ARM 20 nm Processors Expected to Arrive Next Year
The chip manufacturing race is heating up and Intel could be facing more pressure down the road.
ARM's Simon Segars, general manager of processor and physical IP divisions, said that ARM-based 20 nm SoCs could be appearing in smartphones as early as late 2013. Given the fact that 28 nm chips are still in short supply, the move to 20 nm within 12 - 18 months is rather quick.
Intel is placing big bets on its manufacturing technology to compete with ARM chip makers. The current Medfield 32 nm will see a new 22 nm chip next year, which will be replaced again with a 14 nm SoC in 2014, according to Intel's roadmap.
"The whole industry is focused on moving to the next generation as soon as it's economically viable and technologically achievable," Segars told press at Computex in Taipei. There is no information to back up Segars' prediction, but it is common sense to expect such notes given ARM's huge exposure at this year's Computex as Windows RT arrives and a number of ARM-based Windows notebooks are shown. As ARM's profile grows, however, greater investments in manufacturing are likely and a 20 nm forecast for 2013 may not be so unrealistic.
ARM's revenue has been just $294.9 million for the first two quarters of its current fiscal year, but the IP company said that more than 1.9 billion processors based on its blueprints were shipped globally during the time. 1.1 billion chips went into mobile phones and tablets.
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If Atom's gains going to 22nm are as trivial as the gains from Sandy to Ivy, then 22nm Atoms still won't be competitive with Tegra 3, let alone Tegra 6 or whatever will be out then.Reply
Process technology is a crutch, if 22nm is this pointless, 14nm is going to be bad times for Intel. -
nocteratus Going to 22nm or smaller will lower power consumption and heat!Reply
A tablet with 1 or 2 more hours of battery life will be better. And smartphones won't get hot while talking. -
blazorthon process_orIf Atom's gains going to 22nm are as trivial as the gains from Sandy to Ivy, then 22nm Atoms still won't be competitive with Tegra 3, let alone Tegra 6 or whatever will be out then.Process technology is a crutch, if 22nm is this pointless, 14nm is going to be bad times for Intel.Reply
Intel's 22nm process worked excellently for Ivy Bridge. It lowered power consumption substantially and that was the point of it. Intel skimped on overclocking by replacing the fluxless solder that is usually between the IHS and the CPU die with poor quality paste, but that has nothing to do with the 22nm process itself. Ivy also isn't much faster than Sandy, but Ivy was just a die shrink. Die shrinks don't increase performance much at all. They never do. Shrinking the die gives room for a better architecture. The 22nm tock for Intel will be Haswell. Haswell is supposedly going to have substantial performance improvements like the previous tocks have had and it will do it all on the 22nm node.
22nm isn't pointless. It did exactly what it was supposed to do (lowered power consumption) and it did it well. 14nm will probably do it again too. -
kronos_cornelius Great to see competition back in the CPU market. My bet is on ARM given that it has a better business model. Intel, like Microsoft is weighted down by its own legacy and one could argue the arrogance of past success. But we consumers benefit if there is a long protracted battle between the two architectures and business models.Reply -
tomfreak So when is the day I can get a half day of smartphone battery life by playing games?Reply
when is the day Smartphone can kill media player industry? cheap -
blazorthon TomfreakSo when is the day I can get a half day of smartphone battery life by playing games?when is the day Smartphone can kill media player industry? cheapReply
Get an extended battery for your smart phone phone if there is one available. I recently got an extended battery for my older HTC Evo 4G and battery life increased incredibly. -
bison88 TomfreakSo when is the day I can get a half day of smartphone battery life by playing games?when is the day Smartphone can kill media player industry? cheapReply
First Answer: When there is a revolutionary re-design of the battery. Things can only get so small and consume so little wattage before eventually things will need to re-shift focus back to the power source itself.
Second Answer: Not quite sure what you're referencing specifically, but I'd say never. Smart Phones like many other computing devices are just accessories. There is no substitute, and I'd liken never will be a substitute, to the desktops performance, accessibility, and expandability. If this "cloud" crap keeps going the way it is, I see the desktop being the equivalent of the households server/supercomputer that takes care of all the heavy lifting for other devices used on the local network. Can't see any device out there now or in the near future that will make the desktop irrelevant, therefore why not use it in a cloud like environment to offload the more powerful energy draining tasks. -
blazorthon bison88First Answer: When there is a revolutionary re-design of the battery. Things can only get so small and consume so little wattage before eventually things will need to re-shift focus back to the power source itself.Second Answer: Not quite sure what you're referencing specifically, but I'd say never. Smart Phones like many other computing devices are just accessories. There is no substitute, and I'd liken never will be a substitute, to the desktops performance, accessibility, and expandability. If this "cloud" crap keeps going the way it is, I see the desktop being the equivalent of the households server/supercomputer that takes care of all the heavy lifting for other devices used on the local network. Can't see any device out there now or in the near future that will make the desktop irrelevant, therefore why not use it in a cloud like environment to offload the more powerful energy draining tasks.Reply
I think that Tomfreak meant when can phones kill off MP3 players, iPods, etc.
Also, expand-ability of a desktop might be unbeatable, but several laptops can most certainly compete in performance. These laptops don't when in price for the performance, but they are portable without lacking the performance of a desktop. There are several X58 and X79 laptops that support the workstation i7s (even up to the 6 core EEs) and up to 16GB or 32GB of RAM. A Laptop with two Radeon 7970Ms could have gaming performance ahead of the Radeon 7970.