Comments by "Anders Juel Jensen" (@andersjjensen) on "An Infamous Transistor Dilemma: Gate First or Gate Last?" video.

Bob Swan insisted that 10nm should both be an aggressive shrink of 2.3x instead of the usual cadence of 1.7x AND it should be cheaper to produce (by omitting EUV) than 14nm. By the time 10nm actually started ramping TSMC was well ahead on their N5 node that was denser and cheaper using EUV. They did better in two steps than Intel did in one, and they did it faster. Intel's next generation Arrow Lake will "initially" be made on TSMC N3 "until Intel can ramp production" of their own version. This is what happens when you sent a bean counter to do an engineers job.....
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@phuang3 It could be done. That is precisely how their 10nm works. But it's a more expensive node today than TSMC N3 is. Intel 10nm uses SO many double and quadruple patterning steps that any gain in not shelling out for EUV machines gets lost many times over in wash and etch steps.
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@phuang3 They aimed for 2.7x but reached 2.3x. Since Intel does foundry service now so the density of their 10nm is publicly known. They have an ungodly amount of capacity for it, that they're moving off themselves now, and still no customers because it is so expensive. It was a recurring topic at yesterdays investor call......
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Nobody knows anything for certain about it. There is good indication that the oxidation contamination at the Arizona fab only affected Sapphire Rapids server CPUs, and that the Raptor Lake and Raptor Lake Refresh failure are solely due to the ringbus getting cooked. But it is just that: good indication. Not outright proof.
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@mytech6779 All node names are completely bogus at this point. In the beginning they were referencing gate size, but some clever buffins figured out how to increase the transistor density by more than the gate shrinkage. As for the 1.7x nomenclature, I have no idea why that became common. It means that a given amount of transistors that would take up 1.7mm2 on the old node takes up 1mm2 on the new node.
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@rightwingsafetysquad9872 So far I think Dr Su of AMD has done a good job.
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