The more important issue, which most seem to miss, is Intel's lack of a proper backup plan. Intel have put good development effort into Sunny Cove, which features their largest improvement in single thread performance since Sandy Bridge, but a lot of that effort is "wasted" when they don't have a suitable node to produce it on. If they had only done a small effort to prepare the architecture for 14nm as well, they would have been in a much better position right now.
Would Sunny Cove cores be viable on 14nm? I mean literally, in terms of transistors, die size as well as heat.
Assuming things are similar enough for Intel/TSMC 14nm and 10nm/7nm, Zen+ > Zen2 went from 4.8B transistors to 3.9 + 2.09 = 5.99B transistors. Intel does not disclose the transistor count on current CPUs but 8700K is estimated to have a little above 3B transistors and 9900K a little less than 4B which puts Intel's 14nm density roughly on par with TSMC's (and/or architecture density on par with AMD).
- Zen+ is 4.8B in 213mm^2 die (22Mtr/mm^2)
- Zen2 is 3.9B in 74mm^2 CCD (53Mtr/mm^2) and 2.09B in 124mm^2 IOD (17Mtr/mm^2)
There seems to be more and more evidence that IO does not scale well and relatively less dense IO die seems to support that notion. When it comes to cores themselves, 7nm is more than twice as dense as 14nm - 2.4x, give or take. Zen2 has about 40% more transistors in cores compared to Zen+ (and this might be a conservative estimate given changes with IO)
Sunny Cove improvements over Skylake pretty much mirror the changes AMD did with Zen2, increase in transistors needed to implement it should be roughly similar as well. Now, while manufacturing dies does not seem to be a big problem (in terms of yields) heat at 14nm is definitely a problem. 9900K is evidence enough. Now, imagine a 40% larger die with similar power density...
Is it just me or every body else is confused too?
how come 10nm compared to 14nm will have 2.7x density improvement but 7nm will have 2x density improvement?
and anything else that he said was completely lies and there is no evidence of it in real world.
Either Mr. swan is a moron or he think that we are bunch of morons!
What are you talking about?
Lets leave Intel aside for a moment. TSMC does not say direct comparison between 16nm and 7nm on their web page because they have a 10nm process between these. However, TSMC does state 16 > 10 was
2x density (15% faster, 35% less power) and 10 > 7 was
1.6x density (20% faster and 40% less power). This makes out 16 > 7 having 3.2x density improvement. Granted, TSMC's 16nm is a little less dense than Intel's 14nm and Intel's 10nm was initially (that 2.7x claim) intended to be denser than the current version but the scale is correct enough.
The stated density improvements are naturally somewhat real-life but best case scenarios. High performance versions of manufacturing processes that are used for CPUs or GPUs are less dense and less power efficient than mobile-oriented process versions.
