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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 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!
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(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]