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posted by martyb on Wednesday August 16 2017, @04:43AM   Printer-friendly
from the double-plus-good dept.

Intel will announce its Coffee Lake processors on August 21. They will be the last generation of 14nm(++) Core processors before 10nm Cannon Lake and Ice Lake, which is described as using a "10nm+" process:

In an unusual move for Intel, the chip giant has ever so slightly taken the wraps off of one of their future generation Core architectures. Basic information on the Ice Lake architecture has been published over on Intel's codename decoder, officially confirming for the first time the existence of the architecture and that it will be made on Intel's 10nm+ process.

The Ice Lake processor family is a successor to the 8th generation Intel® Core™ processor family. These processors utilize Intel's industry-leading 10 nm+ process technology.

This is an unexpected development as the company has yet to formally detail (let alone launch) the first 10nm Core architecture – Cannon Lake – and it's rare these days for Intel to talk more than a generation ahead in CPU architectures. Equally as interesting is the fact that Intel is calling Ice Lake the successor to their upcoming 8th generation Coffee Lake processors, which codename bingo aside, throws some confusion on where the 14nm Coffee Lake and 10nm Cannon Lake will eventually stand.

[...] Working purely on lithographic nomenclature, Intel has three processes on 14nm: 14, 14+, and 14++. As shown to everyone at Intel's Technology Manufacturing Day a couple of months ago, these will be followed by a trio of 10nm processes: 10nm, 10nm+ (10+), and 10++.

Tick Tock has given way to plus signs everywhere.

Coffee Lake will include the first mainstream 6-core chips from Intel, including the Intel Core i5-8600K and i7-8700K.

Also at Tom's Hardware.


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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday August 16 2017, @10:10AM (3 children)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Wednesday August 16 2017, @10:10AM (#554640) Journal

    The processes are worked on for years before they hit the market. If 10nm, 7nm, and 5nm were nonviable, we would know it by now. The bigger problem is getting the EUV tools working good enough to make the economics viable.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 16 2017, @10:35AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 16 2017, @10:35AM (#554647)

    Takes every facet of degradation into account.

    Intel has had a number of engineering failures (as has AMD, although they have a lot more general QC failures (IE random chip is faulty), whereas Intel's are either errata (logic errors/races), or engineering failures, like those SATA controllers on that one southbridge a few years back that would erode the SATA traces/transistors until it got too noisy to communicate/went dark.)

    Personally, while I am fine with later generation stuff for portables (being generally less reliable, and more sensitive to power improvements.), I had mostly stabilitized on 45->28 nm processors, with no plans to upgrade so long as I can find a web browser and system kernel that will run on them and have nominally up to date security patches. Given that anything post-32nm has management engine issues, firmware signing, backdoors, etc, it is not a huge loss. Especially now that most games have moved to unity or fully drm'd platforms (xbox, ps4) and run like buggy pieces of shit anyways.

  • (Score: 2) by acid andy on Wednesday August 16 2017, @01:04PM (1 child)

    by acid andy (1683) on Wednesday August 16 2017, @01:04PM (#554690) Homepage Journal

    Oh I'm sure it's economically viable. There aren't many atoms in the transistors of the computers most of us are already using, so it clearly mostly works. I just find the physics of it somewhat mind boggling. If you pick up an object or rub it, or drop it, I would expect that a non zero number of molecules would part company from the surface of that object or at least change their alignment. I'm trying to find where my intuition fails me here. If it was a silicon crystal, would a non zero number of molecules still be dislodged each time it was picked up, rubbed or dropped (I actually suspect not)? If so, what about the molecules inside the object, beneath it's surface? Maybe it's extremely rare for them to become misaligned unless an object is subject to unusual stress, heat, etc.

    Can any physicists, chemists or material scientists answer this? If not, a little more of the respect I used to have for soylent will ebb away. : (

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    • (Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday August 16 2017, @01:38PM

      by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Wednesday August 16 2017, @01:38PM (#554705) Journal

      Oh I'm sure it's economically viable.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock%27s_law [wikipedia.org]

      Rock's law or Moore's second law, named for Arthur Rock or Gordon Moore, says that the cost of a semiconductor chip fabrication plant doubles every four years. As of 2015, the price had already reached about 14 billion US dollars.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_ultraviolet_lithography [wikipedia.org]

      The deployment of EUVL for volume manufacturing has been delayed for a decade, though the forecasts for deployment had timelines of 2–5 years. Deployment was targeted in 2007 (5 years after the forecast was made in 2002), in 2009 (5 years after the forecast), in 2012–2013 (3–4 years), in 2013–2015 (2–4 years), in 2016–2017 (2–3 years), and in 2018–2020 (2–4 years after the forecasts). However, deployment could be delayed further.

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