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Intel says it was too aggressive pursuing 10nm, will have 7nm chips in 2021
[Intel's CEO Bob] Swan made a public appearance at Fortune's Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen, Colorado, on Tuesday and explained to the audience in attendance that Intel essentially set the bar too high for itself in pursuing 10nm. More specifically, he pointed to Intel's overly "aggressive goal" of going after a 2.7x transistor density improvement over 14nm.
[...] Needless to say, the 10nm delays have caused Intel to fall well behind that transistor density doubling. Many have proclaimed Moore's Law as dead, but as far as Swan is concerned, Moore's Law is not dead. It apparently just needed to undergo an unexpected surgery.
"The challenges of being late on this latest [10nm] node of Moore's Law was somewhat a function of what we've been able to do in the past, which in essence was define the odds on scaling the infrastructure," Swan explains. Bumping up to a 2.7x scaling factor proved to be "very complicated," more so than Intel anticipated. He also says that Intel erred when it "prioritized performance at a time when predictability was really important."
"The short story is we learned from it, we'll get our 10nm node out this year. Our 7nm node will be out in two years and it will be a 2.0X scaling so back to the historical Moore's Law curve," Swan added.
Also at Fortune and Tom's Hardware.
Related:
Intel's "Tick-Tock" Strategy Stalls, 10nm Chips Delayed
Intel's "Tick-Tock" is Now More Like "Process-Architecture-Optimization"
Moore's Law: Not Dead? Intel Says its 10nm Chips Will Beat Samsung's
Intel Releases Open Letter in Attempt to Address Shortage of "14nm" Processors and "10nm" Delays
Intel Says "7nm" Node Using Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography is on Track
Intel Promises "10nm" Chips by the End of 2019, and More
Intel Launches Coffee Lake Refresh, Roadmap Leaks Showing No "10nm" Desktop Parts Until 2022
Intel Shares "10nm" Ice Lake Processor Details
HP Boss: Intel Shortages are Steering Our Suited Customers to Buy AMD
Intel's Jim Keller Promises That "Moore's Law" is Not Dead, Outlines 50x Improvement Plan
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 18 2019, @07:59PM (3 children)
Mañana.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 18 2019, @08:01PM (2 children)
Yes, we have no mañanas.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 18 2019, @08:54PM (1 child)
Intel must be full of bananas...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 18 2019, @11:00PM
Waiting for the 1nm chips, so I can upgrade to Windows 10.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Alfred on Thursday July 18 2019, @09:47PM (2 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 18 2019, @10:05PM (1 child)
That was more or less my thought. If they were overly aggressive with the 10nm tech, then doing 7nm in 2021 seems a bit odd.
As I understand it, AMD is able to hit the target as a byproduct of having outsourced the actual production to companies that product chips for other things. And as such, aren't stuck fixing all the details of the production themselves.
The real question is how Intel is going to break antitrust law to prevent AMD from getting much advantage from the situation.
(Score: 2) by Alfred on Friday July 19 2019, @01:44PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 19 2019, @01:02AM (2 children)
Intel's 10nm node is on par with TSMC or Samsung's 7nm node in terms of density, so they are not that far behind in fab technology.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday July 19 2019, @01:09AM
The problem AFAIK is that Intel has optimized their "14nm+++++++" node a lot, giving them the clock speed advantage (AMD has roughly the same IPC, maybe even better). Clock speeds could drop on Intel "10nm", and soon after that TSMC will release "7nm+" using EUV.
Furthermore, Intel's roadmap [soylentnews.org] appears to be a mess. Maybe "10nm" yields are not good enough.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 19 2019, @06:50AM
And yet they are unable to scale it beyond tiny laptop chips. Their clocks are bad, their power efficiency is worse than 22nm-class chips. Those 2 released 10nm models were just to calm down investors.
AMD has used a brilliant strategy in the chiplet design allowing them to have products from desktops through workstations to servers using the exact same small silicon pieces. This has very good yields and exploits the economy of scale. Intel on the other hand has separate designs for every segment that can't be shared and have to be custom made.
The initial problems with Zen/Zen+ have all been solved while retaining compatibility with 2 generations of chipsets. You can run a Zen 2 on a super cheap A320 motherboard. You can even run the beast 3900X on a budget B350 provided you put a fan over VRMs.
Meanwhile Intel "requires" new chipset and motherboard for every generation, even going as far as not even bothering with changing the socket! This is artificial since it's possible to hack around the BIOS of a Skylake motherboard to run the latest Coffee Lake in an "unsupported" configuration.