After years of delay in its transition to 10 nm, the American giant Intel intends to accelerate its migration to new engraving processes. The roadmap thus provides for the transition to Intel 4, a name that does not hide a 4 nm node, but rather the 7 nm which was mentioned before and which will mark the arrival of EUV lithography at the foundry (Intel 7 corresponding to 10 nm, just to make things unnecessarily complex).
Taking advantage of the 2022 IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) Symposium on VLSI technologies, Intel has delivered some information on Intel 4, the most important being undoubtedly the announcement of a doubling of the number of transistors with equal surface . In figures, on 1 mm², Intel cases about 80 million transistors with the Intel 7 process and will burn 160 million with Intel 4.
The adoption of an EUV etching technique will allow Intel to improve the production efficiency of its wafers with a reduction in manufacturing steps, but also in the number of masks used. Without the process change, burning these new processors would require 30% more masks, but moving to Intel 4 will require 20% fewer masks.
On the performance side, the density twice as high will allow a priori Intel to propose a gain of around 20%. According to its internal tests, with a fixed voltage of 0.65 V, Intel measures a performance gain of 21.5% at equal frequency on Intel 4 compared to Intel 7. And on tests at iso frequency (2.1 GHz ), the founder was able to measure a gain in energy consumption of around 40%.