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Intel's Process Nodes Will Trail Behind Competitors Until at Least Late 2021

posted by martyb on Wednesday March 04 2020, @09:28PM   Printer-friendly
from the shrinking-lead dept.

takyon writes:

Intel Says Process Tech to Lag Competitors Until Late 2021, Will Regain Lead with 5nm (archive)

It appears that 2020 and 2021 are going to be long years for Intel. CFO George Davis presented at the Morgan Stanley conference yesterday covering a wide range of topics, but noted that despite being "undoubtedly in the 10nm era," the company felt that it would not reach process parity with competitors until it produces the 7nm node at the tail end of 2021. Davis also said that Intel wouldn't regain process leadership until it produces the 5nm node at an unspecified date.

Davis commented that the company was "definitely in the 10nm era" with Ice Lake client chips and networking ASICs already shipping, along with the pending release of discrete GPUs and Ice Lake Xeons. Intel is also moving well along the path of inter-node development, which consists of "+" revisions to existing processes. Davis said the 10nm inter-node step provides a "step-function move" with the Tiger Lake chips based on the 10nm+ process as the company awaits its 7nm process.

However, Davis noted that in spite of the shipping products and pending "+" revisions to the 10nm process, its process node still lags behind competitors, stating:

"So we bring a lot of capability to the table for our customers, in addition to the CPU, and we feel like we're starting to see the acceleration on the process side that we have been talking about to get back to parity in the 7nm generation and regain leadership in the 5nm generation."

Previously:
Intel Launches Coffee Lake Refresh, Roadmap Leaks Showing No "10nm" Desktop Parts Until 2022
Intel's Jim Keller Promises That "Moore's Law" is Not Dead, Outlines 50x Improvement Plan
Intel Roadmap Shows Plans for "5nm", "3nm", "2nm", and "1.4nm" Process Nodes by 2029

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 04 2020, @11:18PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 04 2020, @11:18PM (#966742)

    Process tech relies on volume, and Intel focusing on processor chips can't compete with contract foundries (TSMC) and dram foundries (Samsung).

  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday March 04 2020, @11:29PM

    by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Wednesday March 04 2020, @11:29PM (#966747) Journal

    TSMC is laying down the cash [tomshardware.com] it needs to stay at the head of the pack:

    Silicon manufacturer TSMC's capital expenditure will rise to between $14 and $15 billion USD in 2020, which is significantly higher than 2019's $10-$11 billion expenditure. The increase consists largely of investments in expanding the company's output of 7nm products, as well as creating a large 5nm production capacity, as reported by EXPReview. The publication's sources say that of the increase of $4 billion in expenditure, $1.5 billion will go to expanding 7nm capacity with $2.5 billion going to building up a significant 5nm production line.

    Intel is still trying to increase its "14nm" capacity [guru3d.com].

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  • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday March 05 2020, @03:38AM (1 child)

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Thursday March 05 2020, @03:38AM (#966822)

    It used to be that Intel could do both. They could focus on processor chips on one hand, and process tech on the other; they had enough volume and profitability to do this because they were a near-monopoly, and also because everyone was buying a new computer every 2 years because the technology was moving so fast. These days, it's slowed down; an 8-year-old laptop is really fine for basic tasks (web, office, etc.), and isn't really noticeably slower than a brand-new one, though it will have worse battery life. The growth is in mobile devices, and a lot of people now are even giving up PCs and relying solely on phones and/or tablets. Intel totally missed the boat on mobile CPUs. They tried; they did StrongARM/XScale for a little while, but then sold that off, they had some other ARM-based mobile CPUs for a while, then sold that to Marvell, then they tried Atom, but that didn't go too far. Now ARM is unbeatable for mobile phones. So now they're the dominant player in a shrinking market, and their long-time competitor, while smaller, keeps getting better.