. TSMC 3nm And 5nm Process Nodes The Electronic Times is reporting that TSMC has just begun construction on its next-generation 3nm fab. The manufacturing line is allegedly being constructed on 74 acres of land within the Southern Taiwan Science and Technology Park. TSMC reportedly has $19.5 billion at...
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There is reason to be optimistic AMD will deliver its next-generation Zen 3 processors on schedule. AMD's manufacturing partner, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), says it has begun mass producing chips based on its 7-nanometer plus (7nm+) Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) lithography technology. TSMC did not mention AMD by name, only that it is "delivering customer products to market in high volume." However, AMD has already confirmed its Zen 3 processors will be manufactured on a 7nm+ node, and said it August the design phase had been completed. At the time, AMD also stated the anticipated roll out of Zen 3 processors next year is "right on track." For TSMC, this 7nm+ node is its first...
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AMD's third-generation Ryzen 3000 processors based on 7nm Zen 2 architecture have been an absolute hit for the company. Not only are the processors providing significant boosts in single-threaded app performance, but the 7nm process tech allows the chips to run cooler than their Intel counterparts while ramping up the core counts to as high as 16 cores with the incoming Ryzen 9 3950X. However, now that Ryzen 3000 chips are in the hands of enthusiasts all over the world, there have been some concerns raised about max boost frequencies for the processors. Needless to say, AMD has been watching all of this activity in the enthusiast community very closely and it responded in...
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