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At the company's second quarter 2018 financial results conference call, Intel chief engineering officer Venkata Renduchintala said the "Cannon Lake" 10mn processors won't appear in products until the 2019 holiday season. "The systems on shelves that we expect in holiday 2019 will be client systems, with data center products to follow shortly after," Renduchintala said. Interim CEO Robert Swan went on to tout the company's "very good lineup" of 14nm products. Digital Trends reports: "Recall that 10nm strives for a very aggressive density improvement target beyond 14nm, almost 2.7x scaling," Renduchintala said during the call. "And really, the challenges that we're facing on 10nm is delivering on all the revolutionary modules that ultimately deliver on that program." Although he acknowledged that pushing back 10nm presents a "risk and a degree of delay" in the company's road map, Intel is quite pleased with the "resiliency" of its 14nm roadmap. He said the company delivered an excess of 70 percent performance improvement over the last few years. Meanwhile, Intel's 10nm process should be in an ideal state to mass produce chips towards the end of 2019.

Intel's Cannon Lake chip is essentially a shrink of its seventh-generation "Kaby Lake" processor design. Given the previous launch window, the resulting chips presumably fell under the company's eighth-generation banner despite the older design. But with mass production pushed back to late 2019, the 10nm chips will fall under Intel's ninth-generation umbrella along with CPUs based on its upcoming "Ice Lake" design. Intel claims that its 10nm chips will provide 25 percent increased performance over their 14nm counterparts. Even more, they will supposedly consume 50 percent less power than their 14nm counterparts.

An anonymous reader writes: Yesterday, word came down that Microsoft was starting to lay off some 18,000 workers. As of June 5th, Microsoft reported a total employee headcount of 127,005, so they're cutting about 15% of their jobs. That's actually a pretty huge percentage, even taking into account the redundancies created by the Nokia acquisition. Obviously, there's an upper limit to how much of your workforce you can let go at one time, so I'm willing to bet Microsoft's management thinks thousands more people aren't worth keeping around. How many employees does Microsoft realistically need? The company is famous for its huge teams that don't work together well, and excessive middle management. But they also have a huge number of software projects, and some of the projects, like Windows and Office, need big teams to develop. How would we go about estimating the total workforce Microsoft needs? (Other headcounts for reference: Apple: 80,000, Amazon: 124,600, IBM: 431,212, Red Hat: 5,000+, Facebook: 6,800, Google: 52,000, Intel: 104,900.)

SirFlakey writes: "It appears Moore's law has been proven right yet again. According to a report in Fairfax's IT section, Intel has managed to create the world's smallest transistor(s). This, according to the article would allow them to create CPU's with 10 times (420 million) the P4's transistor count. The transistors are only 3 Atoms thick(!). They say they have come close to the limit of modern technology but also still have plenty of innovation left for the future. This annoucement comes only a few days after it released an earnings warning for this quarter."