Two of the most important American semiconductor companies disagree about the pace and form of future chip advancements.
One of Intel's core corporate goals under Gelsinger is to get back to "performance leadership," which means that its chips need to be as fast and efficient as chips made by rivals at third-party foundries. Intel wants to advance its manufacturing five "nodes," or five transistor sizes, in four years to catch up, while introducing a new node with smaller transistors historically takes two years.
But size has its limitations, because at some point transistors get so small that they run into a physics problem. On Tuesday, Gelsinger called that a "day of reckoning." "We aspire from today, about 100 billion transistors on a single package. By the end of the decade, a trillion transistors in a single package," Gelsinger said, "We are on schedule."Nvidia's newest processors are manufactured by TSMC, which currently has the most advanced semiconductor manufacturing techniques and is the world's largest chipmaker. Nvidia designs chips but worries less about the manufacturing side.