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Samsung Fab Line

Samsung announced several updates to its process engineering science roadmap today at its Samsung Foundry Forum. Like Intel, Samsung intends to offer multiple generations of a single process node — but unlike Intel, information technology isn't debuting a new strategy in lieu of maintaining a quick transition roadmap.

Start, there'south interesting news apropos a fourth-generation 14nm product, 14LPU. For those keeping score at home, Samsung released 14nm Low Power Early (14LPE) offset, followed by 14nm Depression Ability Plus (14LPP), which was broader ramp with more customers and up to 10% improved performance. Earlier this yr, the company appear information technology would build a lower-cost variant of 14nm that didn't sacrifice on power or performance, 14LPC. This fourth-generation 14LPU is meant explicitly for customers who are building "high operation, compute-intensive" applications. 14LPU is said to offering better performance than 14LPC, but Samsung hasn't published details on how all four of its processes compare with one another; simply 14LPP and 14LPE are listed on its website.

It's non hard to read between these particular lines, yet. When foundries add together new iterations of existing process nodes, it's typically because they've got customers who are interested in those procedure nodes and want to accept reward of them. Adding a college power line could mean that Samsung wants to compete for more than business organisation from AMD, Nvidia, or fifty-fifty Qualcomm'southward server processor — or it could be that Samsung meant relatively high-performance parts, and that it'due south however focusing on lower power hardware at relatively low TDPs. Either way, Samsung clearly believes that 14nm will stick around as a long-lived node, and is worth investing in.

Samsung10nm

Samsung's new 14nm LPU and 10nm LPU aren't shown here, but this was cutting-edge information equally of October 2016

The company is yet pushing alee with its plans to gyre out 10nm applied science, however, and has also announced a new 10nm node, 10LPU. The company describes this every bit follows:

Due to limitations of electric current lithography technologies, 10LPU is expected to be the most cost-effective cutting-edge process engineering science in the industry. Together with the second-generation 10nm process (10LPP) that offers an actress performance boost from 10LPE, 10LPU is positioned to see the needs of an extended range of applications that can benefit from the advanced 10nm process.

Samsung seems to be implying that 14LPU is a higher performance node, while 10LPU is a cost-optimized node. Meanwhile, the company also showed off a 7nm EUV wafer and provided an "update" on its 7nm EUV progress, but neglected to tell us anything well-nigh what that update was. This is one area where at that place's notable difference betwixt the various foundries — Intel says it intends to push button to 7nm without EUV, but will deploy that tech at 5nm. TSMC has said something like, only Samsung remains resolute that it can innovate EUV at the 7nm node.

The question of who volition employ that capacity is less articulate. The number of companies deploying cutting-border procedure nodes has dwindled as design costs have exploded, and in that location's money to be fabricated in improving yields and performance at older process nodes, if anyone tin figure out how to exercise it.

It'll be interesting to meet how the TSMC / Samsung / GlobalFoundries lucifer-up shifts over the next 12 to 18 months. Samsung shell TSMC to the 14/16nm node and reaped substantial fiscal benefits from doing and so, while GF had to license Samsung tech rather than continue developing its ain 14XM. Now, GlobalFoundries says information technology'll bring its own 7nm to marketplace, while TSMC is gunning difficult for 10nm. With fewer companies designing on cutting-edge nodes, information technology means there's less room for mistake than ever.