Comment by andy_xor_andrew 2 days ago
to be honest, this is far better news than I was expected, and sooner, too.
is anyone else besides Intel making ~4nm* node wafers on US soil?
*yes I know I know I know about the misnomer with using nm measurements nowadays
One of the chiplets of Intel's Meteor Lake laptop processors launched at the end of last year is made on "Intel 4"; the rest of the chiplets are TSMC N5 and N6. It was not a meaningful improvement over Intel's preceding generation that was made on "Intel 7" aka. the iteration of 10nm where the process was finally good enough for their whole product line.
Intel's Lunar Lake low-power laptop processors shipping in a week will be the first all-TSMC x86 processor from Intel. Their desktop/high-power laptop processors (Arrow Lake) will also be all-TSMC, and should be launching this fall. After that, Intel intends to resume using their own fabs for consumer processors with their 18A process. There are some datacenter processors using "Intel 3" and the 20A process was cancelled in favor of the more fully-featured 18A.
(In case of nitpicks: Intel is also manufacturing the silicon interposers that the chiplets are mounted on, but since these dies are completely passive and have no transistors, I'm not giving them credit.)
With Intel 4, Intel has not succeeded to obtain clock frequencies as high as with Intel 7, which is why the older Raptor Lake laptop CPUs still beat the Meteor Lake CPUs in single-threaded benchmarks.
Moreover, the new Intel 4 process had low fabrication yields, so Intel has produced less Meteor Lake CPUs than it could have sold.
Nevertheless, the Intel 4 process has demonstrated a much greater energy efficiency than the previous Intel 7 process, which is why the Meteor Lake CPUs beat easily the older Intel CPUs in multithreaded benchmarks, where the CPU performance is limited by the power consumption.
Intel 4 was the initial internal-only version of that process. The version available to external fab customers is Intel 3, which is in production in Oregon and Ireland. See https://www.trendforce.com/news/2024/06/20/news-intel-claims...
I mean, there are really only three bleeding-edge foundries: TSMC, Samsung, and maybe Intel if they've gotten their yields back on track.
Samsung has a fab near Austin, TX that was slated to make 4nm but it's been postponed to 2026 along with a shift to 2nm: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/samsungs-yield-is...
But their yields on 2nm are apparently... not great, so even that's in question. https://www.businesskorea.co.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=...
SMIC is apparently making low-yield 7nm and is supposedly working on even lower-yield 5nm, but absolutely not in the US.
Yeah I was surprised to hear this is already at a point where they can produce chips. From what I've heard it takes a really serious amount of effort and expertise to calibrate the machines, and get the water filtration and other chemistry working in a new location.
I thought Intel 4nm was outsourced to TSMC. Or it's a rebranding of an earlier node. Am I mistaken? Do they actually produce that?
Here we are:
https://www.guru3d.com/story/intel-to-strategically-use-tsmc....