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Intel Has Killed off the 10nm Process, Report Says (semiaccurate.com)
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."
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."
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.
Seems to be doing just fine with their venture into 7nm land.
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.
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.