Apple, Huawei Both Claim First 7nm Smartphone Chips (ieee.org)

When Apple unveiled the iPhone Xs and Xs Max earlier today, it said they will contain the A12 Bionic chip -- the first smartphone processor to be made using 7nm manufacturing technology. But, as IEEE Spectrum points out, Huawei made the same claim late last month when it unveiled the Kirin 980 system on a chip. From the report: Apple's new A12 Bionic is made up of four CPU cores, six GPU cores, and an 8-core "neural engine" to handle machine learning tasks. According to Apple, the neural engine can perform 5 trillion operations per second -- an eight-fold boost -- and consumes one-tenth the energy of its previous incarnation. Of the GPU cores, two are designed for performance and are 15 percent faster than their predecessors. The other four are built for efficiency, with a 50 percent improvement on that metric. The system can decide which combination of the three types of cores will run a task most efficiently.

Huawei's chip, the Kirin 980, was unveiled at the IFA 2018 in Berlin on 31 August. It packs 6.9 billion transistors onto a one-square-centimeter chip. The company says it's the first chip to use processors based on Arm's Cortex-A76, which is 75 percent more powerful and 58 percent more efficient compared to its predecessors the A73 and A75. It has 8 cores, two big, high-performance ones based on the A76, two middle-performance ones that are also A76s, and four smaller, high-efficiency cores based on a Cortex-A55 design. The system runs on a variation of Arm's big.LITTLE architecture, in which immediate, intensive workloads are handled by the big processors while sustained background tasks are the job of the little ones. Kirin 980's GPU component is called the Mali-G76, and it offers a 46 percent performance boost and a 178 percent efficiency improvement from the previous generation. The chip also has a dual-core neural processing unit that more than doubles the number of images it can recognize to 4,500 images per minute. Apple will be the first to bring the 7nm chip in volume to market, as Huawei is expected to to start shipping its Mate 20 series phone (with the 7nm chip) a month or two later. Qualcomm also announced late last month that it's begun sampling its 7nm next-gen Snapdragon SoC. As IEEE Spectrum notes, the real winner is TSMC, which is making all three processors.

Comments

Re:Claim, schmaim

[phantomfive]

At this point, the measurement of a nanometer in chip manufacturing is so.......flexible.......that it's not really worth paying attention to, other than as an announcement of something new. It's too imprecise of a measurement. Let's look at the benchmarks, what the chip can actually do, that is what matters.

Re:Claim, schmaim

[Solandri]

I've started comparing based on transistor density, rather than process size, to avoid this stupid apples to oranges nm comparison where one company's nm means something completely different from another company's nm.

• TSMC's 7nm proceess yields 6.9 billion transistors on 100 mm^2, or 69 million transistors per mm^2.
• Intel claims their 10nm process will yield up to 100 million transistors per mm^2, which would still put them ahead.
• For reference, Intel's 14nm process yields 37.5 million transistors per mm^2. Meaning TSMC's 7nm process would be roughly equivalent to (14nm)*sqrt(37.5/69) = 10.3 nm in Intel-speak compared to Intel's 14nm process..

You'll note that Intel's 10nm process yields more improvement than the (14/10)^2 = 1.96x density increase you'd expect. So some of the components are being shrunk more thna a 14:10 ratio with the new process. However, Intel's 10nm process has been delayed repeatedly since 2016, with the latest schedule being no commercial shipments until 2019. So I guess that puts TSMC ahead for now if it can deliver this in volume without problems.