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Intel Says It Will Move Away From 'Tick-Tock' Development Cycle
An anonymous reader writes: In its latest annual report, Intel says that it will be moving away from its decade-old "tick-tock" strategy (PDF) for developing new chips. From the company's 10-K filing, "We expect to lengthen the amount of time we will utilize our 14nm and our next generation 10nm process technologies, further optimizing our products and process technologies while meeting the yearly market cadence for product introductions." Anand Tech's Ian Cutress explains, "Intel's Tick-Tock strategy has been the bedrock of their microprocessor dominance of the last decade. Throughout the tenure, every other year Intel would upgrade their fabrication plants to be able to produce processors with a smaller feature set, improving die area, power consumption, and slight optimizations of the microarchitecture, and in the years between the upgrades would launch a new set of processors based on a wholly new (sometimes paradigm shifting) microarchitecture for large performance upgrades. However, due to the difficulty of implementing a 'tick', the ever decreasing process node size and complexity therein, as reported previously with 14nm and the introduction of Kaby Lake, Intel's latest filing would suggest that 10nm will follow a similar pattern as 14nm by introducing a third stage to the cadence."
My grandfather's clock was too large for the shelf,
So it stood ninety years on the floor;
It was taller by half than the old man himself,
Though it weighed not a pennyweight more.
It was bought on the morn of the day that he was born,
And was always his treasure and pride;
But it stopped short â" never to go again â"
When the old man died.
Ninety years without slumbering
(tick, tock, tick, tock),
His life's seconds numbering,
(tick, tock, tick, tock),
It stopped short â" never to go again â"
When the old man died.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
tick-tock-tock-tock-marketing-tock-tock-marketing
In other words, AMD finally catches up with Intel and ARM has a big up over Atom because of Intel's lost fab advantage. In good news for us, though, computer chips will get cheaper because it will finally make sense to build more fabs. If we are going to be stuck at 10nm for an indeterminate period of time, the process gets cheaper and it makes sense to build more foundries.
Then the flatline model
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
At $5B+ for a single fab and the market for computers continuing its backward slide it's no surprise that Intel is putting the brakes on its capital expenditures.
This will make a LOT of people here mad, but the exponential growth computational power of digital computers is ending. We can no longer count of the computers of tomorrow to be significantly faster or have more memory than today. If you have been following the industry closely you can already see start to happen 10 years ago. So we can forget about projections that used the argument of exponential growth creating the "Singularity" or "AI". There just simply won't be enough processor power available with classical digital computers. The computer you use 10 years from now will look and perform a lot like the one you have today.
Participants in other industries have followed a similar 3-phase product release approach, but there it's usually called Tick-Tock-Cock.
The "Tick" phase is when the risky innovation happens. It's a low-key product release, meant mainly for early adopters and power users.
The "Tock" phase is when things have stabilized and wider adoption and greater testing can now happen.
The "Cock" phase is when the product is ready for mainstream release and very widespread adoption. "Cock" in this case likens back to the call of the mighty rooster, loudly announcing its message (in this case, that the product is ready for use) to the entire world. "Cock" also rhymes with "tock".
Typically it's called the "Tick-Tock-Cock" model in America, but in the UK it's sometimes called the "Ticklecock" methodology, as a play on words.
For an ordinary joe it won't matter that much. Most of the services he uses (Facebook, Twitter, Spotify, Netflix, Skype, lightweight gaming) could be implemented even on a Pentium II with a little bit of optimization. Even Microsoft does not bother artificially bloating their operating system anymore.
Differences in performance (speed, power consumption etc.) are now almost imperceptible between process changes.
love is just extroverted narcissism
It's pretty telling when the CPU single-thread desktop performance leader, the i7-4790K, is almost two years old. That used to be an eternity in silicon fab. Intel is busy on the server side cramming ever-more cores into their Xeons for high-density server rooms and reducing power consumption on the mobile side. The market (and Intel, who in part sets the market) has decided the Devil's Canyon is apparently fast enough for any single-threaded work you'll ever do. That doesn't help those of us who count on software whose vendors haven't yet implemented / optimized multi-core support in their apps.
Sooo... Tick-Tock-Tock then?
That moment when you realize that "decade-old" is still post-2000.
Their big competition is coming at them like a freight train, but they seem to be missing it: all the new cell phone CPU's are becoming more and more capable. If Intel doesn't provide a compelling reason to use their CPU, they will be the one to be dead Dead DEAD.
My dream is to have a computer waiting for my input. Today, even with the fastest machine, I am contunually waiting on the machine. Blame it on crappy software, networks, whatever, but CPUs really need to be a LOT faster IMO.
SLOWER TRAFFIC KEEP RIGHT
Who are these engineers who design the new, smaller manufacturing processes? I'm quite sure Intel or TSMC will reward you quite gratuitously if you are an engineer in a research team that makes 10nm feasible. Can you imagine, those guys change the world.
Very good site i am every day visit .he computer I use 10 years from now might very well be the same computer that I'm using today.
I'm not picking on you in particular, but I'm seeing a lot of posts implying that Moore's law could keep going but it's too expensive, there's not enough competition to warrant it, etc. The fact is that physics is the nail in the coffin for Moore's law. Making small fab processes is getting more and more difficult because these size scales are super tiny, and the difficulty means that Moore's law simply cannot keep going because we have to develop fundamentally new technology -- not just scaled down current technology.
There's a reason Intel is planning to stop using Silicon at 7 nm (not clear what they'll move to -- maybe indium gallium arsenide), and getting up to production quality with a new material is a huge task that is fundamentally incompatible with Moore's law. (InGaAs is not "new" per se, but InGaAs has never seen real commercial use; it has been confined to research labs.)
There's also a reason that research in classical (not only quantum) computing with superconducting circuits is again being seriously researched by commercial enterprises -- including companies like Northrup Grumman which are not traditionally associated with designing computer chips. (IBM poured a lot of money into superconducting computers in the 1980s but ultimately gave up because Si computing was marching along just fine. I think that IBM is back in the superconducting game too.) Again, getting superconducting circuits up and running is _hard_ and fundamentally incompatible with Moore's law.
Moore's law is intrinsically dead. End of story. Even if/when the non-Si chips get up and running, I don't expect that Moore's law will be revived. 7 nm equates to about 14 silicon atoms. The end of the road is in sight. It's trying to march through quicksand from here on out.
PS. I don't get the "lack of competition" hypothesis for why Intel is slowing down; there are a number of manufacturers matching or closing in on Intel's fab process. E.g. Samsung and Globalfoundries are already at 14 nm. TSMC is at 16 nm. These aren't in direct competition with Intel at the moment, but they will be if Intel ever gets serious about putting their chips in things other than desktops/laptops/servers. Intel isn't stupid; they see these other companies as competitors, and Intel really wants a leg up on them. If Intel could keep up with Moore's law, they would.
They already fired a bunch of engineers. Now they're just milking profits and have stopped innovation.
Why was voted down? It is true. I have two relatives that worked for them that were fired because Intel is getting rid of all of their good engineers because they're so expensive. Now they're just sucking all of the profit out of their no longer innovative product lines.
I vote that we call it "Boom Shaka Laka"!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
The article says: " Intel introduced 14nm back in August 2014, and has since released parts upwards of 400mm2, whereas Samsung 14nm / TSMC 16nm had to wait until the launch of the iPhone to see 100mm2 parts on the shelves"
This is not really a fair statement, as Intel's 14nm process began with very poor yields, while TSMC began from the startoff with very good yields. It was only mid - 2015 that Intel fixed their yield problems.
"We're going to artificially slow our release cycle to squeeze as much money out of the consumer as possible."
Of course they've already been doing this all along. As we rapidly approach the size of a molecule the new frontier will just be power consumption.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Is that the next step is real 3D "chips" and fast interconnects between artificial "neurons". If done right, the sum is will be more than its parts.
Yeah, ARM can never replace x86. There will never be a day when consumers mostly buy ARM devices rather than x86. Well not until 2014 anyway. The fact is, most CPUs purchased in the last two years were ARM.
In the datacenter, power (and it's associated cooling) is expensive, so we're already starting to see ARM replacing x86 in the datacenter too.
Business desktops still mostly run x86, because they mostly run Windows and Windows is currently x86-centric. Microsoft has already released an ARM version of Windows, though, and they are currently making a big push toward "apps" that cpu-architecture independent. That is to say, any application written according to Microsoft's recommendations will be ARM compatible.
ARM hasn't completely replaced x86, but ARM does now have most of the market, and the most significant hurdle"for ARM, Windows compatibility, appears to be going away.
Remember the good old days when hard drive capacities doubled or tripled every single year? There was a time when if a 20 GB drive was the biggest thing this year; you could expect 60 GB or 80 GB drives next year. Those days are over. We see higher capacities, but they take a lot longer between cycles. The same thing is happening with CPUs. Once the dies got below about 50 nm, it became increasingly hard to keep shrinking it further. I'm not saying that 1 nm is impossible, but it's going to be very difficult to get there. It's also kind of like clock speeds. Once they reached the GHz range, it started hitting physical barriers (e.g power and heat) and stopped doubling every generation.
10nm will follow a similar pattern as 14nm by introducing a third stage to the cadence
So I guess the new cadence could be called: "Tick Tock CLUNK"?
Moore's rule of thumb expired two years ago.
It can't continue forever. The nature of exponentials is that you push them out and eventually disaster happens.
- Gordon Moore, in 2005
I come here for the love
Back in the day, moving from bipolar to MOSFET transistors was a fundamentally new technology, but we haven't done anything like that any time recently. Almost all of the examples on that list are old or speculative. All the chips in recent memory have been silicon MOSFETS made using ultraviolet photolithography. Moving from planar transistors to FinFETs is the closet thing to a new technology, but that really seems like a refinement. Moreover, banking on a fundamentally new technology won't save Moore's law because the technology needs to be ready now, and it's not.
We have reached the end of Moore's law. That isn't up for debate. Computer performance has been slipping from Moore's schedule for a while now. The question is why. I maintain that it's due to physical limitations. The OP says it's due to economics. I guess that you could argue that we'll get back on pace to follow Moore's law at some point in the future, but that's a much harder argument to make.
Guess what: Moore's law has been failing for several generations of fabs! The divergence from Moore's law has been gradual. No one is saying that progress will suddenly stop, but we've been slowly falling behind the "doubling every two years" schedule for a while now (arguably since at least 2012).
Now, you can argue about why that is. However, the problem is not a lack of effort or funding. I have a bunch of friends who work at Intel, and they're not taking it easy. They're working their asses off but making progress slower than they used to. Making transistors smaller and smaller is proving to be a very difficult task. Now, if you want to call that an engineering problem rather than a physics problem, go right ahead. But the fact remains: the difficulties stem from the physical size of the transistors, not from managerial issues.
I fully agree with you that if we are at the end of Moore's Law then it is because of physical limitations and not economics. As for no preceding tech breakthroughs, Intel's first CTO said (in 2008):
I compare Moore's Law to driving down the road on a foggy night, how far can you see? Does the road stop after 100 metres? How far can you go?
[...] That's what it's been like with Moore's Law. We thought there were physical limits and [now] we casually speak about going to 10 nanometres. We have work going on different transistor structures. Silicon has become scaffolding for the rest of the periodic table. We're putting these other structures into the materials. We see no end in sight and we've had 10 years of visibility for the last 30 years.
I think it is quite possible he is wrong about Moore's Law extending out to 2028 but I find it very hard to believe he is wrong about the history of Moore's Law leading up to 2008. He was in a position to see the tech breakthroughs first-hand. I don't see why he would lie about it.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
Oh, tick-tock was the bedrock of Intel's success? Silly me, I thought it was more about monopoly control and cutting off AMD's air supply.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Intel and "Tick-Tock" basically ground AMD into dust. With AMD unable to keep up R&D development, they are no longer really competitive in many of the CPU segments. Meaning that Intel doesn't need to bother anymore (or at least for awhile), as they are really only competing against themselves. Not only are most of Intel CPU offerings "good enough" they are also "better than anything else" so why bother...
As CPUs slow to a crawl and soon come screeching to a...pause I'm thinking that water cooling and phase change cooling is going to get a boost. People can finally justify spending money--real money on sophisticated cooling systems. I already have a high end water cooling setup that I haven't used for years, but I've never seriously considered making the jump to phase change..until now.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Time for programmers to once again enthusiastically embrace assembly language. The age of depending on ever faster hardware as an excuse for fast/lazy/elegant programming is about to end.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.