The competition of chip maker is expected to get more fierce very soon. Qualcomm, NVidia and Samsung are going to get some tough competition from TSMC and GlobalFoundries with a new 20nm mobile chip to be produced in 2014.
Currently, the highest speed achieved by mobile processors is 2.3 GHz in the Snapdragon 800 from Qualcomm or the Tegra 4i from NVidia (which is set to arrive late this year or early next) and that’s limited by the manufacturing process of 28nm.[more…]
According to TSMC, by using the 20nm process, it can achieve 30 percent more speed with 25 percent less power, that means a clock speed of about 3 GHz could be reached. Nvidia and Qualcomm are known to be working on the same or better achievement also, they just haven’t announced anything.
The process could also help to solve the other big issue with mobile computing these days, battery life. Current chips are power consuming, making it difficult for a smartphone to stay alive for more than 10 or 15 hours or so before needing an outlet. An increment of 25% battery life could definitely helps a lot in prolonging the battery life.
Things won’t stop here, in the future we can look forward to 14nm chips, which should destroy everything else, current benchmarks will probably be useless against those speeds and Intel should get its Atom line in 14nm by the end of 2014, the same size AMD could get with GlobalFoundries.
Finally, consumers are going to be the winners as our phones will get much faster and will last longer.
