News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Why Apple ditched PowerPC, and what it says about Apple ditching Intel. Parent comment

Re:Why Apple ditched PowerPC, and what it says about Apple d... by gsnedders on Saturday June 20, 2020 @05:59PM (#23587712)
> To be fair, most of that is them catching up to where Intel already was. Noone seems to actually be fabbing meaningfully smaller feature sizes (or higher layer counts) than what Intel is stagnating at.

Eh, Intel's 14nm is 37M transistors/mm2. TSMC and SS are both up to 52M/mm2 at 10nm, and 92M/mm2 at 7nm. Both Apple and AMD's latest gen stuff is on TSMC's 7nm process _today_. Yes, Intel's 10nm is at 101M/mm2, but until they can get mass production on that they're falling substantially behind.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Why Apple ditched PowerPC, and what it says about Apple d... by a1369209993 on Saturday June 20, 2020 @06:16PM (#23587848)
Ah, thank you and I'm glad I used "seems", there; the last I had heard they were all still trying to get reliable production at 10/7nm.

(I stand by "most", but it's nice to hear that someone's making actual progress again.)

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Why Apple ditched PowerPC, and what it says about Apple d... by ido on Sunday June 21, 2020 @01:23AM (#23590042)
If you look at long-term trends transistor density has kept pace (slowed down consistently but not dramatically along the years), the big difference is that it no longer gives you as much as a performance boost as it used to.
[ Parent | on HN ]