Intel Foundry Services to Produce 3nm Chips for Major Datacenter Customer

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But there is a bump with Tower acquisition: Chinese authorities.

Intel
(Image credit: Intel)

One of the least-noticed highlights of Intel's earnings call this week was the announcement that its Intel Foundry Services contract chipmaking division landed an order from a major "cloud, edge, and datacenter solutions provider" for producing chips on Intel 3 production node. While this is a significant win for IFS, problems linger, as the Chinese antitrust agency has suspended its review of the Intel-Tower transaction.

A Major Win

Anton Shilov
Anton Shilov
Contributing Writer

Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.

11 Comments Comment from the forums
  • bluvg
    Intel 7 (10nm Enhanced SuperFin), Intel 4 (7nm with EUV), and Intel 3 (7nm+ with EUV) nodes

    Not to be pedantic, but the "nm" label is perhaps only useful as what it was previously called (in which case "formerly called" would help clarify). "nm" as a metric hasn't been a real physical measure of anything for quite some time, but just an extrapolation of what was an actual physical measure in the past.
    Reply
  • JamesJones44
    bluvg said:
    Not to be pedantic, but the "nm" label is perhaps only useful as what it was previously called (in which case "formerly called" would help clarify). "nm" as a metric hasn't been a real physical measure of anything for quite some time, but just an extrapolation of what was an actual physical measure in the past.

    Adding on to your point, some sites have started putting the transistor density in parenthesis on a lot of these nodes, something that I hope catches on. It's still not the greatest metric but IMO it's a better gauge of what these companies are actually doing to improve their nodes than NM is these days.
    Reply
  • DavidLejdar
    Yeah, the "nm" may not be precise about what the physical nm is. But it is still quite an indication about which node-generation the talk is about. I.e. "10 nm", there wasn't anyone who had it before 2016 (nor smaller or denser than that), "7 nm process" was 2017/2018 and onwards, and so on. And in any case, the "International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors" still goes by such naming.

    Nevertheless, if one wants to talk i.e. about metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistors, or e.g. about fin field-effect transistors in particular, then cool. I just don't think that the article was intended as an academical fine-print piece, the readability of which would get prolonged a lot if the author would add all the little details to the naming as is.
    Reply
  • JamesJones44
    DavidLejdar said:
    Yeah, the "nm" may not be precise about what the physical nm is. But it is still quite an indication about which node-generation the talk is about. I.e. "10 nm", there wasn't anyone who had it before 2016 (nor smaller or denser than that), "7 nm process" was 2017/2018 and onwards, and so on. And in any case, the "International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors" still goes by such naming.

    Nevertheless, if one wants to talk i.e. about metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistors, or e.g. about fin field-effect transistors in particular, then cool. I just don't think that the article was intended as an academical fine-print piece, the readability of which would get prolonged a lot if the author would add all the little details to the naming as is.

    The issue is "nm" doesn't really indicate anything about their nodes these days. Samsung has 4 nodes that are the same with only refinements, yet they call them 7LPP, 6LPP, 5LPE and 4LPE. These nodes are closer to Intel's +++ than an actual new die shrink processes, but no one gives them guff about it because at glance the seem smaller. TSMC has done this as well, there 4n node is really an enchanted 5n node (they have others but this is the most recent example). So though they call these things 4 nm, they actually aren't and thus you can't compare them based on that stat alone. Transistor density on the other hand can be compared company to company.
    Reply
  • bluvg
    JamesJones44 said:
    The issue is "nm" doesn't really indicate anything about their nodes these days. Samsung has 4 nodes that are the same with only refinements, yet they call them 7LPP, 6LPP, 5LPE and 4LPE. These nodes are closer to Intel's +++ than an actual new die shrink processes, but no one gives them guff about it because at glance the seem smaller. TSMC has done this as well, there 4n node is really an enchanted 5n node (they have others but this is the most recent example). So though they call these things 4 nm, they actually aren't and thus you can't compare them based on that stat alone. Transistor density on the other hand can be compared company to company.
    Exactly. I get your point @DavidLejdar about bogging down the article, but I think that could be easily avoided while clarifying by simply stating "formerly called" or something along those lines.
    Reply
  • shady28
    DavidLejdar said:
    Yeah, the "nm" may not be precise about what the physical nm is. But it is still quite an indication about which node-generation the talk is about. I.e. "10 nm", there wasn't anyone who had it before 2016 (nor smaller or denser than that), "7 nm process" was 2017/2018 and onwards, and so on. And in any case, the "International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors" still goes by such naming.

    Nevertheless, if one wants to talk i.e. about metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistors, or e.g. about fin field-effect transistors in particular, then cool. I just don't think that the article was intended as an academical fine-print piece, the readability of which would get prolonged a lot if the author would add all the little details to the naming as is.


    Actually no, it isn't.

    To illustrate, TSMC's "10nm" process has a density of 50MTr/mm2 (50 million transistors per square millimeter).
    Intel 7 "formerly Intel 10nm" has a density of 92-102MTr/mm2. TWICE what TSMCs 10nm was.
    TSMC N7 which everyone "thinks" is 7nm, has a density of 92MTr/mm2 - 97MTr/mm2. LESS than Intel 7 "Formerly 10nm"

    So no, you can't tell anything about them from their marketing names.

    With everyone and their dog saying TSMC was on 7nm when they were actually on N7 (10nm to Intel's normal standard) it was becoming a marketing coup for TSMC. That entire false narrative has undoubtedly cost Intel billions in revenue and mind-share.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    bluvg said:
    Not to be pedantic, but the "nm" label is perhaps only useful as what it was previously called (in which case "formerly called" would help clarify). "nm" as a metric hasn't been a real physical measure of anything for quite some time, but just an extrapolation of what was an actual physical measure in the past.
    In this case, it's fair to relate these node names to what Intel previously called them. Otherwise, I agree.

    shady28 said:
    With everyone and their dog saying TSMC was on 7nm when they were actually on N7 (10nm to Intel's normal standard) it was becoming a marketing coup for TSMC. That entire false narrative has undoubtedly cost Intel billions in revenue and mind-share.
    No, I don't believe that. Nobody buys one CPU vs. another because it's called N7 or 10 nm. Of course, Intel was at a marked disadvantage with their 14 nm CPUs, but that was due to actual performance deficiencies rather than merely perceived.
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  • bit_user
    Getting this discussion back on topic, what do we expect will happen? Will Tower be forced to spin out or sell off its Chinese fabs? Or is China looking to extract more than that?

    IIRC, China held up WDC's acquisition of HGST for the better part of a decade, so this could certainly drag on.
    Reply
  • shady28
    bit_user said:
    No, I don't believe that. Nobody buys one CPU vs. another because it's called N7 or 10 nm. Of course, Intel was at a marked disadvantage with their 14 nm CPUs, but that was due to actual performance deficiencies rather than merely perceived.

    You must not be looking at the same forums or reviews 90% of folks look at then. I wonder how often this author says TSMC N5 ("actually 7nm density") as opposed to when they say "Intel 7 (10nm SuperFin)"? It's either ignorance, or bias, take your pick - either way it's a misleading, false narrative.

    You can bet plenty of business has been lost due to this type of behavior.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    shady28 said:
    You must not be looking at the same forums or reviews 90% of folks look at then. I wonder how often this author says TSMC N5 ("actually 7nm density") as opposed to when they say "Intel 7 (10nm SuperFin)"? It's either ignorance, or bias, take your pick - either way it's a misleading, false narrative.

    You can bet plenty of business has been lost due to this type of behavior.
    People who even read reviews are buying based on the benchmarks. People who don't read reviews be like "what's a nm?" and just buy Intel because they've heard of it before.

    Only fanboys argue about nm's. But they've already picked a side, by then.
    Reply