Chips are made out of hundred of millions, sometimes over one billion, tiny little switches called transistors. Your computer/smartphone/tablet has been getting faster and faster each and every product cycle because said transistors are getting smaller and smaller. The smaller the transistor, the less heat it puts out, which means you can clock it faster. Today’s state of the art, for smartphones and tablets, is 28 nanometer. The first chip that used this advanced process was the Snapdragon S4. We’re approaching the two year birthday of the 28 nanometer process, so what’s next?
Many people, myself included, thought 20 nanometer would be the next logical evolution. We went from 65 nanometer to 45 nanometer to 28 nanometer, so a jump down to 20 nanometers seems reasonable, right?. Samsung was going to go down the 20 nanometer path, but according to the Korean publication DDaily, they’ve changed their minds. They’re going to jump one full generation ahead to 14 nanometers, and chips using those transistors should be in phones on store shelves during the first half of next year. In fact, they say the Galaxy S5 will have such a chip, and it’ll be made up of multiple ARM Cortex A53 and A57 cores. Is this even possible? Right now the leader of chip manufacturing technology is undoubtably Intel. They’re pumping out 22 nanometer Haswell chips. The successor to Haswell is called Broadwell, and it’s going to be built using 14 nanometer transistors, but no one knows when it’ll start shipping. Can Samsung beat Intel to 14 nanometers? If so, that would be unprecedented.
