Replies to post #144081 on Intel Corp (INTC)

[This Causes an Error]

What's interesting is that way back in 2013, when analysts noticed that Apple had packed ~1B transistors into an area of 102mm^2 on 28nm (at the time, Intel had released 22nm Haswell with 0.96B transistors in an area of ~130mm^2), BK had the following to say:

Vivek Arya - BoA/Merrill Lynch

Got it, and then as my follow-up. I wanted to just get a sense for how much of a leapfrog advantage will 14 nanometer provide in the mobile market because recently we saw very impressive benchmarks from Apple on their A7 SoC. I understand that they optimized a lot of things within their system that other customers may not be able to do but they were able to show very impressive benchmarks on 28 nanometer silicon. I am wondering as you think about your 14 nanometer products and the fact that you will really need to leapfrog to get major share in mobile how should we think about how big those advantages will be, like what the discussion with customer have been so far?

Brian Krzanich

Sure. So, let's make sure, I mean you just kind of used the generic word of benchmarks and there are lot of different ones that are out there. So I am not sure exactly which ones you are talking about. But if you just take a look at our products and all of our products are 64-bit. So we have had that for an extended period of time and products that we are shipping today are already 64-bit. If you take a look at things like transistor density and you compare, pardon the pun, apples-to-apples and you compare, say, the A7 to our Bay Trail, which is the high density 22 nanometer technology then our transistor density is higher or more dense than the A7 is. So it's a good product. I am not in any way trying to deface that, but we do see the Moore's Law advantage from 28 to 22 nanometer as an example, when you compare dense technologies to dense technologies.

http://seekingalpha.com/article/1747002-intels-ceo-discusses-q3-2013-results-earnings-call-transcript?part=single

He basically said, "we're denser, trust us" but Intel never actually disclosed a transistor count. Seems a little strange, wouldn't they want to show off how much denser their tech is with actual numbers?

Technically if you look at say SRAM cell sizes (both optimized for density), Intel 22nm was ahead of TSMC/Samsung 28nm, but maybe the advantage when translated into real product (which contained more than SRAMs) wasn't as large.

It would be nice if Intel were to publish more details on its SoC products.