Stefan Mileschin

Too much like hard work

The dark satanic rumour mill has been manufacturing a hell on earth yarn claiming that Samsung was negotiating with Chipzilla to produce its 14nm CPUs.

The rumours started when the Korean outlet SE Daily claimed that Intel and Samsung were in negotiations for production of Intel's 14nm Rocket Lake processors in 2021, citing trade war pressures and Intel's production capacity constraints (amidst record demand) that led to a shortage of 14nm processors.

However, Tom's Hardware deep throats have confirmed that processors are not on the negotiating table. Instead, the talks centre around simpler devices, likely chipsets, on an unspecified node.

The report was a little flawed given Chipzilla’s multi-year design cycles for large processors and the fact Intel's IP would have to pass on a lot of its secret sauce to Samsung.

Intel is now designing new microarchitectures which are portable between nodes. That will allow the company to move forward even if it encounters roadblocks on its path to smaller transistors. The Sunny Cove microarchitecture is the first new design that can be used on multiple nodes, but Intel has stated the new core will debut on the 10nm node.

If Samsung was to produce 14nm wafers it would have to use Intel's process technology, which is extremely unlikely.

Intel has used TSMC in the past but only for simple designs, like Atom processors and chipsets.

https://fudzilla.com/news/pc-hardwar...ake-to-samsung