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Intel's 10nm Cannon Lake CPUs Won't Arrive in Mass Quantities Until 2019, Company Says (pcgamer.com)
Intel said this week that it is once again delaying the mass production of its 10-nanometer "Cannon Lake" chips. The company insists that it is already building the chips in low volumes, but said it "now expects 10-nanometer volume production to shift to 2019 [rather than the end of 2018]." From a report: Intel is on solid footing, in other words, though pesky challenges remain in manufacturing its next-generation 10nm parts. CEO Brian Krzanich acknowledged as much during an earnings call, attributing the delay to difficulties in getting 10nm yields to where they need to be. So rather than push to ship 10nm in volume this year, Intel is giving itself some additional time to sort things out.
Isn't it interesting how the solutions relying on the Microsoft ecology all seem to deadlock you to Intel hardware too, when none of the other virtualization technology seems to have that problem. I wonder if you've learned your lesson yet.
Fixing meltdown is fairly simple - don't speculate across ring transitions. That will come with a small performance hit, but only a small one. Fixing Spectre is much harder because Spectre isn't really a vulnerability so much as a class of vulnerabilities with proofs of concept for the easiest things to attack. Fixing Spectre means making sure that no side effects of speculation, including timing, are visible. That means, among other things, no cache fills or evictions during speculative execution, all instructions in flight must be cancelled as soon as they're known not-taken, rename registers must be returned for use as soon as instructions are known to be cancelled, and so on. It might be possible to design a superscalar chip that is not vulnerable to Spectre-like attacks, but I'm sceptical (and I'm doubly sceptical that, if you could, it would perform better than an in-order processor).
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I have no citation yet (Apple would try not to leak until the press event), but the momentum keeps building. The newest iMac Pro has an A10 Fusion chip for some functions (Macbook Pro runs the touchbar on ARM). Before, I think they were mostly driving that speculation themselves (and saving it as a backup plan) to keep Intel pricing under control. Now that AMD is more competitive, Intel will be looking to its major buyers to keep their profits up. Apple introduced bitcode to the OS X app store in 2015, meaning that for software that has this enabled, they can recompile (and even test) software for the new chip before the announcement without telling developers. On launch day, the app could be in the store on a new architecture without developers even updating it themselves.