PC-Ready Samsung Exynos 5 Aims to Achieve ARM Dominance

From DailyTech: Intel Corp. (INTC) has some nifty fab-related tricks up its sleeve like its almost-here 22 nm die-shrink and its leakage-fighting (current leakage, that is) 3D FinFET transistors. Still, it has to be a bit nervous in the face of its biggest competition in the last couple decades -- an onslaught of power-efficient ARM architecture CPUs.

Thus far we'd heard about Snapdragon 4, Qualcomm Inc.'s (QCOM) system-on-a-chip that's expected to lead ARM's push into the CPU space. Now fresh details have leaked about a key rival design -- the Exynos 5 SoC from Samsung Electronics Comp., Ltd. (KS:005930).

Exynos 5, according to a company poster photographed by Semiaccurate, will be built on Samsung's 32 nm process. Compared to Qualcomm's 28 nm SoCs, manufactured by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Comp., Ltd. (TPE:2330), one might expect these chips to be inherently bigger and less power-efficient due to the larger feature size.

However, Samsung's chip is second-generation 32 nm silicon as it was the only ARM chipmaker to reach the node in 2011. And TSMC is reportedly having serious issues with its 28 nm process, causing it to suspend 28 nm production in mid-February [Source: Semiaccurate], a delay that sheds some light on the curious clock-speed drops in the latest generation of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) and NVIDIA Corp. (NVDA) GPUs (both companies rely on TSMC for their GPU chipmaking).

In other words Samsung High-K Metal Gate (HKMG) doesn't exactly push the die-shrink envelope, but it's far more proven and lower risk than the TSMC process used by Qualcomm.

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