They call it their 12LP process, based on 14LP. But they compare the specs to industry-“standard” 16-nm processes, with up to 15% denser circuits and 10% less power than 16 nm.
And is Intel doing any better?
I mean does anyone remember last time when Intel actually had new CPU made on new process node which wasn't just improvement/tweak of existing node?
I certainly don't remember anymore how many years ago that happened.
It's just that actually major improvements to manufacturing process have become exponentially harder.
And it's becoming hard to remember when Intel last time actually improved CPU architecturally instead of minor tweaks.
Kaby Lake was pretty much carbon copy of Skylake with clock speed tweaks.
And Coffee Lake is Kaby Lake with more cores.
And still Intel hasn't even managed to get out full Coffee Lake/"8th" gen product lineup with also more affordable motherboards:
https://www.extremetech.com/computi...ew-high-end-cascade-lake-x-debuting-next-year
Though also single thread performance increase is becoming constantly harder:
Increasing transistor budget doesn't help when pretty much all important instructions can already be processed in single clock cycle.
15-20 years ago CPUs needed multiple clock cycles for many instructions and addiotional transistors allowed decreasing that.
And adding completely new instructions/hardware for them doesn't help any with existing code...
While increasing complexity and internal "bureaucracy" of CPU and hence is balancing with power consumption.
(like Intel's completely off the TDP charts AVX power consumption)
While actual CPU core design improvements are expected only from next year's Zen2 improvements to Infinity Fabric and memory controller have been on expectation list of Zen+.
And this kind memory latency improvements would be certainly very good thing for real world performance:
https://www.techpowerup.com/242119/first-leaked-benchmarks-of-amds-ryzen-7-2000-processor
In multithreaded load single thread stopping for waiting data doesn't affect that much overall performance...
But for single thread performance memory latencies are always critical.
So if Zen+ can also get XFR clock to near 4.4GHz it would do nice job in decreasing Intel's advantage in games.
Also there's upgrade path of Zen2 and also it's tweak being compatible with AM4 socket.
Unlike Intel giving mid finger for user in upgradeability.