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.

Comments

Re:Intel in full damage control mode.

[TheRaven64]

It's much worse than this:

First, these are Cannon Lake chips. Remember Cannon Lake, due late 2016? Delayed until late 2017? Delayed until late in the first half of 2018? Yup, that Cannon Lake. Among other things, Cannon Lake was scheduled to introduce LPDDR4, so would be the first Intel mobile chips that could manage 32GB of RAM without using a huge power budget. If you think it's bad for Intel now, wait for the Apple fanboys to notice...

Second, one of the features that people have been waiting for since it was originally announced in 2016 and was expected to debut with Cannon Lake is Intel's Control-flow Enforcement Technology. This comprises two parts. The first is a set of magic nops that indicate a valid branch target and protect forward control flow arcs (any jump that isn't to a designated landing pad will trap in code marked as supporting the feature). The second is a secure stack. Every call instruction pushes the return address onto the main stack, but also onto a second stack (which is not readable or writeable by normal instructions). Each ret instruction checks the top of both stacks and traps if they disagree. Sounds great? That's what everyone thought last year, but unfortunately it is incompatible with the retpoline Spectre mitigation that is now fairly widely deployed, so CET is now impossible to deploy in the presence of code using retpolines (e.g. Chrome) and so needs to be redesigned very late in the schedule or skipped entirely.