Intel officially announces their 10nm manufacturing technology
Intel officially announces their 10nm manufacturing technology
Published: 28th March 2017 | Source: Intel |
Intel officially announces their 10nm manufacturing technology
These days, most fabs use the ??nm term for marketing, rather than a physical measurement or characteristic of characteristic of their processing node, this has lead to a situation where TSMC are now calling an enhanced version of their 16nm FinFET node 12nm, despite the fact that the size of the node have remained unchanged.
Intel right now are the only major Fab that properly scale their node naming schemes with their process node sizes, giving them what could be defined as the "best" processing technology in terms of transistors per unit area.
The minimum gate pitch of Intel’s 10 nm process shrinks from 70 nm to 54 nm and the minimum metal pitch shrinks from 52 nm to 36 nm. These smaller dimensions enable a logic transistor density of 100.8 mega transistors per mm2, which is 2.7x higher than Intel’s previous 14 nm technology and is expected to be approximately 2x higher than other industry 10 nm technologies.
Many will wonder why Intel has not already moved to 10nm, especially when considering the fact that TSMC is already talking about their upcoming 7nm manufacturing process. To put things simply, TSMC's 7nm is not a true 7nm, at least when considering Intel's naming scheme.
Intel's 10nm manufacturing process has so far not yielded the performance results that Intel wanted, with their 1st generation node offering either a 25% performance boost over 14nm or 45% lower power draw. Compare this to 14nm++, Intel's 3rd generation 14nm node, which offers a 26% performance boost or a 26% reduction in power draw when compared to 14nm.
This makes Intel better off using 14nm++ for now, as 10nm would not yield any performance gains over 14nm++, a node which likely has higher yields and manufacturing capacity. Intel's baseline 10nm process will be superior for low power designs, but not for high-end products.
Intel already has already created their 10nm+ node, which will offer a 15% performance boost over 10nm, with up to a 30% reduction in power, which is more than enough to make it a suitable replacement for 14nm++.
Intel’s 10 nm process delivers up to 25 percent better performance and 45 percent lower power than the previous 14 nm technology. A new, enhanced version of the 10 nm process, called 10++, boosts the performance an additional 15 percent while reducing power by another 30 percent.
With these announcements, Intel has cemented itself as the world leader when it comes to silicon fabrication, marking their manufacturing nodes as superior to their competition and explaining why their technology is technically superior to their competition.
When comparing TSMC's new 7nm process node to Intel's 10nm, we can see that Intel's node is actually smaller, offering a gate pitch/metal pitch of 52nm/36nm while TSMC's offers gate pitch/metal pitch of 54nm/38nm.
You can join the discussion on Intel's 10nm manufacturing process on the OC3D Forums.
Most Recent Comments
|
Originally Posted by Surpuppa
When can we expect a 10nm CPU on the market?
|
|
Originally Posted by Surpuppa
When can we expect a 10nm CPU on the market?
|
CSS Valid