Re:Apple Silicon: The Passing of Wintel
by giantrobot on Monday July 13, 2020 @12:43AM
(#23817249)
Intel does have manufacturing issues at smaller node sizes but that's a really complicated thing to measure, node size claims from various semiconductor manufacturers are more marketing than anything else now.
There's been some suggestions to replace node size claims with better density metrics https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9063714. It's not like TSMC's fabs are some order of magnitude more advanced than Intel's fabs. If Intel had an ARM chip to produce today they could use their considerable fab volume to produce them profitably. Even at large process sizes they could still produce competitive ARM chips. It's not like their current x86 chips at 14nm are slouches.
The problem is that Intel no longer has the leading state of the art fabs. They used to be two generations ahead of everyone else, and now they're two behind. The inertia of x86 has kept them afloat, but the longer Intel fabs lag the more ground ARM has been able to make up.
Intel fabbing ARM parts isn't going to do them much good unless they also manage to get their process shrink delays worked out and behind them.