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Intel's First 10nm Cannon Lake CPU Sees the Light of Day (anandtech.com)

Artem Tashkinov writes: A Chinese retailer has started selling a laptop featuring Intel's first 10nm CPU the Intel Core i3 8121U. Intel promised to start producing 10nm CPUs in 2016 but the rollout has been postponed almost until the second half of 2018. It's worth noting that this CPU does not have integrated graphics enabled and features only two cores.

AnandTech opines: "This machine listed online means that we can confirm that Intel is indeed shipping 10nm components into the consumer market. Shipping a low-end dual core processor with disabled graphics doesn't inspire confidence, especially as it is labelled under the 8th gen designation, and not something new and shiny under the 9th gen -- although Intel did state in a recent earnings call that serious 10nm volume and revenue is now a 2019 target. These parts are, for better or worse, helping Intel generate some systems with the new technology. We've never before seen Intel commercially use low-end processors to introduce a new manufacturing process, although this might be the norm from now on."

13 of 184 comments (clear)

  1. Not everyone needs $1900 Core i9 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Not everyone needs to cough up $1900 for a CPU to have a computer that is usable to them.

    I absolutely hate this notion today that only the most expensive modern things are usable, and that anything else will not work properly.

    1. Re:Not everyone needs $1900 Core i9 by divide+overflow · · Score: 4, Informative

      "Nobody needs more than 640k of RAM" ~Steve Jobs~ -

      Nope, that quote is from Bill Gates, not Steve Jobs. It was the IBM PC running MSDOS/PCDOS in regular memory on x86 processors that had that limitation.

    2. Re:Not everyone needs $1900 Core i9 by divide+overflow · · Score: 3, Informative
      Perhaps it is apocryphal, but...from https://quoteinvestigator.com/...:

      QI has located the earliest instance of a close match to the saying specified by the questioner. This is the version that is often attributed to Gates today. It appeared in InfoWorld magazine in January 1990 in an article that presented a timeline for the development of the PC industry in the 1980s. The remark ascribed to Gates was placed in quotation marks [BGSF]:

      IBM introduces the PC and, with Microsoft, releases DOS (“640K ought to be enough for anyone” — Bill Gates)

    3. Re:Not everyone needs $1900 Core i9 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      They didn't. It's still vulnerable to Spectre and Meltdown. There simply wasn't enough time to modify the hardware. They are targeting Icelake for the hardware fixes.

    4. Re: Not everyone needs $1900 Core i9 by www.goatse.ru · · Score: 3, Funny

      Intel had some ad for the 286 saying it was too much for a single user..

      It is true that married men make more money than single men, but that's still an odd way to market it.

  2. Oh shit by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The free ride is over, software retards. You may actually have to start programming again, instead of creating multi-gigabyte copy-and-paste monsters that can't even keep up with typing at the keyboard, yet use 100% CPU on quad core machines.

  3. Meltdown&co fixed? by NuclearCat · · Score: 3, Insightful

    One thing producing performance-impacting patches for existing processor, another thing trying to sell and manufacture defective processor with known before launch vulnerability.

  4. Why this is news by AbRASiON · · Score: 3, Interesting

    This CPU is nearly 3 years late.
    Intel are having immense difficulty with the 10nm move. Down from 14nm (which was 'refreshed' twice)
    What this means is that other manufactuers are now genuinely catching up to Intel, as much as I didn't believe it, it does seem that (I think TMSC?) is now just about ready to start putting out 7nm products.
    (Note, they all bloody lie about the figures, TMSC 7nm is basically about Intels 10nm)

    That does mean that AMD may be producing CPUs with a similar transistor density and voltage requirements to Intel soon, meaning the only advantage available is processor design, not manufacturing process.

    Regardless of AMDs improved competition potential here though, is the concern that the move from 22nm to 14nm to 10nm has been AWFULLY slow and it's one of the driving factors in why computer processing hasn't really improved hugely in the past 4 to 10 years. It's improved but nothing at all like the previous decade.

    If you're an enthusiast dying for top of the line performance with a deep budget, this has been painful, as you upgrade every 18 months to 20% faster, instead of 70+% faster. If you're a homelab server nerd who wants to run a great little VM cluster, on some mid range, low power chips, the chips you could've bought 3 years ago, are probably fairly viable, still, to todays options.

    Intel has delayed the rest of their 10nm processors I think until next year. Means the Intel 8700k 6core and the rumoured 8750 / 8900 (?) 8 core model (soonish) will be the best you can probably buy, for the next 18 months. If you've been holding off upgrading, may be worth considering.

    It kind of sucks, I'm in the 'want a nice, low power server, but still kinda powerful' camp and I don't want 85w of CPU in my cupboard, but I would like at least 6, half decent threads. It's possible, but would've been much more likely with the shrinks being on time.

    1. Re:Why this is news by Artem+S.+Tashkinov · · Score: 3, Insightful

      the move from 22nm to 14nm to 10nm has been AWFULLY slow and it's one of the driving factors in why computer processing hasn't really improved hugely in the past 4 to 10 years

      I believe it's more about the limits of current technology and the fact that the CPU frequency depends on the voltage and since the power consumption and dissipation varies with the square of the DC supply voltage you just cannot raise the voltage arbitrarily unless you want your CPU to consume hundreds of watts of energy. And also there's the speed of light at play - you cannot arbitrarily raise CPU frequency because electrons will not have enough time to traverse the chip. Another issue is that the x86-64 instructions set is very difficult to optimize because the architecture is so old.

  5. Also by Artem+S.+Tashkinov · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Most likely by mistake last Sunday Intel released Z390 chipset information. The page has since been pulled down because this chipset was rumored to be accompanied with octa-core Coffee Lake CPUs which are yet to be announced.

    Next time I'm gonna web-archive their mistakes ;-)

  6. Re:I always get the feeling by Artem+S.+Tashkinov · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Have you seen their R&D expenditures?

    Designing a 14nm tech process in the 70's/80's was impossible because it has taken billions of dollars of investments and new technologies (some of which weren't invented at Intel) to get there. Also, considering that they've rehashed their 14nm tech process twice and their first 10nm part is a castrated 2core CPU minus iGPU, it surely looks like 10nm is extremely difficult/costly to get right.

  7. Re:I always get the feeling by TeknoHog · · Score: 3, Funny

    Have you seen their R&D expenditures?

    Designing a 14nm tech process in the 70's/80's was impossible because it has taken billions of dollars of investments and new technologies (some of which weren't invented at Intel) to get there. Also, considering that they've rehashed their 14nm tech process twice and their first 10nm part is a castrated 2core CPU minus iGPU, it surely looks like 10nm is extremely difficult/costly to get right.

    Well, that's exactly what they want you to believe. When they say "R&D expedinture", they really mean "R&R expedinture".

    --
    Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
  8. Did Intel confirm it? by Opportunist · · Score: 3, Funny

    We have a Chinese retailer claiming to sell a 10nm CPU that has the features (and probably speed) of a 5 year old low budget processor. And since Chinese companies have a spotless track record of never trying to sell counterfeited products, we should readily believe that this seemingly ancient CPU is bleeding edge.

    I ... erh... well... how do you put it nicely...

    --
    We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.