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Intel Has Killed off the 10nm Process, Report Says (semiaccurate.com)

Posted by msmash on from the how-about-that dept.

Charlie Demerjian, reporting for SemiAccurate: SemiAccurate has learned that Intel just pulled the plug on their struggling 10nm process. Before you jump to conclusions, we think this is both the right thing to do and a good thing for the company. For several years now SemiAccurate has been saying the the 10nm process as proposed by Intel would never be financially viable. Now we are hearing from trusted moles that the process is indeed dead and that is a good thing for Intel, if they had continued along their current path the disaster would have been untenable. Our moles are saying the deed has finally been done.

This isn't to say the road to this point has been easy or straightforward, and the road ahead is even less solid. Intel has continually moved the public bar on 10nm back, incrementally, while singing a different song internally. In their Q1/2018 earnings call they moved the timetables and spun it in a curious way but were telling partners a different story. UPDATE: Intel tweeted on Monday morning: "Media reports published today that Intel is ending work on the 10nm process are untrue. We are making good progress on 10nm. Yields are improving consistent with the timeline we shared during our last earnings report."

116 comments

  1. Moore's Law by 110010001000 · · Score: 0

    End of the line for ever more powerful digital computing is coming fast. Better be prepared.

    1. Re:Moore's Law by Bobrick · · Score: 2

      Prepared how? You say it like it's gonna change anything.

    2. Re:Moore's Law by olsmeister · · Score: 2

      There are plenty of gains to be had by optimizing all the sloppy and inefficient code that has been written and re-used through the years which was accepted thanks to constant hardware improvements.

    3. Re:Moore's Law by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's very likely that we won't see 7nm or 5nm for another few years, so Intel is either going to keep using the 14nm process (that's been used since the Intel Core 5000 series) or they're going to farm out chip production using someone elses 10nm process in the mean time.

    4. Re:Moore's Law by DigiShaman · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I'm not an expert in semiconductor fabrication. That said, if the issue with 10nm was due to incomplete fabrication tooling and/or management, that's one thing. But I fail to see how Intel will fare better with 7nm or 5nm if the problem was purely of physics. If it's the later, we might have effectively hit the wall in terms of being financially feasible.

      --
      Life is not for the lazy.
    5. Re:Moore's Law by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1


      There are plenty of gains to be had by optimizing all the sloppy and inefficient code that has been written and re-used through the years which was accepted thanks to constant hardware improvements.

      Absolutely true. However, hardware improvements are a one time cost that makes all your software faster. Improving software speed is a painstaking process of going through and re-writing code.

      In other words, hardware improvements are practically free. Software optimization is incredibly expensive. My expectation is that HW development will move towards more and more specialized HW improvements.

    6. Re:Moore's Law by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Of course, the constant hardware changes have made it even more necessary to optimize the code to gain significant speedups. The trade-off between portability and optimization should be masked to preserve the productivity, though.

    7. Re: Moore's Law by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Why not just add more cores while improving effiency?

    8. Re:Moore's Law by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Dunno, it's always been more about bang for buck than it has been about the nanometers. Without the need to swap out half the tooling every few years, without the need to spend mountains on basic research every damn year etc, I'd say Moore can continue for quite a while yet. You might need to start investing in more powerful fans and power supplies though.

      Oh yeah, and code optimization, that, might want to start working on it finally.

    9. Re: Moore's Law by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 2

      ...or research new algorithms. Nah, can't have that!

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    10. Re:Moore's Law by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 2

      It's very likely that we won't see 7nm or 5nm for another few years

      Actually, you'll probably see 7nm next year.

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    11. Re:Moore's Law by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Prepared like forget about JS for a start.

    12. Re: Moore's Law by aliquis · · Score: 1

      If for the same die that's the part they have problem with.

      If you just mean use more of everything sure that give more performance but not with the cost and energy cuts.

    13. Re:Moore's Law by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The era of specialized hardware will return. We'll have sound cards, video cards, AI accelerators, etc.

      The real issue is that regardless of what types of cores, we'll need parallel algorithms (and probably lockless ones) to move forward.

    14. Re:Moore's Law by TomGreenhaw · · Score: 1

      End of the line for ever more powerful digital computing is coming fast. Better be prepared.

      While Moore's law is definitely in big trouble, the spirit of what it hoped to offer may not be. The cost of chips continues to come down. The power consumption continues to come down. While the transistor density may no longer be increasing as fast, they continue to increase CPU core counts on larger dies.

      CPU chips for most real world applications haven't been the bottleneck for a while. Solid state non volatile storage continues to advance and this is the primary remedy for most application slowness.

      Machine learning technology may be the future of what people want for ultra powerful low cost computers. Architectural advances can offer vastly more bang for the buck than raw transistor count. Not only to graphic chip architectures offer this but extensions to Intel machine instructions like AVX have a more dramatic impact than the tick/tock of Moore's Law

      IMHO the death of Moore's Law != the death of more powerful computing.

      --
      Greed is the root of all evil.
    15. Re:Moore's Law by Tablizer · · Score: 1

      In other words, hardware improvements are practically free. Software optimization is incredibly expensive.

      Hey, it's good for job security. I shouldn't say that because I often rant about the how stupid web (non) standards turned simple inhouse CRUD dev into a labor-intensive Dagwood Sandwich mess and fashion contest.

      --
      Table-ized A.I.
    16. Re: Moore's Law by Streetlight · · Score: 2

      New algorithms? New algorithms might just introduce new unintended consequences because coders aren't perfect. How about cleaning up and fixing old codes that introduce opportunities for hackers.

      --
      In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
    17. Re:Moore's Law by Megol · · Score: 1

      TSMC have been in 7nm risk production mode a long time (for the semiconductor industry), or so they claim.

    18. Re:Moore's Law by jellomizer · · Score: 1

      Except they won't be cards, they just would be IC embedded on the main board, or even within the same chip.

      I doubt we will see the return of the popularity of 3 foot tower PC. Loaded to the brim with expansion ports,

      --
      If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
    19. Re:Moore's Law by mangastudent · · Score: 4, Interesting

      But I fail to see how Intel will fare better with 7nm or 5nm if the problem was purely of physics.

      To quote this August article About Intel's 10nm Process Lead:

      Since yield issues aren't contagious between process generations, we can expect Intel's 7nm to be on track for the originally stated date.

      The thesis of the article is that Intel was the first to attempt Self Aligning Quad Patterning (SAQP), in a "10mm" node that's more aggressive than the current or just getting going maybe Samsung and TMSC "7mm" nodes.

      Per the author, Intel's "7mm" node will use EUV, which has its own host of problems, but is a fundamentally different technology, see the above link on pushing 193 nm immersion lithography, vs. using what are very close to being soft X-rays at 13.5 nm (per Wikipedia the X-ray range starts at 10nm). Of course, if Intel's 7nm node expected to get some use out of their 10nm SAQP technology, it still might be in trouble.

    20. Re:Moore's Law by jellomizer · · Score: 1

      Parallelism has been on the drawing board for over a generation in prep of the end of Moore's Law, Within the past decade parallel cores have became popular. My Laptop Today with a good video card with nearly 2000 Cuda cores, give more parallel computing power then a MassPar mainframe With (1024 CPUs) I used back in my college days, learning parallel processing.

      --
      If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
    21. Re: Moore's Law by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Chicken Little? Is that you?

    22. Re:Moore's Law by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It feels like it pretty much ended about 2010. The last two years I've been looking for a new laptop expecting to get more RAM for less money but nope.

    23. Re:Moore's Law by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      While I'd argue you're right, there's more to it than != death of more powerful computing.

      I think what it really portends is the death of more powerful computing in the actual physical hands of the consumers.

      To get more powerful computing now, it'll be living in the cloud.

    24. Re: Moore's Law by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 1

      Clearly this is a situation where there's no old code that could be exploited because it has never been put into practice.

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    25. Re:Moore's Law by Wycliffe · · Score: 1

      But I fail to see how Intel will fare better with 7nm or 5nm if the problem was purely of physics. If it's the later, we might have effectively hit the wall in terms of being financially feasible.

      I don't think it's physics as much as financial. The demand is currently not there. A 5 year old laptop was faster than most current laptops/desktops/tablets/phones. Most people have stopped demanding high performance CPUs. Even gamers have shifted their focus to the video cards not the CPUs and a majority of games are now written for tablets/phones that have little more processing power than a 486. Because of the low processing power and low energy requirements of phones/tablets, the stuff that might have created demand like voice recognition has shifted to the cloud instead.

    26. Re:Moore's Law by Wycliffe · · Score: 2

      End of the line for ever more powerful digital computing is coming fast. Better be prepared.

      There is plenty of room for improvement just very few niche applications to pay for it. The demand is currently not there. A 5 year old laptop was faster than most current laptops/desktops/tablets/phones. Most people have stopped demanding high performance CPUs. Even gamers have shifted their focus to the video cards not the CPUs and a majority of games are now written for tablets/phones that have little more processing power than a 486. Because of the low processing power and low energy requirements of phones/tablets, the stuff that might have created demand like voice recognition has shifted to the cloud instead.

    27. Re:Moore's Law by mangastudent · · Score: 1

      I don't think it's physics as much as financial.

      That all depends on whether or not Moore's Law is truly dead, or only dead for this Intel "10nm" process, with the added wrinkle that non-recurring engineering (NRE) costs have been skyrocketing with these more extreme 193 nm immersion lithography nodes because multipatterning requires many more masks. In the latter case, customers who aren't going to order as many units won't use the newer nodes, unless they achieve some other need of their's, like lower power consumption.

      Moore's Law has more been a "law" of economics, in that smaller nodes were for a very long time clearly cheaper to manufacture, since defects were random, especially the classic spot of dust types, and the more die you could fit on a wafer, the higher your yields. Here, Intel has conspicuously failed to get acceptable yields for years, at some point if they don't succeed they will have to pull the plug, either to a less aggressive node, or to the next one if they can get it to work and it's economic. Their "7nm" node is said to use EUV heavily, so the last question is also very much up in the air.

    28. Re:Moore's Law by jwhyche · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Be prepared for what? We reached a plateau of power vs need a long time ago. The average consumer the plateau topped out about 10 years ago. I am a power user and I'm having to make up excuses to upgrade my 6700K to something more powerful. It does everything I need it to do and with plenty of processing room left over.

      --
      I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
    29. Re:Moore's Law by neurojab · · Score: 1

      Exactly. AMD appears to be betting the company on their 7nm process shipping next year. I've heard that AMD 's 7nm is roughly equivalent to Intel's 10nm. Anyway - the idea that there's no incentive anymore to shrink CPU dies anymore is dead wrong. Two things prevent CPU cores from processing faster and more efficiently - heat and the speed of light (or the speed of electrical signals in sillicon). Both are helped by using a smaller process. Almost all purchasers of CPUs benefit from this. On a laptop you can get better performance, better battery life or a smaller battery, or some combination of these. In a data center you can get more servers in a smaller space, fewer servers, lower cooling costs, etc. I don't believe for a second that Intel is going to stop trying to shrink their process - this is just a setback for them and if they don't act quickly, AMD will eat their lunch.

    30. Re: Moore's Law by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      What does that mean for everyday users ?

      Nothing.

      4 core systems have cores sitting idle most of the time and the new 8 core i9 9900K is more than most people need for real daily office work.

    31. Re:Moore's Law by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 1

      The era of specialized hardware will return. We'll have sound cards, video cards, AI accelerators, etc.

      I don't think so. Audio, video, and NN-AI are all doing the same thing: lots of low precision fp-ops in parallel. There is no reason to have separate hardware for each.

    32. Re:Moore's Law by OwP_Fabricated · · Score: 1

      The way I understood it, Intel developed a ton of brand new techniques for getting 10nm and beyond going and it turns out attempting to use all of these new techniques at once on a new node resulted in it taking way, way longer to do and even when they got it sorta working the yields were awful.

    33. Re: Moore's Law by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      486? 66mhz?

      Dude. Tablets and phones go into ghz. They are proper machines.

    34. Re: Moore's Law by Bengie · · Score: 0

      Your rebuttal isn't very good. More bugs are caused by misuse of algorithms than using new ones. I would have attacked the notion that any problem can be solved with an algorithm. W're just about out of low hanging optimizations. We'll probably new whole new approaches.

    35. Re: Moore's Law by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Actually, Appleâ(TM)s A12 Bionic CPU is 7nm right now.

    36. Re:Moore's Law by DickBreath · · Score: 1

      It's not that difficult for Intel to prepare. They can buy chips from AMD. They can license ARM.

      --

      I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
    37. Re:Moore's Law by short · · Score: 1

      Just start developing some larger real-C++ codebase.

    38. Re:Moore's Law by afidel · · Score: 4, Informative

      a majority of games are now written for tablets/phones that have little more processing power than a 486
      *cough* Bullshit *cough*

      All ARMv8 cores are between high 4's and mid 6's in DMIP/MHz and run at speeds from 1.5 to 2.5GHz, that puts them at 6750 to 16,000 DMIPs. The 486 DX4 100 was 70 MIPS and 0.7 MIPS/MHz. The modern ARM chips performance puts them in the range of an Athlon64 to an Athlon64 x2 chip.

      --
      There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
    39. Re:Moore's Law by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      How should I prepare? Should I buy a fallout shelter?

    40. Re: Moore's Law by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yes indeed! My old 486 dos programs run faster in qemu on my RPi3! Duh

    41. Re:Moore's Law by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Dude the Nintendo Switch has a tablet CPU and competes with Playstation 4, Xbox and PC gaming. They have enough power to do local voice recognition and that is increasing : as silicon is cheap and power is expensive, you now see dedicated neural processing blocks. They probably sit 100% unused except when taking a picture with the manufacturer's camera application. Anyway :
      - people don't want to train the voice recognition to their voice, or have no idea that training procedures do exist. Even though this may allow for superior voice recognition with modern means?
      - server side keeps it under the control of google, or amazon, or ... and allows more spying.
      - so-called "smart speakers" are worse than phones and tablets still. These are closer to the 486 though probably a lot faster. It's still trivial to get a quad core 1GHz CPU these days. That's just a block with a quad Cortex A53 and that's small, tried and true (and runs either 64bit or 32bit OS and applications). You see it in place where you'd have had a Z80 clone or something 20-30 years ago, such as in a watch or TV.
      Now for a shitty smart speaker, doesn't matter if it gets a quad core 1GHz or a single core 50MHz (with on-die DSPs to process the incoming sound). If it's really cheap, $20 or $30 you're not going to put a gigabyte of RAM and gigabytes of flash on it. Though, never say never! It's realistic to have that on a "smart speaker pro" and now they're releasing similar shit with a display which thus definitely has such specs and a GPU.

    42. Re:Moore's Law by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Maybe in your line of work, but there are still real time video stream developers who need fast on-bus storage along with memory and processing so you don't drop frames. And this is just one situation where access to high performance is required. For the average consumer, a laptop or tablet is more than sufficient. But prosumers and professionals are still looking for that "3 foot tower PC...Loaded to the brim with expansion ports...".

    43. Re:Moore's Law by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Nonsense, the data center market can't get enough of Intel processors. Intel cannot even supply enough due to manufacturing constraints (which if they were on 10 nm, wouldn't have as many issues with the volume). Expect record revenues from Intel, again.

    44. Re:Moore's Law by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      EUV is only going to be employed if it is cheaper than using 193i. EUV does a miserable job at metal layers due to defect density; expect via layers first by simplifying # masks. There will still need to be a 193i based SAQP or LELELE solution for metal layers in the foreseeable future. EUV is not the be-all and end-all that will get to 7 nm and beyond.

    45. Re:Moore's Law by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This article is bullshit meant to drive traffic to its website. "It's official! Intel has killed off their 10nm" or so is the impression. But it's not really a secret that Intel's first generation 10nm is a dud and Intel will release nothing at all using it except their few dual core i3 with GPU disabled that went on the market months ago as a token product.
      https://ark.intel.com/products/136863/Intel-Core-i3-8121U-Processor-4M-Cache-up-to-3_20-GHz

      This chip is real, but irrelevant. (much like 486DX50 with a 50MHz bus, Pentium III with RDRAM, or Itanium 1 except this is low end)
      What is relevant is the second generation 10nm process which we may colloquially call "10nm+". It's the only one we've cared about for a while. If Intel cancels that one, they're finished.

    46. Re:Moore's Law by MBGMorden · · Score: 1

      It feels like it pretty much ended about 2010

      I don't think it ended then as much as we have hit the point of diminishing returns.

      We'll do a classic car analogy - lets assume that this is a compute controlled car that can be safely piloted at any speed stated.

      Think about it this way: If you're going 5 Mph and you'll reach your destination in 96 hours, then doubling your speed is huge - at 10Mph you've saved 48 hours!

      Then at 20 Mph you've saved 24 hours! And at 40 Mph you've saved 12 more hours! All that is great. Who wants to sit in a car for any longer then necessary?

      The thing is, by the time you get to 81,920 Mph, if you double your speed again you're only cutting about 11 seconds off of your travel time. And it's only a few more cycles of doubling before we're getting into fractions of a second worth of difference. The increases in speed are no longer really relevant.

      A while back - I'd say around 2010 or so - the home computer reached that point of just being "fast enough". People with specialized uses still want more speed, but its harder for specialized uses to drive market demand when general users aren't subsidizing the cost via volume anymore.

      --
      "People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
    47. Re:Moore's Law by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Not necessarily. Fitting even more transistors in the same space might have hit rock bottom, but that doesn't mean you cannot add more cores. Yep, you might end up with a slightly (or substantially) larger CPU, but it will also be more powerful* (and power hungry). Unfortunately, this will make CPU more expensive and, to be honest, little people need, say, an octo-core with 16 thread cpu (tho I for one would love to have it).

      * Provided developers are able to parallelise their code (not always possible) and to do it properly.

    48. Re: Moore's Law by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The cores don't even have to be general purpose, they can throw in tons of purpose-made cores and/or ASICs that each specialise in specific tasks. That would make the processor both more powerful and more power efficient.

    49. Re:Moore's Law by Shatrat · · Score: 1

      I'm not a semiconductor fab expert either, but I do know that some times big jumps like that are counter-intuitively easier.

      For example, 10gbps network connections were starting to push the physical limits of a single wavelength on fiber and of the electronics behind the laser and photodiode, 25gbps is about as good as it gets with single wavelength direct detection on-off keying photonics. However, with 100gbps optics (real ones, not LR4 or SR10) it forced the need to use DSPs to generate the transmit and process the receive. The side effect is that suddenly the 100gbps optics have much higher noise and dispersion tolerance than the previous generation of 10gbps stuff. Now you can go out and buy a single wavelength 400gbps optic if you have the need and the budget.

      Maybe the move to 7nm fabs will also involve a fundamental change in some other aspect of lithography that makes it much easier than 10nm was.

      --
      09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
    50. Re:Moore's Law by fazig · · Score: 1

      As far as I'm informed it's not AMD's 7nm process to begin with. They haven't had their own fabrication since 2008 when they chose GlobalFoundries. Apparently they took this step because of the costs involved in every subsequent node shrink. What they do now is to develop the CPU design and TSMC will be using their 7nm process to implement said design.

      Theoretically Intel could do the same if they wanted to. Outsource at least some of their production until their own processes have become good enough.
      The big question is what it would take for them to do so. Personally I think we won't be seeing this happen as long as enough people are willing to pay for their overpriced CPUs, just to get the best possible performance in video games.

    51. Re:Moore's Law by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Absolutely true. However, hardware improvements are a one time cost that makes all your software faster. Improving software speed is a painstaking process of going through and re-writing code.

      In other words, hardware improvements are practically free. Software optimization is incredibly expensive.

      Or the other way around. SW improvement is a one-time cost that speeds up that app/os for all machines (old and new) that runs it. HW is something each customer has to buy (no free new hw, unlike the free new sw you can get).

    52. Re:Moore's Law by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Amen.

    53. Re: Moore's Law by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You'll possibly see a process called 7nm.

    54. Re:Moore's Law by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      For me the actual observable performance has scaled on the bandwidth since the DDR1 times. I have actually bought a memory system and then the processor is just the one most capable of utilizing it up to the cost limit related to the task. That was before I started running some rendering tasks which tip the balance to the other way.

    55. Re:Moore's Law by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 1

      Pentium III with RDRAM

      Wasn't that supposed to be Pentium 4, or did I miss something about P III's back then?

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    56. Re:Moore's Law by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 1

      There was nothing specifically about who will do it, though.

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    57. Re:Moore's Law by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      > I am a power user and I'm having to make up excuses to upgrade my 6700K to something more powerful.

      Describe what you think makes you a "power user".

      Try developing some Windows app that you need to test on all currently supported versions of Windows, both client and server versions, without purchasing a separate machine for each OS. VMs are a great solution for that. It won't take long for you to realize even a fast multi-core processor and SSDs start to feel sluggish, and you'll wish you could go beyond 64GB of RAM on commodity hardware. Throw in some database backend to test that app against, and you can pretty much rule out any laptop as your test environment. Add a few Linux distributions in the mix just to tinker with (say, the top 10 most popular ones) and you'll be looking for additional hardware.

      I have some specific needs, but beyond that I don't exactly think of myself as a power user.

    58. Re:Moore's Law by toddestan · · Score: 1

      If you're running a VM for all current versions of Windows, at the same time, along with 10 Linux VM's just because, you might be a power user. Or maybe nuts.

      If you're not trying to run all those all at once, you could easily get away with a pretty normal PC. Maybe the only slightly pricy bit could be a large enough SSD to hold all those VM's. Or just buy a hard drive for $75.

    59. Re:Moore's Law by Agripa · · Score: 1

      I don't think it's physics as much as financial. The demand is currently not there. A 5 year old laptop was faster than most current laptops/desktops/tablets/phones. Most people have stopped demanding high performance CPUs. Even gamers have shifted their focus to the video cards not the CPUs and a majority of games are now written for tablets/phones that have little more processing power than a 486. Because of the low processing power and low energy requirements of phones/tablets, the stuff that might have created demand like voice recognition has shifted to the cloud instead.

      Moore's law was and has always been about economics. It is about the cost per transistor even at the expense of performance. Integration increases with greater density, larger area, and improved packaging which all contribute to lower cost per transistor.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

  2. Steal it back from the Chinese by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I mean they haven't invented their current 7nm process, have they? They must have stole it from America.

  3. Time will tell by swinferno · · Score: 2

    Interesting move. Time will tell if this move is more in the interest of shareholders and will hinder technological advancements...

    --
    "In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." - George Orwell
  4. mac pro now delayed to 2020 (intel may it so AMD i by Joe_Dragon · · Score: 0

    mac pro now delayed to 2020 (intel may it so AMD is not going to happen)

  5. Intel changes name to 14tel by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Announces yet another lake with yet another plus.

  6. Expect some shareholder lawsuits by Crashmarik · · Score: 2, Interesting

    If what the report says is correct

    This isn’t to say the road to this point has been easy or straightforward, and the road ahead is even less solid. Intel has continually moved the public bar on 10nm back, incrementally, while singing a different song internally. In their Q1/2018 earnings call they moved the timetables and spun it in a curious way but were telling partners a different story.

    Nothing however tops the masterful “Hyperscaling” stunt where Intel brought in press and analysts to a ‘manufacturing day’ in early 2017 to explain how the crippling slide of 10nm was not actually a slide, it was a good thing and not a delay at all. SemiAccurate laughed and stopped just short of calling Intel liars.

    The company redefined terms well past the breaking point to show that scaling was ‘on track’ even if node cadence was ‘intentionally’ longer. As you can see from the above graph, all was good publicly, internally SemiAccurate was hearing a very different story. (Note: Intel was on track to miss that graph by 1+ year and sliding before 10nm was killed.)

    Be interesting to see how this plays out.

    1. Re:Expect some shareholder lawsuits by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      How it plays out is that, after shareholders dump stock and sue, driving the price down. Intel will "settle" by buying back a few billion in stock at depressed prices to prop up the price, and then immediately announce their 7nm process node is fully operational and ready to ship product. The resulting price spike in the stock will make them very rich.

    2. Re:Expect some shareholder lawsuits by olsmeister · · Score: 1

      https://www.marketwatch.com/st...

    3. Re:Expect some shareholder lawsuits by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's called a forward looking statement.

  7. Moles by Nukenbar · · Score: 1, Troll

    I find it hard to take any article seriously that uses the word "moles" multiple times that isn't discussing a skin issue.

    1. Re:Moles by tsa · · Score: 1

      There must be many articles written on the behaviour of moles and the damage they cause to fields and dykes.

      You choose how to interpret that ;)

      --

      -- Cheers!

    2. Re:Moles by Hrrrg · · Score: 2

      I find it hard to take any article seriously that uses the word "moles" multiple times that isn't discussing a skin issue.

      I tried to RTFA, but it appears that semiaccurate.com is down. Heh, haven't seen a site be slashdotted in a long time. I guess by moles you don't mean 6.02310^23?

    3. Re:Moles by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      mole is the industry term for decades

    4. Re: Moles by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Avocado's number: 1 guaca mole

      Sorry, that was Tera Bull.

      Oh I love scale puns

  8. PAYWALL by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    This is litle more than the lead-in to a "professional level subscribers only"... whatever thing.

  9. idiot quotes his own site by iggymanz · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Intel hasn't killed off anything. This idiot Charlie Demerjian quotes his own site to "prove"...what?

    fact is Intel is delaying 10nm (a marketing term more than an actual chip feature size, doesn't mean half pitch any more) to 2019

    1. Re:idiot quotes his own site by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This is the guy that got every Intel 10nm delay to date correct, well in advance.

      I'd trust him to write that what was 10nm was cancelled now, and likely replaced with something that is actually possible for Intel to achieve - or a jump to the 7nm node.

    2. Re:idiot quotes his own site by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You do realize that Intel themselves have named it 10nm. The fact of the matter is that Intel's10nm process hasn't worked out. They didn't delay it and delay it and delay it for fun you know? The real question is what they do now.

    3. Re:idiot quotes his own site by iggymanz · · Score: 1

      the only source he quotes is his own website...pffft...

      if he wants to be an internet journalist like a big boy he needs to up his game

    4. Re:idiot quotes his own site by iggymanz · · Score: 1

      but now he's saying it's canceled. Still any credible source says Intel is already shipping some devices, but will not be at full production level until next year. Now, if Intel really is "cancelling".... they'd be out of business. They can't not have 10nn (marketing term for features that in reality are a lot bigger)

    5. Re:idiot quotes his own site by iggymanz · · Score: 1

      Intel is shipping some 10nm now actually, the only question is when full production volume hits, which credible sources (and Intel...sure it may get delayed more) is 2019 thus far....

    6. Re:idiot quotes his own site by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Being someone who works out there and have seen the problems with the 10nm stuff, I'd say this is accurate. Can't see why they'd quit it completely instead of falling back to regroup as it were. But the fact is the 10nm stuff has all sorts of problems that would mean too many dies per wafer would not pass testing.

    7. Re:idiot quotes his own site by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      There's a huge difference between shipping a few parts in 10nm and mainstream production.

    8. Re: idiot quotes his own site by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Perhaps he's playing clickbait word games. Intel killed their 10nm process and is moving straight to their 10+ process.

  10. So Intel won't be able to pull away from AMD? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The 10nm process was seem as the ticket for Intel finally pull away from AMD, which is now too damn close for comfort.

  11. AMD on the other hand by pak9rabid · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Seems to be doing just fine with their venture into 7nm land.

    1. Re:AMD on the other hand by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Intel will need to go back to their lyin benchmark games. Oh, wait, I forgot, they already did with the i9 rollout.

    2. Re:AMD on the other hand by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      AMD didn't spend $300 million in a diversity push to get 50/50 representation in all positions of the company, and didn't link managers' bonuses to how many women they hired.

      Who'd have thought things could go so wrong when you start hiring based on sex rather than ability...

    3. Re:AMD on the other hand by bluefoxlucid · · Score: 1

      I wonder how AMD keeps costs down. It takes like 15 weeks to make a single processor--yes, the manufacturing process is pipelined because it takes so long to build a chip.

      --
      Support my political activism on Patreon.
    4. Re:AMD on the other hand by Tablizer · · Score: 1

      Women ruined Intel's chips? Good one.

      --
      Table-ized A.I.
    5. Re:AMD on the other hand by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yeah, but they're not making their own chips since many years, they're buying from TSMC in China, who together with Samsung in South Korea are the only ones who can currently build below 10nm.

    6. Re:AMD on the other hand by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Oh you found us out!

      We'l never replace you young white men with women and minorities at this rate.

      Darn you AC! Darn you!

    7. Re:AMD on the other hand by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Found the Russian.

    8. Re:AMD on the other hand by pak9rabid · · Score: 1

      They don't. They've just historically gotten themselves into debt trying to compete with Intel.

    9. Re:AMD on the other hand by pak9rabid · · Score: 1

      Not sure why you got downvoted, you're not incorrect...

  12. Too bad it didn't work by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The blog SemiAccurate would still be up an running if they were running with an Intel 10nm chip instead of Intel's current offerings.

  13. What are you talking about? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    There are chips in development that are 1000x more efficient (performance for the power) compared to current GPUs for neural network training and playback in development, and the development chips are designed on existing processes. See the paper on RapidNN for an example.

    The secret to the speedup is to place memory and arithmetic units on the same chip. That technique has room for improvement still as memory and logic processes are a little different and combining them on the same chip results in inefficiencies.

    1. Re:What are you talking about? by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 4, Informative

      The secret to the speedup is to place memory and arithmetic units on the same chip.

      Wikipedia has a good overview: Computational RAM. I know some of the people who worked on this with Dave Patterson's group at UCB. Very smart people, and a very interesting project.

      We are in the post-Moore world. The future is massive parallelism.

    2. Re:What are you talking about? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      We are in the post-Moore world. The future is massive parallelism.

      I agree but oddly JavaScript (no parallelism in the language) and Python (GIL-limited parallelism in the language) are becoming very popular. Programmers still love thinking sequentially.

    3. Re:What are you talking about? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Man, you can write down parallel code in Python _very_ easily without GIL limitations whatsoever.

    4. Re:What are you talking about? by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 1

      I agree but oddly JavaScript (no parallelism in the language) and Python (GIL-limited parallelism in the language) are becoming very popular.

      JavaScript has WebCL, giving access to massive parallelism, although it is not yet supported by all browsers.

      Python is used more than any other language for massively parallel NNs, with TensorFlow, Keras, Caffe, etc.

  14. The fast paced evolution has finished. For now. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    We are approaching the limit for CMOS-based electronics, for many years there has been a lt of research for an alternative, although none are here yet. But when one of those alternatives finally arrives, it will be a second revolution of computing, like being back in the 90s. One promising technology is vacuum channel transistors, for example.

  15. A simple solution by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    get creimer to sit on the ICs, that'll compress them down to the next few nodes!

  16. My Big 10 inch process by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Is alive and well!

  17. oh well by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Semiaccurate seems to be slashdotted

  18. Semiaccurate? by The+Cynical+Critic · · Score: 4, Informative

    Ummm.... You people do know that Semiaccurate is a kind of notorious for being run by an insanely zealous AMD fanboy? We're talking about the same person who made some absolutely crazy misreading of a number of documents to arrive at a conclusion that Nvidia's Fermi architecture had sub 5% yields as devices based on that architecture were shipping in good numbers.

    A reliable source this is not, particularly when it comes to AMD's or it's direct competitors, so wait for some more trustworthy sources before making your mind up on this subject.

    --
    "Why should I want to make anything up? Life's bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it."
    1. Re: Semiaccurate? by StevenDeBondt · · Score: 2

      Yeah well fermi was a disaster producion-wise mate, nobody really knows why that implosion of heat sold that good that it did. I guess marketing and loyalism was strong in that age too.

    2. Re:Semiaccurate? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Baseless, and ad hominem. On Intels' 10nm process, SA have been pretty much alone in pointing out Intels questionable messaging, and they've been ahead of the game in pointing out new codenames and the urgent, messy response to Ryzen.

      On the last few generations of Intel server SKUs, SA wrote very complimentary reviews and comprehensively outlined why they would dominate, which they did. When AMD released EPYC, they rightly pointed out that it would seriously disrupt Intels market share... which it has.

      Sure they have got a few things wrong over the years, but that is bound to happen when you are trying to write anything before it's public knowledge.

  19. Re:mac pro now delayed to 2020 (intel may it so AM by ausekilis · · Score: 1

    mac pro now delayed to 2020 (intel may it so AMD is not going to happen)

    I'm struggling with what you're trying to say here. "may it so"? "AMD is not going to happen?" Huh?
    I don't think Apples "tech refresh" is in any way dependent on Intel's process size. There hasn't been any correlation that I've seen between process size and "mac[book] pro" releases. Despite not yet hitting 10nm, Intel has still released new iterations of their i-series chips pretty consistently.

    Intel has done some underhanded things in the past to push AMD out - and got slapped with anticompetitive lawsuits. AMD has proven they've got solid designs with the PS4 and XB1. Only time will tell if Apple cares about name and reputation (such as it is) versus solid technology at a reasonable price. Any new shiny computer from Apple will be priced the same high price, regardless if it's Intel or AMD inside. Besides, Apple has been making noise about developing their own ARM chips for laptop computing. So this may all be a moot point.

  20. Why ? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    If any shareholder thinks they can build better, they are welcome to step forward and give manufacturing tips to the intel guys.

    Until they can do that, they should remember the thousands of patents and inventions intel already developed.

    They should look at how intel has continually been driving down the power requirement while still increasing performance.

    They should consider how intel went from single cores to dual core, to 4 core, 8 core, etc. etc. ...

    Intel also has partnered with AMD on developing improved graphics performance too.

    10nm or 7nm is just a number.

    There is a lot of innovation going on every day, without making things 'just smaller'.

    And as the user market has shifted , consumers want light weight, long lasting all day Tablets and Smart phones.

    Notebooks and desktops might still hold its place for a while...

    But the new generation of humans expect everything in their phone or tablet anyway...

    Intel can focus on widening it's product line to service multiple devices, from watches to servers.

    10nm is NOT the only measure of market performance. After trying to improve the current system, it just doesn't scale for mass production and they are right to stop beating this dead horse and back up, go back to attempt to invent a diffferent process that WILL scale and work towards mass production.

    After all, how fast do you need to go for kitten photos and facebook posts of what you had for dinner ? :-)

  21. Interesting Timing ? by supercell · · Score: 1
    Wall Street Analyst just upgraded Intel this morning in large part based on the move to the 10nm process. Stock jumped on the upgrade.

    Seems he is misinformed or SemiAccurate is off base

    https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/2...

  22. So Semiaccurate is run by Intel? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    You know: Ye ole false flag "agent provocateur" routine, to discredit the opposition's positions.

  23. Or not by RogueWarrior65 · · Score: 1

    https://www.macrumors.com/2018...

  24. Because intel cant do it means it cant be done? by voss · · Score: 1

    AMD will likely have 7nm chips out sometime in late 2019.

  25. Already Refuted by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Intel has already refuted the claim. SemiAccurate breaks some big stories sometimes, but they also break a lot of fake stories.