Items tagged with fabrication
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Zak Killian - Thu, Apr 24, 2025
That's right folks: buckle up, because we're well into the bumpy roads of sub-nanometer steps in fabrication process improvements. Intel's about to start launching chips fabbed on its 18A process before you know it, and TSMC has its own...
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Bruno Ferreira - Wed, Apr 23, 2025
TSMC's N2 (2nm) chip fab reportedly has a new customer: Intel, who joins the ranks of AMD and Apple tapping the Taiwanese fab goliath's bleeding edge production lines. It's not the first time that Intel and TSMC struck a deal, but it's...
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Zak Killian - Thu, Sep 05, 2024
Intel has done a fair bit of talking recently over successes from its 18A process node, which rather brings up the question, "why bother with 20A at all, if 18A is already yielding well?" Apparently someone at Intel had the same thought...
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Matthew Connatser - Wed, Jan 03, 2024
Intel is hosting its IFS Direct Connect event on February 21, and the company is seemingly still on track to hit its goal of five nodes in four years (also known as 5N4Y), and is also ready to share its post-18A roadmap. The event features...
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Zak Killian - Mon, Jun 05, 2023
Microprocessors are the most complex things humans have ever constructed. In any complex system, radically changing one part of a system always has knock-on effects for other parts of the system. To combat this, you can try to de-couple...
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Zak Killian - Tue, Mar 21, 2023
It's kind of ironic, but one of the main drivers of improved computer performance is in fact... improved computer performance. To design ever-faster chips, you need ever-faster chips, and that's true at several layers of the processor...
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Zak Killian - Mon, Dec 05, 2022
Much has been written about the death of Moore's Law. The "law"—more properly titled an "observation"—was created by one of Intel's founders, Gordon Moore. He noted that the number of components in an integrated circuit was roughly...
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Zak Killian - Tue, Nov 08, 2022
Right now, all of the fastest microprocessors in the world are made in one place: Taiwan. That country's Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) has the most advanced fabrication technology on the planet. As as result, companies...
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Zak Killian - Tue, Jun 14, 2022
There are two parts to making a microprocessor. That's obviously an oversimplification, because there are actually a multitude of parts, but the two highest-level are design and fabrication. It's all well and good to design a...
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Zak Killian - Fri, May 20, 2022
What do you think the biggest problem in CPU design is, right now? If you said "thermal density", you win today's prize. You don't actually get anything but our admiration and some well-deserved satisfaction, but that's its own reward...
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