Intel Optimistic About Its Next-Gen 7nm Process Technology (anandtech.com)

From a report: Originally planned to enter mass production in the second half of 2016, Intel's 10 nm process technology is still barely used by the company today. Currently the process is used to produce just a handful of CPUs, ahead of an expected ramp to high-volume manufacturing (HVM) only later in 2019. Without a doubt, Intel suffered delays on its 10 nm process by several years, significantly impacting the company's product lineup and its business. Now, as it turns out, Intel's 10 nm may be a short-living node as the company's 7 nm tech is on-track for introduction in accordance with its original schedule.

For a number of times Intel said that it set too aggressive scaling/transistor density targets for its 10 nm fabrication process, which is why its development ran into problems. Intel's 10 nm manufacturing tech relies exclusively on deep ultraviolet lithography (DUVL) with lasers operating on a 193 nm wavelength. To enable the fine feature sizes that Intel set out to achieve on 10 nm, the process had to make heavy usage of mutli-patterning. According to Intel, a problem of the process was precisely its heavy usage of multipatterning (quad-patterning to be more exact).

Comments

Re:This is where Intel re-labels.

[epine]

And before you go there, Intel was the first company to lie about node size.

In the era where there was a fairly broad consensus about how to advertise a process node size, there was only one transistor.

But then the power envelope started to matter, and signalling distance increasingly started to matter, and then there wasn't just one transistor any more, but various transistors tuned for different roles, and some transistors are contributing to peak clock frequency, while others are contributing to total integration density, while still others contribute to maintaining an acceptable power envelope.

A good process is one that enables you to strike a balance among all these trade-offs, while ultimately achieving good yield, and without requiring undue process steps.

It ceased to be a world with a single node size dimension to rule them all.

It's pretty naive to think you're going to abstract a process with this many inherent tradeoffs into a single scalar figure of merit.

Some of the same crowd is big on the idea of one master sentencing guideline to rule them all: sexual crime, white collar embezzlement, violent crime, intimidation and extortion can all be ratified into a single, unified sentencing pyramid that everyone finds just and coherent.

But sentencing is complex, and there's a deterrent component, and different kinds of criminals responding differently to the deterrence scale (few white collar criminals respond to a sentencing scale that goes from zero to infinity in one quick, irrevocable step by throwing caution to the wind and killing any cop who dares to apprehend them).

The criminal deterrence system works best when you compare nearby things to nearby things, and attempt to smooth out any ruthless punitive escalations over trivial differences (why did the man down the hall get half the sentence I got, for basically the same crime?) That kind of things throws yet more fuel on the rumour (always popular to begin with) that the law is arbitrary, capricious, vindictive, and personal (yes, it has been known to happen for real).

At the end of the day, "deserving" only deserves one small wedge of the pie. Appropriate deterrence curves also have a lot to do with it (if too steep for the wrong class of criminals, cops die) and often local fairness matters more on the ground (see Bernhard Riemann) than global fairness, for which no uniform societal adjudication is possible, in any case; the one true punishment pyramid is a unicorn grail.

Uniform adjudication: sometimes a convenient fiction, but never an altogether truthful fiction.

Closer to home than cop killing, I buy shirts all the time that are an X or two fatter than I am. I have long arms, and there's no hope whatsoever for the arms unless the shoulders fit. I also have broad shoulders, and generally it turns out there's no hope for whatsoever for the shoulders to fit properly unless the man boobs are cavernous and the bat wings drape under my armpits like I'm a newly famished member of the undead. But at least my sleeves cease to grip my wrists four inches above the wrist joint, and more still, every time I raise an elbow.

All these shirts have one basically on size designation inscribed on the tag on the back of the neck (along with the odd sprinkle of T). Good to know all the tailors are on the same page, and no-one is lying their ass off: all the XLs are mildly cavernous, and all the XXLs are generously cavernous. No worries, the label never lies.

But it still doesn't help me fit a shirt, because that one reified number was bullshit to begin with. (The only shirt to ever fit me off the rack was an Italian-tapered small x LT.) American tailoring and Italian tailoring are not entirely commensurate. I don't specifically know who was to blame for this, but probably the Italians were first to lie.