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.

Digital computers are reaching the end

[110010001000]

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.

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.

Moore's law is dead; physics killed it

[dlenmn]

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.

Moving to a three stage process?

[Chas]

I vote that we call it "Boom Shaka Laka"!

Re:Tick-Tock-Tock

[SeaFox]

That's how Intel will waltz into the next decade.