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."

Comments

Expect some shareholder lawsuits

[Crashmarik]

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.

idiot quotes his own site

[iggymanz]

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

Re:Moore's Law

[mangastudent]

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.