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."

Comments

R.I.P. Andy Grove

[Thud457]

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.

Moore's law, say hello to the law of economics

[JoeyRox]

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.

Re:Moore's law, say hello to the law of economics

[Anonymous Coward]

I also wonder what they call paradigm shifting micro-architectures. Basically, apart from the PIV/Netbu(r)st series, all Intel processors are descendants of the Pentium-Pro, their first OOO processor. The changes have been in the area of completely different FPU units (good riddance for the x87 stack), switching to 64 bit (you have to thank AMD for that), and a few other improvements. But putting the memory controller or the GPU on the chip, using faster/wider I/O busses, or multiplying the number of cores is _not_ a paradigm shift, it's only using the transistor budget wisely because you can't design a core which needs 1 billion transistors (even if most of these are in the cache).
Bottom line, the core (no pun intended) of their current processors is closer to the 20 year old Pentium-Pro than to the Pentium IV or the original Pentium (which itself was largely a dual 486). Now I don't criticize the decision: if it isn't broke, don't fix it (Netbust was an ill-fated attempt). What I object to is calling it a paradigm shift when there have been only incremental improvements (in the micro-architecture) between PPro, PII, PIII, and the whole series of Core processors.

Re:Moore's law, say hello to the law of economics

[castionsosa]

You hit the nail on the head. "Good enough" has knocked Moore's Law off the rails. Since there isn't that much demand, other than adding cores for virtualization [1], it isn't surprising that Intel is backing off the gas pedal with CPU development.

There are other things as well to add to a CPU. Disk I/O hasn't kept up with capacity gains, and there is always working on better power management which is something I'm sure Intel's enterprise customers are heavily damanding for PR reasons.

[1]: The ideal would be faster cores, since Microsoft has hopped on the Oracle and Sybase bandwagon and started licensing by core, and not CPU socket, but more cores is better than nothing.

Re: Digital computers are reaching the end

[Mal-2]

Oh yes, how dare they focus on things that effect users, like how long the battery in their laptop lasts, or their electric bills. The majority of users aren't seeing issues with CPU speed, so it is becoming less of a focus then other factors. Heaven forbid they focus on the consumer's needs.

If they could keep whipping the "faster, faster, faster" horse, they would. When the primary advantage of a new computer over an old one is that it takes less power and generates less heat, people don't see much pressure to upgrade. The old one still works just fine, even if the cost of operation is higher. This is not to say that pushing "smaller, cooler, quieter" is a bad thing for the world at large. It's obviously good. But it's not as good for Intel as pushing speed at all costs used to be. Therefore the conclusion has to be that they're doing it this way because as successful as the old way was for them, they can't make it work any longer.