Intel delays 10nm Cannon Lake processors, again, until late 2019

[rm999]

It's fun to dig up old predictions of where we'd be today. Here's an article from 2002: https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1176510

>Moore's Law scales to at least 9nm: technologist

>It'll be at least a human generation before Moore's Law begins to run out of gas at around the 9nm and even then it may thrive, TSMC's chief technologist said Tuesday (March 12). Calvin Chenming Hu told an audience at the annual Semico Summit conference here that the 9nm node "can be ready more or less on time, in 2028 according to long-term forecasts or 2024 according to the 2002 (industry roadmap)."

Intel is off by 4-5 years according to their initial estimates (in 2011) of hitting 10nm, but they are 5-10 years ahead of where TSMC thought we would be 15+ years ago. TSMC was manufacturing at 10nm last year, incidentally (Qualcomm's Snapdragon 835).

[darkmighty]

As far as I hear from industry specialists (but don't know first hand), the 'node' terms have become little more than marketing. I believe in 2002 it was still a useful metric of feature size, hence why 9nm would be still ahead.

[tedsanders]

Bad predictions go in both directions. In 2000, Intel was saying that within five to ten years CPUs would run at 10 GHz and be made with EUV lithography. 18 years later and 10 GHz never came close to happening. EUV didn't happen either, though we may finally be close.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2000/12/11/intel_plans_1500_10...

https://www.anandtech.com/show/680/6

[acchow]

Isn't comparing TSMC to Intel process nodes like comparing apples to oranges?

[ksec]

>Intel is off by 4-5 years according to their initial estimates (in 2011) of hitting 10nm

In 2011 they were expecting 10nm in 2016. So it was not really off by 4 - 5 years. More like 3 - 4 years.

>TSMC's chief technologist said Tuesday (March 12).

Somewhere along the line TSMC's node naming no longer follows Intel's node naming. So that 9nm they mention is more like today's TSMC 5nm. So if you look at 2024 for TSMC's 5nm it isn't too far off. TSMC is planning to have 5nm in 2020. The 4 years speed up has been from heavy investment of Mobile SoC and industry scales changes that were not foreseen at the time.

[deepnotderp]

Note that the effective gate length on an Intel "10nm" finfet is 18nm.

[redtuesday]

There are even rumors that Intel delayed the much more important Xeons to 2020, which could give AMD a 1 year head start with Zen2 on 7nm in the server space (comparable to Intels 10 nm).

Copy paste from my posting yesterday:

EDIT: it seems the twitter post got deleted.

EDIT2: anandtech still has the pictures: https://www.anandtech.com/show/13119/intels-xeon-scalable-ro...

> If the rumor [0] that Intel's first 10nm server chip will only release mid 2020 is true, then AMD's shares will probably skyrocket again if they truly can release their Zen 2 server CPU mid 2019 (on 7nm which is comparable to Intel's 10nm).

[0] https://twitter.com/david_schor/status/1022142835989118977

[AceJohnny2]

It used to be that Intel was undisputed king of the silicon race. It's kind of shocking that they've fallen so far behind.

TSMC is already doing 7nm mass production right now:

https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20180622PD204.html

(arguably, what they call "7nm" isn't quite that, but still...)

[seiferteric]

Every single time an article comes up about this someone says this, and every single time someone refutes this saying that 7nm is a lie. Intel 10nm is supposed to be more dense than TSMC 7nm (if they ever get there).

[hinkley]

The consensus the last time there was a delay was that TSMC's 7nm process is roughly comparable to Intel's 10nm process.

They're still ahead, but only until Intel finally ships 10nm.

I'm not sure how much this affects the industry in general, but I bet there are some interesting Intel vs Arm discussions being fueled in Apple's product roadmap meetings.

[agumonkey]

I think intel tried to go too deep at once thinking it had time to do so and now that others are reducing the distance bit by bit it looks like they're late

[Valmar]

7 nm... 10 nm... all marketing bullshit, at the end of the day. Only way to know is compare the raw, different aspects of nodes.

[gnusci]

Well they have a lot of things to care of before to release the next CPU

https://www.intel.ca/content/www/ca/en/support/articles/0000...

In particular security issues related to the IME:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine

[throwaway77384]

I hate that thing more than anything else in computing.

Windows 10 spying pales in comparison to the theoretical capabilities of the ME.

There was this brief campaign to try to get AMD to let users control or disable their ME equivalent, but it never went anywhere.

I would kill for a modern computing platform without this crap built in. Soon forced DRM will go through it as well.

It's absolutely shocking to see how much control people (and even companies) have surrendered to Intel.

I'd recommend only buying libre / coreboot compatible hardware (or librem, or system76 systems) until users can gain more control over the Intel ME.

[chx]

Note this article is guessing and it's very likely they are guesssing wrong.

https://seekingalpha.com/article/4190920-intel-intc-q2-2018-... what was actually said is this:

> we continue to make progress on 10-nanometer. Yields are improving consistent with the timeline we shared in April, and we expect systems on shelves for the 2019 holiday season.

This article guesses this to mean Cannon Lake.

In reality, it almost surely means Ice Lake.

[lucian]

The secret behind 10nm technology:

https://www.asml.com/press/press-releases/earnings-growth-co...

“Outlook For the third-quarter of 2018, ASML expects net sales between EUR 2.7 billion and EUR 2.8 billion, a gross margin between 47 percent and 48 percent. R&D costs of about EUR 395 million, SG&A costs of about EUR 120 million. Our target effective annualized tax rate is around 14 percent.”

[ksec]

I don't believe ASML is holding up the Intel 10nm. It was a problem in Intel's own making. Their EUV equipment are mostly related Samsung 7nm, GF 7nm, and TSMC 7nm+.

[crunchlibrarian]

It's so strange how this is all playing out almost exactly like the Athlon XP days except with lots of cores and clouds.

[thinkythought]

Does anyone believe there's another core duo type massive leap out there to even be had this time around though? AMD is going to slowly pull a bit ahead of intel, especially in bang for buck, but i don't see how they can catch back up.

As it is, last time intel jumped ahead it was by repackaging and souping up an a mobile arch that in and of itself was based on the old pentium 3 arch. They can't really mine the parts bin that way this time around either.

[fnord77]

except ARM is nearly a viable competitor, too now.

Windows 10 ARM laptops are already shipping.

[mandelbulb]

From the original article:

>In the second-quarter results, Intel said that its 10-nanometer yields are "on track" with systems on the market in the second half of 2019. Krzanich's previous perspective wasn't specific on whether they would arrive in the first half of next year or in the second half. On the conference call with analysts on Thursday, Swan was more specific and said products would be on shelves in time for the holiday season.

>Murthy Renduchintala, group president of the technology, systems architecture and client group, said on the call that the products that will become available in 2019 are client computing products, whereas products for data center use will come "shortly after." The stock fell further after those comments but later rebounded as executives talked about ongoing research and development for next-generation 7-nanometer technology.

[ksec]

>Murthy Renduchintala, group president of the technology, systems architecture and client group, said on the call that the products that will become available in 2019 are client computing products,

This sounds to me like Apple telling Intel. We plan to ship new MacBook, MacBook Pro, iMac and Mac Pro after 2019 Keynote. If you don't deliver we will kick all of Intel's product out of our roadmap. Including the modem business, which although offer no profits value but lots of investor are looking at it.

[piinbinary]

I wonder how cloud computing providers feel about this. On the one hand, competition between Intel and AMD for the cloud probably means cheaper chips for them. On the other hand, they were probably looking forward to the power savings from Intel's 10nm chips.

[rbanffy]

At the volumes they buy, whatever they pay is much different and bears little relationship with what we pay. The prices to beat are acquisition + energy + real estate / performance over product lifetime.

[fnord77]

Azure has started using ARM chips with Windows Server...

[snarfy]

And AMD's stock is up $3

[darpa_escapee]

Kicking myself for getting out at $17. Oh well, it was a good run, I've been holding it since it was $4.

[eecsninja]

Cry me a river. I'm still waiting for the day when our productivity scales with computing power (or node size). [1]

Until then, the drive toward smaller/faster/whatever-other-superlatives CPU's is just people running on a hamster wheel.

[1] https://foundersfund.com/the-future/#/artificial-intelligenc...

[theshadowknows]

Could someone ELI5 why smaller/denser feature size and layouts is the way we achieve higher and higher speeds? Is it mainly about efficiency and heat?

[Fej]

Where does Intel get their codenames from?

[deepnotderp]

Landmarks in Oregon, the design team is based in Oregon and gets to choose the names.

[jandrese]

Nearby geological features.

[jandrese]

AMD be like "C'mon Intel, you're making this too easy."

[JudasGoat]

Smart phone profit paid the "lion share" of 7nm development. That makes AMD's selling of it's fabs look like a brilliant business move. At the time IIRC AMD sold them in desperation to stay afloat. So maybe just a "lucky" turn for AMD.

[mepian]

I wonder what Jim Keller has to say about this, wasn't he hired to oversee the introduction of the 10nm manufacturing process?

[kinghajj]

I don't think so, Keller's specialty is microarchitecture, not semiconductor node processes.

[joeblau]

The end is nigh Intel. Just like Apple switched to Intel Power PC’s were not upgrading, so will Apple switch to ARM.