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Intel's Tick-Tock Cycle Skips a Beat
New submitter Ramze writes: Several outlets are reporting on Intel's confirmation that it will make three generations of 14nm processors, delaying the switch to 10nm. The planned 14nm Kaby Lake processor marks the first time Intel has skipped the "tick" of a die shrink on its regular "tick/tock" cycle. Production of Cannonlake processors on 10nm has been pushed back to the second half of 2017 — likely due to manufacturing difficulties. Intel reported earlier this year that it may have to switch away from silicon to exotic materials such as indium gallium arsenide to make the next shrink to 7nm.
I am not sure why there is anything more on wasted on desktop processors given the last 6-7 years of only ~10 percent gains? We are expecting almost zero improvement in desktop performance with Skylake over the 4790K processors, and barely a power reduction. Billions were spent to get us almost nothing tangible.
Laptop machines have come a long way, but the desktop is stuck at 4 cores and no hint at anything but maybe 10% performance gains per year for the foreseeable future.
We are instead getting integrated crappy GPU's in flagship processors that will mostly never get utilized, and that crappy GPU is half the die area. I'd rather have the same die size with 6-8 cores, or more L2 cache, or almost anything else that I might actually make use of. Sadly, intel reserves those kinds of features for their much more expensive Xeon or "Extreme" branded lines.
Intel is stalling at 14nm. Everyone else stalled at 28nm. 28nm is still the cheapest node in per transistor terms. Since most chip makers are driven by cost rather than transistor performance, there have been few takers for 20nm and 14nm.