News Intel Process Roadmap Through 2025; Renamed Process Nodes, Angstrom Era Begins

Giroro

Splendid
This renaming is gross and deliberately misleads the customers and investors. I hope Intel gets sued, and sued hard.
Even Intel seems to be anticipating the lawsuit. The point of dropping the "nm" seems to be entirely based on boosting their inevitable legal case that 'Intel naming is a registered trademark and is no way indicative of the size of the transistor or the technology used '

IE: the subway Footlong™ defense.

To wit, I'm sure Intel will also claim that the A in 20A does not stand for Ångstrom and is not to interpreted as a unit of measurement.
 

spongiemaster

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Dec 12, 2019
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This renaming is gross and deliberately misleads the customers and investors. I hope Intel gets sued, and sued hard.
Even Intel seems to be anticipating the lawsuit. The point of dropping the "nm" seems to be entirely based on boosting their inevitable legal case that 'Intel naming is a registered trademark and is no way indicative of the size of the transistor or the technology used '

IE: the subway Footlong™ defense.

To wit, I'm sure Intel will also claim that the A in 20A does not stand for Ångstrom and is not to interpreted as a unit of measurement.
Uhh... ok. The more rational view is, who cares?
 

aero1x

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spongiemaster - resident intel shill.

Nobody cares, just consumers, investors, enthusiasts that's all.
 

spongiemaster

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spongiemaster - resident intel shill.

Nobody cares, just consumers, investors, enthusiasts that's all.

No, they don't. The only people that care are fanboys. From the article.

"Intel is renaming its process nodes to align with the current naming conventions used by the third-party foundries like TSMC and Samsung. "

Link to one post where I have said AMD should be sued because their nodes are not accurately named. I couldn't care less what they name their node. I've never bought any piece of electronics equipment based on the node the chips used. If you're not slamming AMD and Nvidia for the false naming of the nodes they use, than the shill is you.
 

Bazzy 505

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This renaming is gross and deliberately misleads the customers and investors. I hope Intel gets sued, and sued hard.
Even Intel seems to be anticipating the lawsuit. The point of dropping the "nm" seems to be entirely based on boosting their inevitable legal case that 'Intel naming is a registered trademark and is no way indicative of the size of the transistor or the technology used '

IE: the subway Footlong™ defense.

To wit, I'm sure Intel will also claim that the A in 20A does not stand for Ångstrom and is not to interpreted as a unit of measurement.

you are actually very wrong, the whole nanometer marketing has become huge misnomer many years ago.

Just to give you an example actual transistor size on 7nm TMSC node is 22 nm,
actual transistor size on 14+++ Intel node is in reality 24 nm in size.

The article does a good job explaing why.
Renaming the process nodes just brings it more into line with what they really are.
 

frogr

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Paul, you have a typo under the High NA section
"Intel says it will be the first company to receive a High NA EUV machine from TSMC(should be ASML)"
 
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The point of dropping the "nm" seems to be entirely based on boosting their inevitable legal case that 'Intel naming is a registered trademark and is no way indicative of the size of the transistor or the technology used '
nm hasnt been a actual standard for ages now. they didnt need to change even IF sued as they could fall back on its not been a universal standard in many many yrs.

likely done to try and get ppl to not do the "intel is on 10 while amd is on 7" situations in future while trying to come across as wanting to embrace a standard.

side benefit is they gain a standard in their fab business in future.

tl;dr doesntm atter in end 10nm or intel 7 means literal crap eitherway (same as if amd did it...its literally got no meaning but a name change)


many ppl hate nm name as its went obsolete ages ago.

they SHOULD be labeled by a new standard they agree upon as a whole.
 
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Sippincider

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Should be fun explaining how an Intel 7 isn't an Intel i7...

Anyway they can brand it whatever they want. What matters is TDP, price, and whether the chips lead or follow the market. We'll have to closely read the specs as usual.
 

kjfatl

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This renaming is gross and deliberately misleads the customers and investors. I hope Intel gets sued, and sued hard.
Even Intel seems to be anticipating the lawsuit. The point of dropping the "nm" seems to be entirely based on boosting their inevitable legal case that 'Intel naming is a registered trademark and is no way indicative of the size of the transistor or the technology used '

IE: the subway Footlong™ defense.

To wit, I'm sure Intel will also claim that the A in 20A does not stand for Ångstrom and is not to interpreted as a unit of measurement.
When intel was clearly the leader, companies like TSMC started playing numbers games to make their process look better. Intel didn't care because everyone knew that they were the leader. All they are doing is changing their nomenclature to match that of TSMC and Samsung.
 

Howardohyea

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As much as I don't like the current process node naming scheme I have to agree with the article.

I remember a few years back Intel was trying to change the transistor naming scheme of all the other companies like Samsung and TSMC. Looks like Instead of everyone else changing Intel bit the bullet and changed themselves.

The article also described Intel changing the naming "necessary evil". Furthermore Intel's 10nm have features as small as 7nm, and some estimates puts Intel's transistor density on par with TSMC's 7.

If Intel don't want to loose the marketing war then they have to rename the process node.
 
Most people don't really care about nm and process node. And we are used to get confusing naming from intel so everything is ok.

Whats important here is: Can you deliver this chips in time? and at a decent price?

2~3 years ago AMD was the the best cost/performance cpu out there. Right now intel got the best ones, Why? because you can get them at decent price, and they perform very, very well. Thats all it matter for most people.
 

escksu

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This renaming is gross and deliberately misleads the customers and investors. I hope Intel gets sued, and sued hard.
Even Intel seems to be anticipating the lawsuit. The point of dropping the "nm" seems to be entirely based on boosting their inevitable legal case that 'Intel naming is a registered trademark and is no way indicative of the size of the transistor or the technology used '

IE: the subway Footlong™ defense.

To wit, I'm sure Intel will also claim that the A in 20A does not stand for Ångstrom and is not to interpreted as a unit of measurement.

I am truly surprised... Its now 2021 and there are still pple like you?? Vast majority of folks today already know "nm" has no meaning at all. Its just a marketing term today...
 

MMorris666

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yeah, only a couple months ago IBM came out and said they have made the first 2nm chip even though nothing on that chip measures 2nm. didn't see any hate then...
 

escksu

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yeah, only a couple months ago IBM came out and said they have made the first 2nm chip even though nothing on that chip measures 2nm. didn't see any hate then...

Yes, anandtech has an article on that. Its using "2nm technology".....

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16656/ibm-creates-first-2nm-chip

Nothing in that chip is 2nm.... The only "2nm" about it is that density is est. to be 3.5x higher than 7nm TSMC.

7nm TSMC = 91.2 MTr/mm2
2nm TSMC (if scale directly from 7nm) = 91.2 / 2 * 7 = 319.2 MTr/mm2

"2nm" IBM = est. 333.3 MTr/mm2 (higher than 319.2)
 

escksu

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Not so much what they "really are" as just more in line with other fabs' marketing.

Yes and no..... If you are saying "really are", all the 7-14nm are not anywhere near what they really are. No one has a 14nm transistor today, let alone 7nm. They are way bigger.


WE can see that Intel's 10nm is pretty much on par with TSMC 7nm. Their 14nm is actually close to 11-12nm than 14nm.
 

VforV

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I'm not an Intel fan (anymore, since Zen1), but this does not affect me any way. It's a PR move, more than anything else.

What I care is how good their CPUs will be in terms of performance, power usage, price and upgrade path/platform longevity vs AMD.

That's all I care and if they will be better than AMD at one point (I expect that to possibly be from 2023 onward, as I said before), then and only then I'll be interested in Intel again.

That being said who ever wins in each generation going forward from 2023 I don't want a roflstomp, but a close win and close competition, so all of us customers get better and better products, because of that fierce competition.
 

Giroro

Splendid
you are actually very wrong, the whole nanometer marketing has become huge misnomer many years ago.

Just to give you an example actual transistor size on 7nm TMSC node is 22 nm,
actual transistor size on 14+++ Intel node is in reality 24 nm in size.

The article does a good job explaing why.
Renaming the process nodes just brings it more into line with what they really are.

I agree that transistor naming already sucks.
But, I very strongly disagree that renaming the process "brings it more into line with what they really are".
That's the big lie here. That's what is upsetting. They are bringing the number further from the truth, and directly telling people that the new number is the "right" one. You say explaining, I say gaslighting.

Taking naming that was already misleading, and throwing it over the cliff of "words no longer have any meaning" is not an improvement.
There's a difference between Seagate successfully changing the legal definition of Gigabyte to "one billion bytes", Vs if somebody released a 500 Gigabyte flash drive with a disclaimer on their website saying "Gigabyte is a registered trademark, and is in no way an indicator of capacity. Actual drive capacity will vary by random, due to the manufacturing process". Then the hypothetical drive would actually just end up being a 256MB Wish scam with firmware that reports 2TB free, or whatever.
Process naming is probably somewhere in between. Maybe slightly worse than storage companies blaming their missing capacity on "formatting" (which hasn't been technically in decades. That's from decades ago when you could change the track layout of floppy disks, even back then there was still tons of other mismarketing).

Units of measurement have real world meaning. They're regulated. If the CEO of Exon decided tomorrow to redefine a gallon of gas to "100 ounces of air", then they would be held both civally and criminally liable. But IBM can a 1440KB (now KiB) floppy and get away with printing 1.44MB on the box, because no powerpoint presentation in the world is interesting enough to teach a government employee why there's no possible interpretation where that claim was correct.
That one was like printing "40ish ounces, maybe by weight" on a quart of ice cream.

I'm tired of false advertising. I'm tired of tech companies being able to do and say anything they want, whenever they want.
Computers have been around for over 50 years. It's not acceptable that the courts and consumer advocacy still don't understand them well enough to recognize even the most blatent abuses of customer trust.
 

Howardohyea

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I agree that transistor naming already sucks.
But, I very strongly disagree that renaming the process "brings it more into line with what they really are".
That's the big lie here. That's what is upsetting. They are bringing the number further from the truth, and directly telling people that the new number is the "right" one. You say explaining, I say gaslighting.

Taking naming that was already misleading, and throwing it over the cliff of "words no longer have any meaning" is not an improvement.
There's a difference between Seagate successfully changing the legal definition of Gigabyte to "one billion bytes", Vs if somebody released a 500 Gigabyte flash drive with a disclaimer on their website saying "Gigabyte is a registered trademark, and is in no way an indicator of capacity. Actual drive capacity will vary by random, due to the manufacturing process". Then the hypothetical drive would actually just end up being a 256MB Wish scam with firmware that reports 2TB free, or whatever.
Process naming is probably somewhere in between. Maybe slightly worse than storage companies blaming their missing capacity on "formatting" (which hasn't been technically in decades. That's from decades ago when you could change the track layout of floppy disks, even back then there was still tons of other mismarketing).

Units of measurement have real world meaning. They're regulated. If the CEO of Exon decided tomorrow to redefine a gallon of gas to "100 ounces of air", then they would be held both civally and criminally liable. But IBM can a 1440KB (now KiB) floppy and get away with printing 1.44MB on the box, because no powerpoint presentation in the world is interesting enough to teach a government employee why there's no possible interpretation where that claim was correct.
That one was like printing "40ish ounces, maybe by weight" on a quart of ice cream.

I'm tired of false advertising. I'm tired of tech companies being able to do and say anything they want, whenever they want.
Computers have been around for over 50 years. It's not acceptable that the courts and consumer advocacy still don't understand them well enough to recognize even the most blatent abuses of customer trust.
you can't do anything about it, including trying to sue Intel. There is no standard so nothing you can do. Also from this chart by Anand Tech I don't see any issues renaming it just to keep up with marketing.
Intel's (formerly called) 10nm is denser than TSMC's 7nm. So I don't see much issue changing the naming.
https://ibb.co/J7TWQ7z
 

AtrociKitty

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This renaming is gross and deliberately misleads the customers and investors. I hope Intel gets sued, and sued hard.
Here's the ranking of several manufacturing nodes based on half-pitch scaling of an equivalent (in transistor density) planar transistor node. I'll use Intel's previous node branding:
  1. 4.5nm Intel (marketed as “5nm”)
  2. 5nm TSMC (marketed as “3nm”)
  3. 6.4nm Intel (marketed as “7nm”)
  4. 6.7nm TSMC (marketed as “5nm”)
  5. 9nm Intel (marketed as “10nm”)/ 9nm TSMC (marketed as 7nm (N7+))
  6. 10nm TSMC (marketed as “7nm” (N7/N7P))/ 10nm Samsung (marketed as “7nm”)
  7. 13nm Samsung (marketed as “8nm” by Samsung)
  8. 14nm Intel / 14nm Samsung (marketed as “10nm” by Samsung)
  9. 16nm TSMC (marketed as “12nm” (12FFC) by TSMC)
  10. 17nm GF (marketed as “12nm” (12LP) by GF)