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bazooka_penguin | 4 years ago

It should be ahead of Intel 4 ("4nm"). Samsung 5nm density is approximately 127M gates/mmsq on paper. Samsung 4nm will scale to around 0.75x area according to their China conference earlier this year, to a transistor density of around 168M gates/mmsq. They had another conference the other day detailing 3nm, which will scale down another 25%, to around 224M gates/mmsq.

Intel 4 was estimated to be up to 200M gates/mmsq. I don't think we have exact numbers since Intel only released numbers for their previous 10nm plan, which were heavily revised for Tigerlake iirc. I think Intel 3 is a variant of Intel 4 so 3GAA will presumably be similar to Intel 3.

edit: slides of the 3nm conference yesterday https://twitter.com/stshank/status/1445924295121592321/photo...

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dragonelite|4 years ago

gates/mmsq seems a way more usuable metric then the nm marketing stuff?

bazooka_penguin|4 years ago

It's a better ballpark, but it's still an ideal number measured by the manufacturer using their own tests. Problem is, companies rarely if ever source the exact same design to multiple foundries, so it's not easy to compare in practice.