sour grapes marketing
Intel's apologists love to repeat the mantra that size isn't everything ("Intel's 10nm is better than TSMC's 7nm!"). This is a variant of the same thing we saw in x86 processors many years ago when Cyrix, who had some interesting architectural features but were unable to match Intel clock-for-clock, came up with the ill-fated "Performance Rating". The PR was some multiple of their actual clock rate intended by marketing types to be compared with others' clock frequencies. Cyrix weren't the only ones to do this; AMD dabbled and so did others. Of them all, only AMD are still in business and they've been transparent about their speeds and feeds for many years now.
It's absolutely true that power, performance, and price are what actually matter. And that's why this claim simply doesn't hold water: Intel still can't produce enough "Intel 10nm" parts to meet demand, and neither those nor the "Intel 14nm" parts that make up the bulk of their offerings are even remotely competitive. Yields on the 10nm process are terrible, requiring their monolithic wafers to be heavily binned and resulting in core counts roughly half the competition's. Despite having fewer cores and tiny caches, those processors dissipate more power than both AMD's and Ampere's. Rounding out the trifecta, the top of the line Xeon lists for 20-50% more than AMD's superior 7742 and 7763. Cascade Lake wasn't competitive with Naples, even while AMD shipped Rome. Ice Lake isn't competitive with Rome, even as AMD ship Milan. Intel are losing on every imaginable metric, even the niche metrics they've relied upon in trying to gloss over their failure. Whether they're losing because "Intel 10nm" really isn't better than "TSMC 7nm" is immaterial, but one can't support the "process size doesn't matter" argument with price, performance, or power figures. All three suggest that process matters and TSMC's is probably quite a bit better. That's further bolstered by the fact that Ampere, using the same TSMC process as AMD to build processors of an entirely different ISA, are coming out with even higher core counts than AMD (to be expected, honestly, given the ISA differences) and similar performance figures at the same power levels as AMD. In other words, both the leading large-processor manufacturers using TSMC's process are kicking the snot out of Intel on every metric.
Sour grapes marketing doesn't work. People know that 7nm is better than 10nm, and if there were any doubt about it, they can look at the things that do matter and see that there is, if not a causal relationship they can understand physically, at least an overwhelming correlation. Please stop propagating this nonsense. If Intel want to tell us that nominal process node doesn't matter, they're welcome to prove it by delivering a competitive product on their "in some ways better" process. They've been trying to do just that for more than 5 years now and not only haven't caught up but continue to lose ground . Maybe Intel 7nm -- if they ever get it working -- will deliver better processors than TSMC 5nm, but history suggests it probably won't, and in the meantime I cringe every time I read this nonsense. The grapes are delicious; don't deprive yourself.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
