Samsung Announces Mass Production of 2nd Gen. 14-Nanometer FinFET Logic Process

[btarunr]

Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., a world leader in advanced semiconductor technology, today announced that it has begun mass production of advanced logic chips utilizing its 14 nm LPP (Low-Power Plus) process, the 2nd generation of the company's 14 nm FinFET process technology.

In leading mass production of advanced FinFET logic process, Samsung announced in Q1 of 2015 the launch of the Exynos 7 Octa processor built on the industry's first 14 nm LPE (Low-Power Early) process. With the new 14 nm LPP process, Samsung continues to demonstrate its process technology leadership, and unparalleled performance and power efficiency for its Exynos 8 Octa processor and its many foundry customers including Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. The Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 processor uses Samsung's new 14 nm LPP process and is expected to be in devices in the first half of this year.

"We are pleased to start production of our industry-leading, 2nd generation 14 nm FinFET process technology that delivers the highest level of performance and power efficiency," said Charlie Bae, Executive Vice President of Sales & Marketing, System LSI Business, Samsung Electronics. "Samsung will continue to offer derivative processes of its advanced 14 nm FinFET technology to maintain our technology leadership."

Incorporating three-dimensional (3D) FinFET structure on transistors enables significant performance boost and low power consumption. Samsung's new 14 nm LPP process delivers up to 15 percent higher speed and 15 percent less power consumption over the previous 14 nm LPE process through improvements in transistor structure and process optimization. In addition, use of fully-depleted FinFET transistors brings enhanced manufacturing capabilities to overcome scaling limitations.

With its superb characteristics, 14 nm FinFET process is considered to be one of the most optimized solutions for mobile and IoT applications and is expected to meet growing market demand for a wide range of high performance and power efficient applications from network to automotive.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[deemon]

Will the AMD chips be manufactured also in this 2nd gen 14nm LPP FinFET process or in 1st gen 14nm FinFET?

 

[TheGuruStud]

Will the AMD chips be manufactured also in this 2nd gen 14nm LPP FinFET process or in 1st gen 14nm FinFET?

Haven't all the articles said LPP?

I just read a big steaming pile from motley fool saying that Samsung would get little benefit from acquiring AMD...just LOL. Who are these authors? Intel lovers?

 

[ZeDestructor]

Haven't all the articles said LPP?

I just read a big steaming pile from motley fool saying that Samsung would get little benefit from acquiring AMD...just LOL. Who are these authors? Intel lovers?

No.. just people who are aware of a few things such an acquisition would result in..

1. AMD's x86 license expires if they get bought by any other company.
2. Samsung already makes CPUs and GPUs (Exynos). The have no need for AMD in that respect, and as of right now, are more than content to just sit on the commodity market side (RAM, SSD) of enterprise gear rather than go head to head against Intel/AMD/IBM for CPUs and Intel/AMD/nVIDIA on the co-processor side. Instead, Samsung would rather focus on the more lucrative market, and have done just that with their R&D, with them shipping their own LTE stack on their latest Exynos-powered smartphones.

 

[TheGuruStud]

No.. just people who are aware of a few things such an acquisition would result in..

1. AMD's x86 license expires if they get bought by any other company.
2. Samsung already makes CPUs and GPUs (Exynos). The have no need for AMD in that respect, and as of right now, are more than content to just sit on the commodity market side (RAM, SSD) of enterprise gear rather than go head to head against Intel/AMD/IBM for CPUs and Intel/AMD/nVIDIA on the co-processor side. Instead, Samsung would rather focus on the more lucrative market, and have done just that with their R&D, with them shipping their own LTE stack on their latest Exynos-powered smartphones.

They would go to court to have the license transferred if possible (perhaps keep AMD an independent subsidiary).

Intel is attempting to undercut everyone on price. They don't care how much money they lose. Intel has coffers full of cash (not as much as samsung, though). They sank several billion in itanic and a few in larabbee without breaking a sweat. Samsung needs AMD to lock down the market, imo unless they want to lose their ass to intel in the future. You need another gorilla to play hardball. Being nice with those assholes at intel doesn't end well.

What happens when intel starts pimping out unused fabs for cost just b/c they can? Letting intel run amok isn't an option if you ask me.

Sammy needs to be more than just a fab and display. Intel could try to flood them out of the market in memory, too, if they chose to.

Maybe I'm just wishing. I want to see intel crushed. Screw them.

 

[lilhasselhoffer]

I've read through the article, and wonder how exactly it is you're coming to these conclusions.

Samsung says they've got a new process up and running. They say what is going to be their focus (at least initially) on this new line.


You've somehow decided that this means Samsung is buying out AMD. Can you please connect the dots here? If I didn't know better, I'd say about 10 gallons of bong water or being a blind fanboy would be the only justification for such a leap. Heck, I've search the page for "AMD" and there is not a single instance of it in the linked article.


Please keep the fanboy vitriol to a minimum.

 

[ZeDestructor]

They would go to court to have the license transferred if possible (perhaps keep AMD an independent subsidiary).

That'll be a long, protracted court case, by which time it concludes, may well make the entire thing completely redundant if ARM catches up fast enough. Essentially, about the only guys who could possibly do that would be the chinese, who have a large enough internal market they can afford to violate the agreements and take the western embargo while they sort out the legalities. Samsung could do it (because, let's be fair here, they can sell to China just as well), but they won't risk having their entire lineup of various products in all the markets being embargoed across the US, EU and most of the rest of the world.

Intel is attempting to undercut everyone on price. They don't care how much money they lose. Intel has coffers full of cash (not as much as samsung, though).

Wat? If they were undercutting everyone on price, then why is it that every other thread I open has people whining about how Intel is price-gouging by keeping the desktop platform at 4cores, or price-gouging by keeping HT only on the i7s, or price-gouging with the Socket R parts?! Intel's pricing is essentially the same as it has always been, minus a minor, constant rise in price over the years, essentially just tracking inflation. I mean, the Q6600 from way back cost around 300. So did the Q9450/9550. As did the 2600K, and the 3570K after it, and the 4670K/4690K, and even the current 6600K.

They sank several billion in itanic and a few in larabbee without breaking a sweat. Samsung needs AMD to lock down the market, imo unless they want to lose their ass to intel in the future. You need another gorilla to play hardball. Being nice with those assholes at intel doesn't end well.

Larrabee paid off in Xeon Phi and experience in GPUs (which has been put to good use in iGPUs).

Itanium on the other hand is one masterpiece of an architecture, but the absolute stinker that the first-gen chips were ruined it's market reputation. Combine that with AMD's AMD64 effort, POWER6 and SPARC having a huge install base already, and nobody really willing to move for what seemed at the time to at best be a comparable architecture meant that the 2nd and 3rd generation chips floundered. By the time the market let Itanium's initial performance reputation die down, x86 had largely grown most of the features that Itanium had anyways, leaving only HP to pay Intel to keep Itanium development going (yes, Intel doesn't fund Itanium solely out of it's own pockets).

What happens when intel starts pimping out unused fabs for cost just b/c they can? Letting intel run amok isn't an option if you ask me.

It's already hapenning, but not because Intel wants to. Rather, it's because Intel has to keep those fabs online for financial reasons. In fact, they've been so desperate to keep them up they've accepted some other companies in, most notably Altera, who they've now gobbled up. Intel does not want to give it's competition any space in it's fabs, and for that reason, none of the companies it let in had any products directly competing with it. As a side note, one fab in Oregon was halted because of slowing demand.

Sammy needs to be more than just a fab and display. Intel could try to flood them out of the market in memory, too, if they chose to.

Samsung is also RAM, SSD, CPU, GPU, PCB. Intel could flood them out of memory, but it's just not worth the pathetic margins to them. Memory is a question of volume, and Intel doesn't have the volume to stand up against the big three RAM suppliers anytime soon. That said, they have worked very closely with Micron to produce HMC (competition to HBM) for use in Knights Landing and possibly other products. As I understand it, it's a simlar setup to Fury/Fury X, with Micron producing the memory, then shipping it off to Intel to mount on an interposer with their cores.

Maybe I'm just wishing. I want to see intel crushed. Screw them.

You're just a fanboy with (clearly) very little market or historical knowledge. Besides, as as @lilhasselhoffer said, nothing in this article mentions AMD production. And second, AMD won't be on any of the low-power nodes for Zen. LPP is purely aimed at the low-power SoC market.[/QUOTE]

 

[midnightoil]

You're just a fanboy with (clearly) very little market or historical knowledge. Besides, as as @lilhasselhoffer said, nothing in this article mentions AMD production. And second, AMD won't be on any of the low-power nodes for Zen. LPP is purely aimed at the low-power SoC market.

[/QUOTE]

Zen is on Samsung 14nmFF LPP. Probably exclusively initially (no GF).

 

[ZeDestructor]

Zen is on Samsung 14nmFF LPP. Probably exclusively initially (no GF).

Got a source? I'm operating on conjecture and assumption.

 

[PP Mguire]

Hey lookit that, a thread about Samsung's process and there's an argument about AMD with no mention of AMD in the OP.