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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."
Prepared how? You say it like it's gonna change anything.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
Seems to be doing just fine with their venture into 7nm land.
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?
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.
...or research new algorithms. Nah, can't have that!
Ezekiel 23:20
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
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."
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
To quote this August article About Intel's 10nm Process Lead:
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.
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.
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.
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.