Familiarity with the industry, and knowledge that finFET was exactly what caused Intel to stall, Global Foundries to just give up and quit trying to keep up, and where Samsung fell behind TSMC. TSMC’s dominance today all goes through its success at mass producing finFET and being able to iterate on that while everyone else was struggling to get those fundamentals figured out.
Intel launched its chips using its 22nm process in 2012, its 14nm process in 2014, and its 10nm process in 2019. At each ITRS “nm” node, Intel’s performance and density was somewhere better than TSMC’s at the equivalent node, but somewhere worse than the next. Intel’s 5-year lag between 14nm and 10nm is when TSMC passed them up, launching 10nm, and even 7nm before Intel got its 10nm node going. And even though Intel’s 14nm was better than TSMC’s 14nm, and arguably comparable to TSMC’s 10nm, it was left behind by TSMC’s 7nm.
You can find articles from around 2018 or so trying to compare Intel’s increasingly implausible claims that Intel’s 14nm was comparable to TSMC’s 10nm or 7nm processes, reflecting that Intel was stuck on 14nm for way too long, trying to figure out how to continue improving while grappling with finFET related technical challenges.
You can also read reviews of AMD versus Intel chips around the mid-2010s to see that Intel had better fab techniques then, and that AMD had to try to pioneer innovating packaging techniques, like chiplets, to make up for that gap.
If you’re just looking at superficial developments at the mass production stage, you’re going to miss out on the things that are in 20+ year pipelines between lab demonstrations, prototypes, low yield test production, etc.
Whoever figures out GAA and backside power is going to have an opportunity to lead for the next 3-4 generations. TSMC hasn’t figured it out yet, and there’s no real reason to assume that their finFET dominance would translate to the next step.
this sounds like it’s confirming my original comment with more specificity, that Intel was consistently playing catch up to tsmc and the only thing that might happen in the future is that maybe tsmc doesn’t progress at the rate they have been and Intel develops a theoretical technology.
lots of maybes and ifs.
maybes and ifs are not evidence of TSMCs downfall, they’re playthings that may or may not happen without any reasonable data to interpret.
I don’t have a horse in this race, but I am allegiant to facts and logical consistency.
Familiarity with the industry, and knowledge that finFET was exactly what caused Intel to stall, Global Foundries to just give up and quit trying to keep up, and where Samsung fell behind TSMC. TSMC’s dominance today all goes through its success at mass producing finFET and being able to iterate on that while everyone else was struggling to get those fundamentals figured out.
Intel launched its chips using its 22nm process in 2012, its 14nm process in 2014, and its 10nm process in 2019. At each ITRS “nm” node, Intel’s performance and density was somewhere better than TSMC’s at the equivalent node, but somewhere worse than the next. Intel’s 5-year lag between 14nm and 10nm is when TSMC passed them up, launching 10nm, and even 7nm before Intel got its 10nm node going. And even though Intel’s 14nm was better than TSMC’s 14nm, and arguably comparable to TSMC’s 10nm, it was left behind by TSMC’s 7nm.
You can find articles from around 2018 or so trying to compare Intel’s increasingly implausible claims that Intel’s 14nm was comparable to TSMC’s 10nm or 7nm processes, reflecting that Intel was stuck on 14nm for way too long, trying to figure out how to continue improving while grappling with finFET related technical challenges.
You can also read reviews of AMD versus Intel chips around the mid-2010s to see that Intel had better fab techniques then, and that AMD had to try to pioneer innovating packaging techniques, like chiplets, to make up for that gap.
If you’re just looking at superficial developments at the mass production stage, you’re going to miss out on the things that are in 20+ year pipelines between lab demonstrations, prototypes, low yield test production, etc.
Whoever figures out GAA and backside power is going to have an opportunity to lead for the next 3-4 generations. TSMC hasn’t figured it out yet, and there’s no real reason to assume that their finFET dominance would translate to the next step.
this sounds like it’s confirming my original comment with more specificity, that Intel was consistently playing catch up to tsmc and the only thing that might happen in the future is that maybe tsmc doesn’t progress at the rate they have been and Intel develops a theoretical technology.
lots of maybes and ifs.
maybes and ifs are not evidence of TSMCs downfall, they’re playthings that may or may not happen without any reasonable data to interpret.
I don’t have a horse in this race, but I am allegiant to facts and logical consistency.
juggling what ifs is not very interesting for me.
Yes, this has been true since about 2017, because 10nm was about 3 years late, losing its previous 3-year lead.
The future is uncertain, but the past is already set.