News on China's scientific and technological development.

Quickie said:

I have gone along this line of reasoning quite a few posts ago.

It seems like quite a few people still buy into the hoo-ha of Intel 10 nm being superior to the 7nm of other manufacturers. I think there is a chart posted here somewhere showing that the Intel 10 nm is efficient than the 7 nm when compared strictly on
That may have to do with the better design of the CPU architecture making it more efficient (speed wise) doing certain tasks, but not necessary on other tasks as well.

Transistor to transistor, a 14nm node will definitely consume more power than a 10 nm node.

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I agree that there are many metrics to compare. Its like building a gaming PC, every single person has a different opinion on which GPU is better and what metric is important or not. But even TSMC admits that 7nm is just a marketing term and doesn't really correspond with any physical dimensions. So the important thing is that chips may not actually be shrinking much more. The true width of a 7nm or 5nm transistor is probably around 10nm. Meaning that China is closer to producing a 7nm chip than what others think, since the true physical width has stopped shrinking. Even though the name continues to shrink.

localizer said:

But Intel's 14nm is definitely comparable to 10nm TSMC/Samsung

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Not in terms of per transistor efficiency or mixing speed.

localizer said:

I don't believe the 10nm/7nm comparison since Zen 7nm is obviously better than Intel 10/14nm. Also, Intel's 10nm production is limited.

But Intel's 14nm is definitely comparable to 10nm TSMC/Samsung

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But Intel's 14nm is definitely comparable to 10nm TSMC/Samsung

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Comparable in terms of what?

In regard to the performance of CPU architectures for certain benchmark tests, it may be true Intel's 14 nm may be comparable to 10 nm of some other CPU manufacturer.

Still, the 2 types of nodes are not comparable in regard to the transistor's power consumption efficiency and switching speed.

Can we have a thread that's actually "news on China's scientific and technological development" instead of "hysterics about possible US sanctions", "problems China's semiconductor industry faces", or "what exactly is a node?"

ZeEa5KPul said:

Can we have a thread that's actually "news on China's scientific and technological development" instead of "hysterics about possible US sanctions", "problems China's semiconductor industry faces", or "what exactly is a node?"

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But ...

Chinese people organize our thought in webs and patterns.

White people like the English and French, they are linear logic. The English won't even do the dialectic like the Germans or Russians.

Skywatcher said:

It took Samsung only about a year to start EUV enabled 7nm lithography (2018), and that includes installation and development.

Given that if SMIC will have the N+2 node experience by 2022, EUV 7nm would come about pretty shortly after the SMEE EUVL machine is delivered.

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Yet Samsung's 7nm performs worse than their 10nm.

tamsen_ikard said:

One thing I would like to point out is that these 7NM, 5NM terms are no longer tied to the actual physical process. These are marketing terms to hype up process technology. Intel's 10NM process has much higher transistor density than TSMC and Samsung's 7NM process. So, when TSMC hyped up its 7NM as being ahead of Intel, it was not true. Whether the 5NM and 2NM are significant improvements or not cannot be measured just by looking at X NM number. We need to look at transistor density and several other measures to actually compare different process technologies.

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Transistor density is also a false measurement. Intel's 10nm while nominally having a density of 100.4MTr/mm^2 actually comes out to be about 60~ for high performance versions of the node. There really is no way of judging how good a node is until something is built on it.

latenlazy said:

It’s comparable on transistor density. Not on actual power efficiency and switching speed.

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By now Intel's 14nm would be about half as dense as TSMC's 10nm. Every single iteration of 14 have seen Intel relax the gate size.

The two great technological challenges of China during this decade, Semiconductor and Jet engine

ZeEa5KPul said:

Can we have a thread that's actually "news on China's scientific and technological development" instead of "hysterics about possible US sanctions", "problems China's semiconductor industry faces", or "what exactly is a node?"

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I agree, but I think it was a mistake to close the topic on semiconductors

There is a real technological war between China and the United States, we can't avoid it