However, as much as we want the Foxconn clocks to be real, the weight of evidence is stacking up against this aspect of the leak. To maintain meaningful battery life with those clocks, we'd need to be looking at a 16nm FinFET chip and maybe even a new revision of the ARM CPU cores, and the Chinese teardown of the processor confirms that the physical size of the chip is seemingly unchanged from existing 20nm Tegra X1 SoC.
The difference between 16nm and 20nm isn't actually about transistor size, but more about the 3D 'FinFET' transistors on the lower node. A 16nm SoC would be approximately the same size as the existing 20nm Tegra X1, but the difference here is that the teardown reveals a processor with seemingly identical dimensions. Also interesting is that the processor is surrounded by the same surface-mounted arrangement of what are likely to be decoupling capacitors, there to reduce noise on the power lines. The initial conclusion we have is that we are looking at a more lightly modified X1, still on the 20nm process, which ties in more closely with the clocks we reported - and indeed every non-Foxconn spec leak seen to date.
