Good news for those into shrinkage, as Samsung has rolled out a proof of concept 20nm chip based on the ARM Cortex SoC.  The process used includes High-k metal gates in addition to silicon on insulator, neither of which are new technology to CPU enthusiasts, however the process size is.  That lends credence to the rumour that Apple might be considering switching to an ARM architecture since they already use Samsung as a major provider and this would allow them to continue that relationship.  Then again GLOBALFOUNDRIES is looking at a partnership with ARM as well, so don’t count them out.  This should also give doubters of Intel’s scheduled process shrinkage some reassurance; if Samsung is already doing it then it is hard to doubt Intel’s abililty to do so.  SemiAccurate has the scoop here.

"Samsung Foundry, a subsidiary of Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. (SEO:005930) is currently testing its entire 20nm process flow and has just taped out a complete test processor that is based on an ARM Cortex-M0 processor that has been combined with ARM Artisan prototype libraries (both 12-track high performance and 9-track high density versions), custom memories, GPIO, and test structures."

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