Intel 4 Node Will Double Density And Enhance Clocks 20% Simply In Time For Meteor Lake
On: June 15, 2022
There are two components to creating a microprocessor. That’s clearly an oversimplification, as a result of there are literally a mess of components, however the two highest-level are design and fabrication. It’s all properly and good to design a ludicrously-fast, bleeding-edge processor, but it surely makes little distinction if the fabrication course of used to construct it goes poorly and you find yourself with a chip that clocks half as excessive as you deliberate, and even worse, has horrible yields (which means that a lot of the chips do not work).
Intel’s CPUs within the final decade or so have knocked it out of the park on the design facet of issues, however the fabrication facet confronted critical struggles when making an attempt to maneuver from the older 14nm course of—used for every little thing from Fifth-gen Broadwell as much as Eleventh-gen Rocket Lake—to the newer 10nm course of that’s now often called “Intel 7.” The issues slowed Intel’s progress within the efficiency enviornment to a crawl, and allowed competitor AMD to catch up from a critical drawback.
Well, on the Very Large-Scale Integration (VLSI) Technology Symposium, which has been held since 1981, Intel’s presenting 13 completely different papers, most of that are meant to quell nervousness over the corporate’s next-gen fabrication course of. As a abstract, the corporate claims its “Intel 4” course of will provide a 20% clock price enhance over Intel 7 on the similar energy, whereas reaching double the transistor density for logic, though SRAM density solely will increase by 23%.
Intel accomplishes these achievements by making intensive use of Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) lithography—the primary Intel course of to take action. That makes them a bit late to the game, as TSMC and Samsung have each been utilizing EUV for a few years now, though you can argue that Intel’s continued competitiveness on its Intel 7 course of finally bodes properly for its future efforts.
In phrases of energy consumed (and thus warmth generated), Intel says that its Intel 4 course of affords a few 40% enchancment on the similar clock price versus Intel 7. With that in thoughts, it seems like Intel 4 will probably be a specific boon for low-power and laptop computer chips, but when we have a look at the graph, it additionally seems like Intel 4 may provide a lot increased frequency scaling for high-powered desktop components.
As we already knew, the primary merchandise to be produced utilizing Intel 4 would be the firm’s forthcoming 14th-gen Meteor Lake CPUs. Based on what the corporate has proven, we’re anticipating to see these chips crop up in laptops earlier than they seem on the desktop. We’ve already seen Meteor Lake in its disaggregated silicon glory, and the corporate says it has samples up and booting Windows already, so they could come shortly after Raptor Lake, early subsequent 12 months.
