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Intel: EUV-Enabled 7nm Process Tech is on Track
Originally planned to enter mass production in the second half of 2016, Intel's 10nm process technology is still barely used by the company today. Currently the process is used to produce just a handful of CPUs, ahead of an expected ramp to high-volume manufacturing (HVM) only later in 2019. Without a doubt, Intel suffered delays on its 10nm process by several years, significantly impacting the company's product lineup and its business.
Now, as it turns out, Intel's 10nm may be a short-living node as the company's 7nm tech is on-track for introduction in accordance with its original schedule.
For a number of times Intel said that it set too aggressive scaling/transistor density targets for its 10nm fabrication process, which is why its development ran into problems. Intel's 10nm manufacturing tech relies exclusively on deep ultraviolet lithography (DUVL) with lasers operating on a 193 nm wavelength. To enable the fine feature sizes that Intel set out to achieve on 10nm, the process had to make heavy usage of mutli-patterning. According to Intel, a problem of the process was precisely its heavy usage of multipatterning (quad-patterning to be more exact).
By contrast, Intel's 7nm production tech will use extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUVL) with laser wavelength of 13.5 nm for select layers, reducing use of multipatterning for certain metal layers and therefore simplifying production and shortening cycle times. As it appears, the 7nm fabrication process had been in development separately from the 10nm tech and by a different team. As a result, its development is well underway and is projected to enter HVM in accordance with Intel's unannounced roadmap, the company says.
Meanwhile, an unconfirmed leak of AMD's Ryzen 3000 lineup shows a 12-core CPU at $300 and a 16-core CPU at $450.
Previously: Intel Delays Mass Production Of 10 nm CPUs To 2019
Intel Releases Open Letter in Attempt to Address Shortage of "14nm" Processors and "10nm" Delays
Intel Denies that It Will Cancel or Skip its "10nm" Process
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Friday December 07 2018, @01:28AM (2 children)
From tradeshows for the past few years. They mean it this time.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 07 2018, @02:21AM
A lone man was walking down the sidewalk early in the morning. The man was rubbing his chin with his fingers, as though he were deeply contemplating a certain matter. Indeed, this man - Rickerson - was contemplating something, and that something was of the utmost importance: Rape.
How many women and children should Rickerson rape today? It was a difficult question to answer. Even men's rights philosophers - who studied issues such as this for their entire lives - would be at a loss as to what the answer was. Suddenly, and without warning, the answer came to him; it was deceptively simple and yet seemingly unfathomable. All of them. Why not simply rape all of them? Rickerson knew. Rickerson knew that he stumbled upon a world-changing insight, and so he immediately moved to contact the world's top science organizations.
The revolutionary knowledge spread throughout the world like wildfire. "Rape them all!" became a common expression. Several fields of science - chemistry, physics, psychology, computer science, and more - changed almost completely overnight to the point where they no longer resembled their former selves. In addition, rape rates rose to the maximum possible extent. As a result, men all over the world began reclaiming their rights. Some men even used devices to access parallel universes so that they could toy with the women and children there as well. And this was all thanks to Rickerson, who received a Nobel Rape Prize for his Earth-shattering discovery.
It was a new dawn for humanity, one which brought limitless growth and endless opportunities. This time period would eventually come to be referred to as The Rape Age.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 07 2018, @12:55PM
The logic is reasonable behind 7nm being on-track. EUV has been compared to 28nm nodes because the reduction in required multi-patterning. It could be Intel's 10nm process is just too challenging for immersion. Both TSMC and Samsung are using EUV at 7nm although to what extent is ambiguous.
For all three of these players availability of EUV scanners will be an issue. Throughput is still low and ASML cannot increase production quickly. This could also build Intel's story that 14nm investment is increasing too: 7nm fabs will be built as quickly as tools can roll in but ultimately a high-yielding process is still needed to meet demand.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 07 2018, @01:42AM
This is probably reading too much into it, but on the other hand I have learned to expect sneaky phrasing from intel. Anyway, this could be interpreted as saying they did not yet incorporate that step.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 07 2018, @02:28PM (1 child)
The often-repeated claim is that Moore's law must end because of the size of the atoms. But maybe the size of the photons is a bigger challenge.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Friday December 07 2018, @02:33PM
1. Build a new type of transistor. [soylentnews.org]
2. Stack transistors in a 3D IC.
3. Moore's ???
4. Profit.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday December 07 2018, @03:02PM (3 children)
From TFA
Woo hoo! More cores, more cores!
The software tech and know how already exists. Some languages already have good frameworks for it. (some) Software Developers just won't bother to learn how to leverage it.
But if the hardware gets more and more cores. It will simply become compelling for developers to build software to use them. Many problems can be rethought and reorganized to run in parallel.
There is also an insight that may not be apparent. Runtime systems with parallel garbage collection can use some cores to do the GC. The performance benefit here may not be obvious. But whatever the main workload function is, doesn't spend any of its cycles managing memory, or deallocating structures. Those cycles to deallocate memory are spent later on a different thread. So even a task that must be inherently serial can benefit in this way from more cores. Such as recalculating the page boundaries of all subsequent pages in a word processor when the user types characters into page 2. As a developer, it also makes me feel confident I've done it correctly if my code really does keep all the cores busy no matter how many I throw at it. eg, it doesn't hit some peak at 4 cores and get no faster on 12 cores for example.
More cores start to make it possible to entertain ideas that we currently think of as too expensive or impractical. Clippy: it looks like this is an image of a cat attacking a postal mail carrier. Would you like me to develop a plan to eliminate all postal mail carriers? Click here!
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Friday December 07 2018, @03:20PM
Yup. As much as multithreading has been a chicken and egg problem in the past, quad-cores are pretty ubiquitous, even in phones. And PS4 and XBO have 8 cores, with 6-7 usable. Incidentally, the next Xbox could use [wccftech.com] an AMD Zen 2 CPU instead of Jaguar, probably with 8 cores again, except Zen would allow 16 threads instead of the custom Jaguar's 8 [cpu-world.com].
The chicken has been born, the egg has been hatched. "Normal" users can easily have 6 to 32 cores, 12 to 64 threads. And the remarkable thing about the Ryzen leak is that no quad-cores are listed. The weakest CPU is a 6-core for $99. The new chiplet design could also allow AMD to put 6-8 cores in their Ryzen laptop chips, although that remains to be seen.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 07 2018, @04:09PM (1 child)
those look like pretty badass chips to me. if they have their closed source psp shit in them i wont buy them for a year or so after they come out as a mini protest/pseudo boycott
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday December 07 2018, @05:02PM
I guess you are waiting for the price decrease to "punish" AMD. But if you wait that long you might be able to grab the "7nm" refresh made with more use of EUV, probably resulting in better clock speeds and power efficiency. Or you could hold out until "5nm".
As for the PSP, there are no signs of change there [libreboot.org]. Send the CEO an email and see what happens.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]