引用:

For now, it seems like the three leaders in logic manufacturing, IBM/Global Foundries, Intel and TSMC, are all set to continue pursuing Moore’s Law. Intel and TSMC have the volumes and revenues to justify further investment, while IBM and Global Foundries have the financial resources to continue development and potentially grow their volumes to match. While Samsung has indicated they will aggressively seek foundry business, their R&D is closely tied to IBM’s and it is not obvious that their success in DRAM will translate into many logic customers.

A more subtle question is the pacing. Historically speaking, Intel was 12-15 months ahead of AMD and IBM in manufacturing. At 32nm, this lead has increased to 18 months with respect to Global Foundries and AMD. It is entirely unclear whether this is a long term trend, or merely an artifact of IBM’s ill-fated choice of a gate-first process technology. On one hand, Global Foundries’ benchmark is TSMC – which is the leader of the foundry industry and their chief competitor. But IBM’s server CPUs and systems clearly compete with Intel’s. The 22nm node will confirm whether TSMC and IBM/Global Foundries can keep apace with Intel, but those disclosures are unlikely to happen until later this year at VLSI or IEDM 2011.