Samsung beats Intel and TSMC to major chipmaking tech that'll one day power our gaming PCs

pcgamer.com:

Samsung is the first chipmaker to roll out a brand new technology, one which will eventually be used by all major chipmakers and find its way into all manner of computer chips, including those from Intel, Nvidia, and AMD. It's called gate-all-around (GAA), and it changes the way in which transistors, the building blocks of all our tech products, will be made.

GAA (sometimes referred to as GAAFET) is what will replace FinFET technology that is in widespread use today. It's a new technology that uses a gate wrapped around multiple transistor channels. That's quite a bit different to FinFET, which uses a single fin as a channel with a gate connected on three sides.

Why is that significant? GAA essentially enables stacking of multiple channels on top of one another; more channels, greater scaling capacity. That's why GAA is so key to extremely compact process nodes such as 3nm and 2nm. The other thing is that GAAFet channels can be adjusted in width, from wires to sheets, which can again help with shrinking down with each node and increasing performance.

Samsung calls its GAA technology «Multi-Bridge-Channel FET», or MBCFET for short, and its new 3nm process node with this new MBCFET technology is now in the initial production stage. This new MBCFET technology «defies the performance limitations of FinFET, improving power efficiency by reducing the supply voltage level, while also enhancing performance by increasing drive current capability,» says Samsung.

The first generation 3nm process node out of Samsung aims to achieve a 45% reduction in power consumption, 23% faster performance, and take up 16% less space than its current 5nm process. From there, Samsung hopes to build chips with its second generation 3nm process that