Despite my personal obsession with graphene, a miracle material that is to my disappointment going to take almost a decade to make it to mainstream chips, here at Fudzilla we always try to find when are the chips on the next node going to hit the market.

When a company shrinks a chip from 40nm to 28nm this usually means a significant increase in transistor count, usually higher than 30 percent and all this at lower power. To put things in perspective, this means that in the same die size, you can put significantly more transistors, increase the clock of the processor or SoC, and all this with even lower voltage.

This is why 20nm will be an important milestone for the ARM alliance, as it will bring much faster chips, better graphics at lower power helping the industry player to increase the battery life of our devices. Intel will ship 14nm SoCs and processors in 2H 2014 and this is the time when we expect to see 20nm high performance chips from TSMC. Globalfoundries has also promised to be out with 20nm in 2014 but the dominant force in high performance SoC manufacturing is TSMC.

With this in mind, the 2014 Snapdragon line-up and Tegra 5 are both 28nm chips. The same applies to next generation Exynos parts, as Samsung was relatively late to 28nm. And Apple? We’re not sure yet.