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posted by martyb on Thursday July 18 2019, @07:19PM   Printer-friendly
from the big-problems-with-very-little-things dept.

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.

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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Alfred on Thursday July 18 2019, @09:47PM (2 children)

    by Alfred (4006) on Thursday July 18 2019, @09:47PM (#868702) Journal
    Um, right. I hope AMD spanks em.
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 18 2019, @10:05PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 18 2019, @10:05PM (#868708)

    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

      by Alfred (4006) on Friday July 19 2019, @01:44PM (#868951) Journal
      Before they act publicly they have to mobilize the lobbyists. Not that I would buy one but I kinda hope that Apple does do a desktop non-iOS non-x86 machine (could be ARM but might not) at least to show that you can break from intel.