Intel Claims its Next 10nm Chips Will Be a “Generation Ahead” of Samsung

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While the spotlight today is on the Samsung Galaxy S8 and S8 Plus, Intel is trying to one-up Samsung in an area where they fiercely compete. Intel’s fabrication process has been strong, but 10nm chips have seemingly taken the company longer than expected.

However, Intel claims that its long-delayed 10nm Cannon Lake chips will be a “full generation ahead” of rivals Samsung and TSMC. This jump comes due to the “hyper scaling” in their design, which makes for denser chips able to accommodate for twice as many transistors, yielding CPUs with 25 more percent performance and 45 percent lower power use than what’s found on current Kaby Lake designs. While chip traces are the same as their competitor’s, the better feature density ultimately produces higher transistor counts and smaller die sizes than Samsung’s chips. Intel even claims that this design will help them continue Moore’s Law for better increments in performance in future releases.

Samsung and Qualcomm had partnered to bring the 10nm Snapdragon 835 to fruition, a strong alliance that allows them to showcase their design and manufacturing experience. Samsung thus leaped ahead of Intel through its 10nm FinFet process, and at the same time, the company is facing strong competition in the desktop CPU space due to AMD releasing Ryzen, a very competitive package at an affordable price.

Intel is supposedly planning to ride its 10nm chips for three years while keeping up with Moore’s Law, until they scale down to 7nm technology. The additional pressure put forth by the partnerships and releases its competition enjoyed in 2017 are certainly applying pressure here, which means Intel is likely to double down on its efforts to produce efficient chip designs, and perhaps even make its products more affordable as well. Either way, all of this competition is certainly benefiting us consumers in both the mobile and desktop/laptop space, so it’ll be interesting to see where these companies take our devices’ chips in 2017 and beyond.