During Fortune's Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen, Colorado, Intel's CEO Bob Swan took stage and talked about the company, about where Intel is now and where they are headed in the future and how the company plans to evolve. Particular focus was put on how Intel became "data centric" from "PC centric," and the struggles it encountered.

However, when asked about the demise of Moore's Law, Swan detailed the aggressiveness that they approached the challenge with. Instead of the regular two times improvement in transistor density every two years, Swan said that Intel has always targeted better and greater densities so that it would stay the leader in the business.

EK Water Blocks, the leading premium computer liquid cooling gear manufacturer, is releasing a Special Edition of the EK-Vector Radeon RX 5700 +XT water block that is compatible with reference design AMD Radeon RX 5700 and 5700 XT graphics cards. This efficient and elegant-looking cooling made to look like the AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT factory cooler will allow your high-end Navi series graphics card to reach higher boost clocks, thus providing more overclocking headroom and more performance during gaming or other GPU intense tasks.

With the fabrication process of 7 nm, the chips become very small. The size of the new Navi GPU cores in RX 5700 and 5700 XT is only 251 mm while the 14 nm Vega GPUs were 495 mm in size. Almost double. The Navi GPU is more efficient, but still, the thermal density is increased. Which is why these small chips benefit a lot from a more efficient way of cooling via our water blocks.

AMD has reportedly discontinued production of its flagship Radeon VII graphics card. According to a Cowcotland report, AMD no longer finds it viable to produce and sell the Radeon VII at prices competitive to NVIDIA's RTX 2080, especially when its latest Radeon RX 5700 XT performs within 5-12 percent of the Radeon VII at less than half its price. AMD probably expects custom-design RX 5700 XT cards to narrow the gap even more. The RX 5700 XT has a much lesser BOM (bill of materials) cost compared to the Radeon VII, due to the simplicity of its ASIC, a conventional GDDR6 memory setup, and far lighter electrical requirements.

In stark contrast to the RX 5700 XT, the Radeon VII is based on a complex MCM (multi-chip module) that has not just a 7 nm GPU die, but also four 32 Gbit HBM2 stacks, and a silicon interposer. It also has much steeper VRM requirements. Making matters worse is the now-obsolete "Vega" architecture it's based on, which loses big time against "Navi" at performance/Watt. The future of AMD's high-end VGA lineup is uncertain. Looking at the way "Navi" comes close to performance/Watt parity with NVIDIA on the RX 5700, AMD may be tempted to design a larger GPU die based on "Navi," with a conventional GDDR6-based memory sub-system, to take another swing at NVIDIA's high-end.

GIGABYTE, the world's leading premium gaming hardware manufacturer, today announced the launch of Radeon RX 5700 XT 8G and Radeon RX 5700 8G, the latest Radeon RX 5700 series graphics cards built upon the 7 nm processor technology with new RDNA architecture and the world's first GPU to support PCI Express 4.0. With RDNA gaming architecture, GIGABYTE Radeon RX 5700 XT 8G and Radeon RX 5700 8G are equipped with 2560 and 2304 stream processors respectively and both come with 8 GB GDDR6 memory to deliver superior visual fidelity, lightning-fast performance and advanced features to power the latest AAA and eSports titles. The style of the Radeon RX 5700 XT 8G graphics card is different than before. It comes with a metal exoskeleton for heat dissipation and is fused with the reimagined contour silhouette, as well as precision-machined accents. Great gaming experiences are created by bending the rules.

The RDNA gaming architecture of Radeon RX 5700 Series is designed to power the future of PC, console, mobile and cloud-based gaming for years to come. It features a new compute unit design optimized for improved efficiency and a multi-level cache hierarchy designed to provide reduced latency, higher bandwidth and lower power. Delivering up to 1.25X higher performance-per-clock and up to 1.5X higher performance-per-watt compared to the previous-generation Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture, RDNA provides the computational horsepower to enable thrilling, immersive gaming by enhancing explosions, physics, lighting effects for fluid, high-framerate gaming experiences.

Apparently, AMD isn't celebrating its 50th anniversary in all parts of the globe, judging from recent reports regarding its AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT 50th Anniversary Edition. Apparently, the exclusive, limited-edition graphics card will only be available for US and China customers - two of the biggest worldwide markets, for sure. This is a strange decision from AMD, since a sold unit is a sold unit; however, this may be a sign of really limited availability of the graphics card and the hardware powering it.

AMD Ryzen 3000 "Matisse" processors are multi-chip modules of two kinds of dies - one or two 7 nm 8-core "Zen 2" CPU chiplets, and an I/O controller die that packs the processor's dual-channel DDR4 memory controller, PCI-Express gen 4.0 root-complex, and an integrated southbridge that puts out some SoC I/O, such as two SATA 6 Gbps ports, four USB 3.1 Gen 2 ports, LPCIO (ISA), and SPI (for the UEFI BIOS ROM chip). It was earlier reported that while the Zen 2 CPU core chiplets are built on 7 nm process, the I/O controller is 14 nm. We have confirmation now that the I/O controller die is built on the more advanced 12 nm process, likely GlobalFoundries 12LP. This is the same process on which AMD builds its "Pinnacle Ridge" and "Polaris 30" chips. The 7 nm "Zen 2" CPU chiplets are made at TSMC.

AMD also provided a fascinating technical insight to the making of the "Matisse" MCM, particularly getting three highly complex dies under the IHS of a mainstream-desktop processor package, and perfectly aligning the three for pin-compatibility with older generations of Ryzen AM4 processors that use monolithic dies, such as "Pinnacle Ridge" and "Raven Ridge." AMD innovated new copper-pillar 50µ bumps for the 8-core CPU chiplets, while leaving the I/O controller die with normal 75µ solder bumps. Unlike with its GPUs that need high-density wiring between the GPU die and HBM stacks, AMD could make do without a silicon interposer or TSVs (through-silicon-vias) to connect the three dies on "Matisse." The fiberglass substrate is now "fattened" up to 12 layers, to facilitate the inter-die wiring, as well as making sure every connection reaches the correct pin on the µPGA.

AMD "Navi 10" is a very different GPU from the "Vega 10," or indeed the "Polaris 10." The GPU sees the introduction of the new RDNA graphics architecture, which is the first big graphics architecture change on an AMD GPU in nearly a decade. AMD had in 2011 released its Graphics CoreNext (GCN) architecture, and successive generations of GPUs since then, brought generational improvements to GCN, all the way up to "Vega." At the heart of RDNA is its brand new Compute Unit (CU), which AMD redesigned to increase IPC, or single-thread performance.

Before diving deeper, it's important to confirm two key specifications of the "Navi 10" GPU. The ROP count of the silicon is 64, double that of the "Polaris 10" silicon, and same as "Vega 10." The silicon has sixteen render-backends (RBs), these are quad-pumped, which work out to an ROP count of 64. AMD also confirmed that the chip has 160 TMUs. These TMUs are redesigned to feature 64-bit bi-linear filtering. The Radeon RX 5700 XT maxes out the silicon, while the RX 5700 disables four RDNA CUs, working out to 144 TMUs. The ROP count on the RX 5700 is unchanged at 64.

Here are some of the first clear pictures of the Radeon RX 5700 XT and RX 5700 AMD launched on Monday. The two cards are based on the new 7 nm "Navi 10" silicon that implements AMD's latest RDNA architecture. The reference-design RX 5700 XT sports a brand new premium design with a ridged metal cooler shroud studded with an illuminated Radeon logo on top, a second logo at its front face, and a matching back-plate. Underneath is an aluminium fin-channel heatsink with a vapor-chamber base-plate that pulls heat from the GPU, memory, and VRM. A lateral-flow blower ventilates the heatsink, pushing hot air out of the case. Power is drawn from a combination of 8-pin and 6-pin PCIe power connectors. Outputs include three DisplayPort and one HDMI.

The Radeon RX 5700 looks a little less premium, and its cooler design greatly resembles the "metal" reference cooler of the RX Vega 64. This is possibly because reference RX 5700 will not make it to the market unlike reference RX 5700 XT, and will instead be an AIB partner-driven launch, with all cards being custom-design. AMD also provided images of the RX 5700 XT in a "teardown" shot, which reveals the vapor-chamber based heatsink, the lateral blower, and more importantly, the reference-design PCB with its 7-phase VRM.More pictures follow.

Ahead of its official reveal at AMD's E3 2019 keynote scheduled for 3 PM (Pacific) later today, VideoCardz scored a key slide that spills the beans on AMD's next performance-segment graphics card, the Radeon RX 5700 XT. This card is based on the 7 nm "Navi 10" silicon, and is its "XT" (maxed-out) SKU. Its reference-design board design in the slide reveals a return to a lateral-blower type cooling solution that now has a prettier cooler shroud with silver ridges and Radeon logos on two sides, one of which is illuminated, with a possible RGB LED accent that runs along the top of the card.

The specifications revealed point to 40 compute units. Unless AMD changed the stream processor count per CU with the RDNA architecture from 64, this works out to 2,560 stream processors. When combined with a stellar engine boost frequency of up to 1905 MHz, the GPU has a compute throughput of 9.75 TFLOP/s, which is 37 percent higher than that of the RX 590, but 27 percent lower than the Radeon VII, and roughly similar to the RX Vega 56. The RX 5700 XT is armed with 8 GB of GDDR6 memory, although the slide won't mention memory clock-speeds or bandwidth. AMD may disclose pricing and availability in its keynote address later today.

Microsoft at its E3 2019 keynote dropped a huge teaser of its next-generation gaming console development, codenamed "Project Scarlett." The console is expected to pack some serious hardware that powers gaming at 8K resolution (that's four times 4K, sixteen times Full HD). That's not all, it will also feature real-time ray-tracing. Microsoft's performance target for the console is to be 4 times higher than that of the Xbox One X. The company is also giving the console its first major storage sub-system performance update in years.

At its heart is a new 7 nm semi-custom SoC by AMD and a high degree of customization by Microsoft. This chip features CPU cores based on the "Zen 2" microarchitecture, which provide a massive leap in CPU performance over the current Scorpio Engine SoC that uses low-power "Jaguar Enhanced" cores. At the helm of graphics is a new iGPU based on the RDNA architecture that powers AMD's upcoming Radeon RX 5000 "Navi" graphics cards. It's interesting here to note that Microsoft talks about real-time ray-tracing while we're yet to see evidence of any specialized ray-tracing hardware on "Navi." In its teaser, however, Microsoft stressed on the ray-tracing feature being "hardware-accelerated."

AMD today announced the Radeon Pro Vega II and Pro Vega II Duo graphics cards, making their debut with the new Apple Mac Pro workstation. Based on an enhanced 32 GB variant of the 7 nm "Vega 20" MCM, the Radeon Pro Vega II maxes out its GPU silicon, with 4,096 stream processors, 1.70 GHz peak engine clock, 32 GB of 4096-bit HBM2 memory, and 1 TB/s of memory bandwidth. The card features both PCI-Express 3.0 x16 and InfinityFabric interfaces. As its name suggests, the Pro Vega II is designed for professional workloads, and comes with certifications for nearly all professional content creation applications.

The Radeon Pro Vega II Duo is the first dual-GPU graphics card from AMD in ages. Purpose built for the Mac Pro (and available on the Apple workstation only), this card puts two fully unlocked "Vega 20" MCMs with 32 GB HBM2 memory each on a single PCB. The card uses a bridge chip to connect the two GPUs to the system bus, but in addition, has an 84.5 GB/s InfinityFabric link running between the two GPUs, for rapid memory access, GPU and memory virtualization, and interoperability between the two GPUs, bypassing the host system bus. In addition to certifications for every conceivable content creation suite for the MacOS platform, AMD dropped in heavy optimization for the Metal 3D graphics API. For now the two graphics cards are only available as options for the Apple Mac Pro. The single-GPU Pro Vega II may see standalone product availability later this year, but the Pro Vega II Duo will remain a Mac Pro-exclusive.

AMD senior technical marketing manager Robert Hallock, responding to a specific question on Twitter, confirmed that the 3rd generation Ryzen processors do feature soldered integrated heatspreaders (IHS). Soldering as an interface material is preferred as it offers better heat transfer between the processor die and the IHS, as opposed to using a fluid TIM such as pastes. "Matisse" will be one of the rare few examples of a multi-chip module with a soldered IHS. The package has two kinds of dies, one or two 7 nm "Zen 2" 8-core CPU chiplets, and one 14 nm I/O Controller die.

The most similar example of such a processor would be Intel's "Clarkdale" (pictured below), which has its CPU cores sitting on a 32 nm die, while the I/O, including memory controller and iGPU, are on a separate 45 nm die. On-package QPI connects the two. Interestingly, Intel used two different sub-IHS interface materials for "Clarkdale." While the CPU die was soldered, a fluid TIM was used for the I/O controller die. It would hence be very interesting to see if AMD solders both kinds of dies under the "Matisse" IHS, or just the CPU chiplets. Going by Hallock's strong affirmative "Like a boss," we lean toward the possibility of all dies being soldered.Image Credit: TheLAWNOOB (OCN Forums)

AMD at its 2019 Computex keynote today unveiled the Radeon RX 5000 family of graphics cards that leverage its new Navi graphics architecture and 7 nm silicon fabrication process. Navi isn't just an incremental upgrade over Vega with a handful new technologies, but the biggest overhaul to AMD's GPU SIMD design since Graphics CoreNext, circa 2011. Called RDNA or Radeon DNA, the new compute unit by AMD is a clean-slate SIMD design with a 1.25X IPC uplift over Vega, an overhauled on-chip cache hierarchy, and a more streamlined graphics pipeline.

In addition, the architecture is designed to increase performance-per-Watt by 50 percent over Vega. The first part to leverage Navi is the Radeon RX 5700. AMD ran a side-by-side demo of the RX 5700 versus the GeForce RTX 2070 at Strange Brigade, where NVIDIA's $500 card was beaten. "Strange Brigade" is one game where AMD fares generally well as it is heavily optimized for asynchonous compute. Navi also ticks two big technology check-boxes, PCI-Express gen 4.0, and GDDR6 memory. AMD has planned a July availability for the RX 5700, and did not disclose pricing.

AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su at her 2019 Computex keynote address announced the 3rd generation Ryzen desktop processor family, which leverages the company's Zen 2 microarchitecture, and are built on the 7 nm silicon fabrication process at TSMC. Designed for the AM4 CPU socket, with backwards compatibility for older AMD 300-series and 400-series chipset motherboards, these processors are multi-chip modules of up to two 8-core "Zen 2" CPU chiplets, and a 14 nm I/O controller die that packs the dual-channel DDR4 memory controller and PCI-Express gen 4.0 root complex, along with some SoC connectivity. AMD claims an IPC increase of 15 percent over Zen 1, and higher clock speeds leveraging 7 nm, which add up to significantly higher performance over the current generation. AMD bolstered the core's FPU (floating-point unit), and doubled the cache sizes.

AMD unveiled three high-end SKUs for now, the $329 Ryzen 7 3700X, the $399 Ryzen 7 3800X, and the $499 Ryzen 9 3900X. The 3700X and 3800X are 8-core/16-thread parts with a single CPU chiplet. The 3700X is clocked at 3.60 GHz with 4.40 GHz maximum boost frequency, just 65 Watts TDP and will be beat Intel's Core i7-9700K both at gaming and productivity. The 3800X tops that with 3.90 GHz nominal, 4.50 GHz boost, 105W TDP, and beat the Core i9-9900K at gaming and productivity. AMD went a step further at launched the new Ryzen 9 brand with the 3900X, which is a 12-core/24-thread processor clocked at 3.80 GHz, which 4.60 boost, 72 MB of total cache, 105W TDP, and performance that not only beats the i9-9900K, but also the i9-9920X 12-core/24-thread HEDT processor despite two fewer memory channels. AMD focused on gaming performance with Zen 2, with wider FPU, improved branch prediction, and several micro-architectural improvements contributing to a per-core performance that's higher than Intel's. The processors go on sale on 7/7/2019.

As if the mother of all ironies, prior to its effective death-sentence dealt by the U.S. Department of Commerce, Huawei's server business developed an ambitious product roadmap for its Fusion Server family, aligning with Intel's enterprise processor roadmap. It describes in great detail the key features of these processors, such as core-counts, platform, and I/O. The "Sapphire Rapids" processor will introduce the biggest I/O advancements in close to a decade, when it releases sometime in 2021.

With an unannounced CPU core-count, the "Sapphire Rapids-SP" processor will introduce DDR5 memory support to the data-center, which aims to double bandwidth and memory capacity over the DDR4 generation. The processor features an 8-channel (512-bit wide) DDR5 memory interface. The second major I/O introduction is PCI-Express gen 5.0, which not only doubles bandwidth over gen 4.0 to 32 Gbps per lane, but also comes with a constellation of data-center-relevant features that Intel is pushing out in advance as part of the CXL Interconnect. CXL and PCIe gen 5 are practically identical.

AMD's 7 nm "Navi 10" silicon may finally address two architectural shortcomings of its performance-segment GPUs, memory bandwidth, and render-backends (deficiency thereof). The GPU almost certainly features a 256-bit GDDR6 memory interface, bringing about a 50-75 percent increase in memory bandwidth over "Polaris 30." According to a sketch of the GPU's SIMD schematic put out by KOMACHI Ensaka, Navi's main number crunching machinery is spread across eight shader engines, each with five compute units (CUs).

Five CUs spread across eight shader engines, assuming each CU continues to pack 64 stream processors, works out to 2,560 stream processors on the silicon. This arrangement is in stark contrast to the "Hawaii" silicon from 2013, which crammed 10 CUs per shader engine across four shader engines to achieve the same 2,560 SP count on the Radeon R9 290. The "Fiji" silicon that followed "Hawaii" stuck to the 4-shader engine arrangement. Interestingly, both these chips featured four render-backends per shader engine, working out to 64 ROPs. AMD's decision to go with 8 shader engines raises hopes for the company doubling ROP counts over "Polaris," to 64, by packing two render backends per shader engine. AMD unveils Navi in its May 27 Computex keynote, followed by a possible early-July launch.

The Hot Chips conference is one of the leading-edge grounds for discussion of new silicon-bound technologies, and AMD will, as usual, take to its grounds in an effort to detail their efforts in their technology fields. The conference's organization has already confirmed a number of participants in its conference schedule, which includes the likes of Intel, Microsoft, Alibaba, NVIDIA, Tesla and of course, AMD.

AMD will be delivering two keynotes: the first, on August 19th, is simply titled "Zen 2", and will therefore deal with the underpinnings of the Zen 2 microarchitecture, which will be pervasive to all of AMD's CPU product lines. A second conference will be held on the same day by AMD's CEO Lisa Su herself, and is titled "Delivering the Future of High-Performance Computing with System, Software and Silicon Co-Optimization". On the next day, August 20th, another AMD keynote is simply titled "7 nm Navi GPU", and we expect it to follow in the footsteps of the Zen 2 conference. So, with AMD diving deep into both architectures come August... it's extremely likely the company will have launched both product lines by then. Fingers crossed. You can find the abstract on AMD's CEO Lisa Su's conference after the break.

During AMD's annual shareholder meeting today, AMD president and CEO Dr. Lisa Su confirmed the launch of next-generation AMD Ryzen, EPYC CPUs and Navi GPUs for the third quarter of this year. The expected products are going to be manufactured on TSMC's 7 nm process and will be using new and improved architectures.

Ryzen 3000 series CPUs are rumored to have up to as much as 16 cores in Ryzen 9 SKUs, 12 cores in Ryzen 7 SKUs and 8 cores in Ryzen 5 SKUs. EPYC server CPUs will be available in models up to 64 cores. All of the new CPUs will be using AMD "Zen 2" architecture that will offer better IPC performance and, as rumors suggest for consumer models, are OC beasts. Navi GPUs are the new 7 nm GPUs that are expected to be very competitive both price and performance wise to NVIDIA's Turing series, hopefully integrating new technologies such as dedicated Ray Tracing cores for higher frame rates in Ray Tracing enabled games. No next generation ThreadRipper launch date was mentioned, so we don't yet know when and if that will that land.

Intel traditionally released new CPU microarchitectures and new silicon fabrication nodes with the client segment, and upon observing some degree of maturity with both, graduated them to the enterprise segment. With its homebrew 7 nanometer silicon fabrication process that takes flight in 2021, Intel will flip its roadmap execution strategy, by going "Data Center First." Speaking at the 2019 Investors Day summit, Intel SVP and GM of Data Center Group Navin Shenoy revealed that the first product built on Intel's 7 nm process will be a GPGPU accelerator chip derived from the Xe architecture for the Data Center, followed closely by a new server CPU. Both these products come under Shenoy's group. One is a competitor to likes of NVIDIA Tesla and AMD Radeon Instinct, while the other is a Xeon processor competing with AMD EPYC.

Shenoy explained the reason why within his group, the GPGPU product was prioritized over the server CPU. It has to do with redundancy of the GPU silicon, or specifically, the higher potential to harvest partially defective dies than CPU. A GPU has a larger number of indivisible components that can be disabled if found non-functional at the time of quality assurance, and these harvested dies can be used to carve out variants of a main product. An example of this would be NVIDIA carving out the GeForce GTX 1070 (1,920 CUDA cores) from the GP104 silicon that physically has 2,560 CUDA cores. The first manufacturing runs of the GPGPU will give the foundry valuable insights into the way the node is behaving, so it could be refined and matured for the server CPU. With 10 nm, however, Intel is sticking to the client-first model, by rolling out the "Ice Lake" processor towards the end of 2019. Within the Client Computing group, Intel has flipped its roadmap execution such that mobile (notebook) CPUs take precedence over desktop ones.

Intel's semiconductor manufacturing business has had a terrible past 5 years as it struggled to execute its 10 nanometer roadmap forcing the company's processor designers to re-hash the "Skylake" microarchitecture for 5 generations of Core processors, including the upcoming "Comet Lake." Its truly next-generation microarchitecture, codenamed "Ice Lake," which features a new CPU core design called "Sunny Cove," comes out toward the end of 2019, with desktop rollouts expected 2020. It turns out that the 10 nm process it's designed for, will have a rather short reign at Intel's fabs. Speaking at an investor's summit on Wednesday, Intel put out its silicon fabrication roadmap that sees an accelerated roll-out of Intel's own 7 nm process.

When it goes live and fit for mass production some time in 2021, Intel's 7 nm process will be a staggering 3 years behind TSMC, which fired up its 7 nm node in 2018. AMD is already mass-producing CPUs and GPUs on this node. Unlike TSMC, Intel will implement EUV (extreme ultraviolet) lithography straightaway. TSMC began 7 nm with DUV (deep ultraviolet) in 2018, and its EUV node went live in March. Samsung's 7 nm EUV node went up last October. Intel's roadmap doesn't show a leap from its current 10 nm node to 7 nm EUV, though. Intel will refine the 10 nm node to squeeze out energy-efficiency, with a refreshed 10 nm+ node that goes live some time in 2020.

Rumors of AMD's next-generation performance-segment graphics card are gaining traction following a leak of what is possibly its PCB. Tweaktown put out a boatload of information of the so-called Radeon RX 3080 XT graphics card bound for an 2019 E3 launch, shortly after a Computex unveiling. Based on the 7 nm "Navi 10" GPU, the RX 3080 XT will feature 56 compute units based on the faster "Navi" architecture (3,584 stream processors), and 8 GB of GDDR6 memory across a 256-bit wide memory bus.

The source puts out two very sensational claims: one, that the RX 3080 XT performs competitively with NVIDIA's $499 GeForce RTX 2070; and two, that AMD could start a price-war against NVIDIA by aggressively pricing the card around the $330 mark, or about two-thirds the price of the RTX 2070. Even if either if not both hold true, AMD will fire up the performance-segment once again, forcing NVIDIA to revisit the RTX 2070 and RTX 2060.

We've all taken a look at AMD's March 2019 product roadmap, which showed us the upcoming 2019 tech the company would be bringing to the table in its "non-stop product momentum". However, it seems that this non-stop product momentum might be coming to an unexpected twist of fate that might delay it from entering the last station - the Zen 2-based Threadripper. In the company's latest May earnings call roadmap, the company silently removed the Zen 2 Threadripper from its product roadmap - where it used to sit right after the launch of Zen 2-based Ryzen products for consumers, is now just a big crop of the space it occupied.

This might mean many things, and a mistake on someone's part while cropping the PowerPoint slide could be the only thing going on here. However, the best and most plausible speculation that can be entertained when one considers this is simple - a supply problem. With the 7 nm node being the newest, most dense fabrication process possible, and with AMD having to share TSMC's 7 nm wafer production with a number of high profile companies - such as Qualcomm, for instance - may mean that supply is simply too tight to support Zen 2-based products across so many product stacks - Ryzen and Epyc - at the same time.

TSMC in its quarterly earnings call expressed confidence in that most of its 7 nm (N7) process production node customers would be looking to make the transition to their 6 nm (N6) process. In fact, the company expects that node to become the biggest target for volume ordering (and thus production) amongst its customers, since the new N6 fabrication technology will bring about a sort of "backwards compatibility" with design tools and semiconductor designs that manufacturers have already invested in for its N7 node, thus allowing for cost savings for its clients.

This is despite TSMC's N6 process being able to take advantage of extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUVL) to lower manufacturing complexity. This lowering is achieved by the fact that less exposures of the silicon are required for multi-patterning - which is needed today as TSMC's N7 uses solely deep ultraviolet (DUV) lithography. Interestingly, TSMC expects other clients to pick up its N7+ manufacturing node that aren't already using their 7nm node - the need to develop new tools and lesser design compatibility between its N7 and N7+ nodes compared no N7 and N6 being the justification. TSMC's N7+ will be the first node to leverage EUV, using up to four EUVL layers, while N6 expands it up to five layers, and the upcoming N5 cranks EUVL up to fourteen (allowing for 14 layers.)

Intel's Xe discrete GPU project head Raja Koduri recently visited a Samsung Electronics silicon fabrication facility in Korea at the backdrop of the company's major 5 nm EUV announcement. This sparks speculation that Koduri could be exploring Samsung's portfolio of sub-10 nm contract-manufacturing offerings to mass-produce Xe discrete GPUs. Intel's own foundry business is reeling with mounting pressure from the company's main breadwinner, the client and enterprise processor businesses, to get its 10 nm node on the road. Koduri's GPU would need to leverage higher transistor densities than what Intel's 10 nm could offer, given that rival AMD is already implementing 7 nm, and NVIDIA is expected to go sub-10 nm with its future generation of GPUs.

TSMC today announced its 6-nanometer (N6) process, which provides a significant enhancement of its industry-leading N7 technology and offers customers a highly competitive performance-to-cost advantage as well as fast time-to-market with direct migration from N7-based designs. By leveraging the new capabilities in extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography gained from the N7+ technology currently in risk production, TSMC's N6 process delivers 18% higher logic density over the N7 process. At the same time, its design rules are fully compatible with TSMC's proven N7 technology, allowing its comprehensive design ecosystem to be reused. As a result, it offers a seamless migration path with a fast design cycle time with very limited engineering resources for customers to achieve the product benefits from the new technology offering.

Scheduled for risk production in the first quarter of 2020, TSMC's N6 technology provides customers with additional cost-effective benefits while extending the industry-leading power and performance from the 7nm family for a broad array of applications, ranging from high-to-mid end mobile, consumer applications, AI, networking, 5G infrastructure, GPU, and high-performance computing.