No one is shocked that the country known for stealing advanced foreign technology is advancing their technology.
Clickbait. The cpu is 7 nm, 5 years behind. They keep saying that it’s shouldn’t be possible like they made the holy grail.
Intel is still on 7nm. Samsung’s 5nm is basically 7nm+. The fact that SMIC can do 7nm without EUV is insanely impressive.
Intel took years and years of delays to achieve the same thing.
The business strategy decisions behind CPU fab is really interesting over the past 15 years.
AMD made a budget clone of Intel two decades ago. Then Intel made a misstep and released Northwood Pentium 4. AMD used less power and was faster. And AMD decided to go with DDR memory, while Intel went RDRAM. Then AMD was king when they went AMDx86-64 for 64 bit and Intel went Itanium.
Then AMD made a huge miscalculation on the future of multicore computing and designed Bulldozer, while Intel got their shit together and went down the hyperthreading route and released CORE/Core2/Core2Duo chips. And Intel was king for a decade.
I don’t know the exact timing, but AMD needed cash and sold their fabs to raise money, which became
TSMCGlobalFoundries, sorry. GF learned how to make stuff small since smartphones became a huge market. Then AMD let an engineer run the company and she invested in the Zen architecture, which could be made by GF with their lessons from the mobile world.This is my take. By AMD turning GF loose, GF could
date other peoplework on mobile projects, which helped them learn.It’s a side note now, but Intel hung on to their fabs and lagged behind GF. AMD let their fab go and benefitted from it. EDIT: I had some facts wrong. It’s possible Intel fabs are ahead of GF.
As a side note, Intel did try fairly hard to get into mobile like GF. They had the Atom chips and went for tablet, Ultrabook, netbook, and mobile. I had an ASUS Android phone with an Intel SOC. So it’s not like they ignored mobile, but it didn’t benefit them as much as TSMC.
AMD’s fabs became Global Foundries, who pulled out of the bleeding-edge node game once it became cost prohibitive to do so with 7nm.
5 years behind in a tech is far far better than being under control of a foreign country to access said tech.
It really is super impressive though. There are only a handful of fabs internationally and I think all of them outside of China use machinery made from 1 company only for advanced processes.
