Intel Corp (INTC)

[jfine]

was this reported here:

http://www.uforadio.com.tw/modules/newbb/print.php?form=2&forum=116&topic_id=164925&post_id=940635

Your article was written on Jan. 24, 2014. On Jan.23, Altera held their conference call. Here is part about 14nm.

Christopher B. Danely - JP Morgan Chase & Co, Research Division
Great. And then my follow-up question probably for John. John, I think you mentioned in the past that you've used 20-nanometer node as, I guess, transitional or a little bit smaller. Is that -- does that still hold? I guess what will be your view on 20-nanometers? What other can we expect in a bunch of other product families to come out at 20? Or were you just going to make the leap directly to the Intel at 14?
John P. Daane - Chairman, Chief Executive Officer and President
Chris, the reason we're doing only a midrange in 20 is, when we looked at the high-end, we originally had higher density members of the family planned and power consumption was just too high. And it's because we're using a planar process. And in many of the applications that we're in, the applications or -- they're not in applications or boxes which have cooling or fans. They're in things like radios or base stations or telecom systems or military where power is a very significant issue. And we found with the higher density or high-end members using 20-nanometer, the power consumption simply was too high for the applications and not usable. And so with the FinFET availability, the high-end really needs to be a FinFET, because that allows you to get the power consumption down for the much higher density fully featured devices. And so for us, we'll move it to '14. I would expect the competition will probably do something within what is called 16FF with the competition, which is more of a 20. And I think overall, because we're a generation ahead in process technology, that will allow us to have much higher density, much higher performance, as well as lower power, which is why we believe we really capture a vast majority of the high-end when we introduce the 14-nanometer. But again, the reason for only a midrange in 20 really came down to power consumption, and it just wasn't doable within a planar process.

Hans C. Mosesmann - Raymond James & Associates, Inc., Research Division
John, TSMC has recently kind of indicated that, at 16FF, the transistor density is not as poor as some had thought and it approaches the transistor density of Intel at '14 FinFET. Can you weigh in on that commentary? Maybe they're not as far behind as some had suggested?
John P. Daane - Chairman, Chief Executive Officer and President
So we used only publicly announced material when we talked about that. And so if you go back in time, there is material from TSMC that shows that the scaling or -- which is density, between 20 SoC and 16FF they're the same, there's no scaling. And obviously, we used the Intel material and then both on wafer prices being higher in 16 that came from both conference calls from Xilinx, as well TSMC. So we were completely using what is information provided by the vendors themselves. Now I did hear within the TSMC conference call that they commented that their 16FF may have scaling today and maybe old material was wrong, I can't comment on that. That could be true. There was a second element that they discussed which is the fact that the transistor is faster, therefore you're going to need fewer gates to achieve a design, and that will also mean the dye size is smaller. That would be true with any vendor of a FinFET. And so when you compare technologies, you're not going to give one vendor that benefit and not the other vendor that benefit. So you really need to pull that out and just look at the pure scaling from the design roles. And I think from that perspective, we see that the company that we're engaged with, Intel, is still a full generation ahead, density, performance, power. And we're absolutely convinced that we're going to have the best product for the high-end space.
particular time.

http://seekingalpha.com/article/1964781-alteras-ceo-discusses-q4-2013-results-earnings-call-transcript?part=single