Samsung announces 10nm S-RAM for smaller mobile chips, Intel lags behind

Samsung Galaxy S6
Future Galaxy phones will doubtless benefit from this tech

Samsung has just announced the development of S-RAM modules based on 10nm FinFET tech, meaning smaller SoCs with obvious benefits for smartphones.

The news will be something of a wake-up call for Samsung's rivals, because as ETnews reports, the development of 10-nanometre FinFET S-RAM means the company is ahead of not just TSMC, but also the chip giant Intel (the latter has pushed its 10nm schedule back a year from 2016 to 2017 due to production costs).

Samsung's new S-RAM modules will be used for processor cache, and the new 10nm FinFET efforts are apparently 37.5% smaller than 14nm S-RAM. We are talking better performance and lower power draw, which should hopefully mean some nice gains on the battery longevity front – which are always welcome.

Samsung reckons that it will be ready for mass production of the 10nm memory modules by 2017, and early on in the year for that matter. We'll just have to wait and see if that target becomes a reality…

Aggressive growth

Samsung is certainly pushing hard on chip development, and indeed in September, opened a new HQ in Silicon Valley to push forward with research and development in terms of semiconductors, as well as displays.

At the opening of the new headquarters, Oh-Hyun Kwon, Vice Chairman and CEO of Samsung Electronics, noted that the firm is "laying the groundwork for a more aggressive pace of growth over the next several decades."

Hopefully that aggression will see rivals spurred on further, and greater progress being made across the whole industry.

Via: G for Games

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).