Intel Corp (INTC)

[VeeCee]

Intel needs to counter the claims made in this article. Daniel Nenni is using false claim to put Intel down. Even analyst have started using his article to come to the same conclusion.
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http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily/2014/09/17/intel-is-apples-a8-exposes-shortcomings-says-semi-advisors/

3:44 PM ET
Intel: Apple’s ‘A8' Chip Exposes Shortcomings, Says Semi Advisors
By Tiernan Ray

Is Apple (AAPL) beating Intel (INTC) at the latest chip technology?

In some ways, yes, says Robert Maire of boutique research firm Semiconductor Advisors.

In a note out late yesterday, Maire follows up on some positive observations about Apple’s “A8” chip, introduced last week along with its iPhone 6 models.

In an initial note published on Friday, Maire observed that Apple’s stated specification of 2 billion transistors in the A1is more than the 1.4 billion transistors in Intel’s “Haswell” desktop chip.

He also notes Apple’s claim of a 25% performance improvement over its A7 chip in the iPhone 5S, a claim of 50% GPU performance increase, and a claim of the A8 being “50% more power efficient.”

Observed Maire, “This is more than double the normal gain of 15-20% expected from a shrink to 20nm technology that A8 is based on.”

“This suggests that Apple made some significant design improvements on top of just the hardware shrink.”

Maire, noting that such processors could take over some “light” application tasks in a notebook like the MacBook Air, wondered “When will Apple start building its own laptop and desktop processors?”

While he doesn’t think Intel will lose Apple’s desktop and laptop business “anytime soon,” he opined, “It should also be viewed as a threat to Intels entry into the tablet and smartphone market. Apple has set a very high bar in performance that it seems would be very difficult for Intel to match on a price/performance basis without substantial subsidies (contra revenue…).”

In today’s note, Maire writes that after doing more “digging,” he has come to the view that Intel is not getting as much out of its latest chip process technology, in particular, the so-called TriGate 3-D transistors relative to the progress Apple has made with with countract foundry Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSM) for the A8:

In doing the math, the general assumption would be that Intel should have many more transistors per square inch using both FinFET and 16/14nm technology versus Apple’s Planar 20nm technology but surprisingly that is not the case. 16/14nm should by itself offer much better transistor density. The advantage of FinFET over planar is building the transistors vertically rather than horizontally so as to squeeze more in per square inch. This would imply that Intel’s Broadwell should have a huge advantage in transistor density based on these two “superior” technologies …but surprisingly that is not the case. Apple could have stacked the deck a little bit with a larger cache size which would account for some of the transistor density increase but its still hard to explain it all away. At the very least its clear that FinFET though advantageous, is not the be all end all nirvana. Is all the grief, aggravation and heartache that Intel went through, with yield issues worth it to get a device that isn’t much better than an Apple A8 at 20nm planar? Could it be that Intel’s basic design and architectural capability is lacking such that the dual advantages of 16/14nm coupled with FinFET barely keep it ahead? Interesting questions to ask of Intel….we wonder what the response would be….

I should note that Maire’s note references third parties such as a piece published Sunday by Daniel Nenni of SemiWiki.

Update: After I wrote into to Maire to qualify the A8/Broadwell comparison, Maire replied that the main Intel part for comparison in this case is the “Core M, Broadwell-Y,” which has upwards of 1.3 billion to 1.4 billion transistors in a dual-core configuration. Maire observes that it’s possible the A8 “has a larger cache” than the Broadwell part, “but that still does not account for the large difference” in transistor density, he says.