News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model by londons_explore on Friday April 23, 2021 @07:15AM (#26913482)
Plenty of people would like to die-shrink their 7nm designs down to 5nm if only capacity existed.
Re:Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model by kingosticks on Friday April 23, 2021 @08:38AM (#26914088)
I think plenty of people will skip it. Even ignoring the high cost, not everything scales as well with every new node. There're plenty of customers who will have no interest in this node right now and some that will have no interest in it ever. I've not seen anything that suggests capacity shortages at 5nm yet, especially for Apple who've already booked all of 3nm for next-gen.
Re:Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model by hajile on Saturday April 24, 2021 @09:54AM (#26924842)
SRAM scaling from 7nm to 5nm is pitiful. While the CPU transistors see 50-70% increases, the SRAM is only shrinking 20-30%.

For chips with massive cache, that isn’t super cost effective (I suspect as a cost saving measure that we’ll see L2/L3 cache moving to a separate chip on a larger process while the rest shrinks down).