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Intel Says They Aren't Abandoning 10nm Chips, Despite Report Saying They're Canceled (pcmag.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from PC Magazine: Intel is denying a new report that claims the chipmaker is abandoning its 10 nanometer manufacturing process following years of delays. "Media reports published today that Intel is ending work on the 10nm process are untrue," the company tweeted on Monday. Hours prior to the tweet, semiconductor news site SemiAccurate claimed that Intel was pulling the plug on the chip-making technology over the company's ongoing struggles to bring it to full production. Chips built with the 10nm process were originally slated to arrive in 2016, but the company has repeatedly pushed that launch date back. During Intel's last earnings call, executives said they now expect 10nm chips to officially drop during the 2019 holiday season.
In response to SemiAccurate's report, Intel said it continues to make "good progress" on the 10nm technology. "Yields are improving consistent with the timeline we shared during our last earnings report," the chipmaker added in its tweet. The next-generation silicon will supposedly offer a 25 percent performance increase over 14nm-manufactured technology. The 10nm chips will also be able to run on 50 percent less power when clocked at the same performance of a 14nm processor. Intel will hold an earnings call on Thursday, so expect company executives to elaborate on 10nm's progress then.
In response to SemiAccurate's report, Intel said it continues to make "good progress" on the 10nm technology. "Yields are improving consistent with the timeline we shared during our last earnings report," the chipmaker added in its tweet. The next-generation silicon will supposedly offer a 25 percent performance increase over 14nm-manufactured technology. The 10nm chips will also be able to run on 50 percent less power when clocked at the same performance of a 14nm processor. Intel will hold an earnings call on Thursday, so expect company executives to elaborate on 10nm's progress then.
Intel has effectively missed it's 10nm die shrink when Samsung and TSMC are on 7nm. Intel better have 5nm in it's back pocket because it's pointless building any 10nm CPU's now (maybe other chips instead.)
These values (14 nm, 10 nm, 7 nm) are not directly comparable. These days, the values seems more like marketing numbers.
Intel does need to focus more on innovation and implementation and less on customer segmentation, though. Intel used to be so far ahead that even an inferior processor design was on par with the competition, due to the advantage in fabrication.
Two days before AMD reports, three days before Intel reports, Semiaccurate floats this rumor with pretty much nothing to back it up. Here's the meat of their argument Note: The following is analysis for professional level subscribers only. So this is about signing up subscribers? Or an attempt at illegal stock manipulation? Both? It is certainly not about quality journalism.
I am definitely an AMD fanboy, full disclosure there. But that doesn't make me an Intel hater, at least not when they lay off the dirty tricks, which appears to pretty much the situation at the moment. So... balanced assessment: no reason to doubt Intel's revised 10nm production schedule. This is all about yields as Semiaccurate is fond of pointing out.
You can see from this that Intel's 10nm fin pitch is a bit more aggressive than TSMC's 7nm, 6% smaller. Intel's minimum metal pitch is a lot more aggressive, 22%. This is all right at the limit of what deep UV alone can do, so that might be Intel's bridge too far right there. I have a whole lot of difficultly believing that Intel did not learn enough from their aborted ramp up last spring to know exactly what they need to do to hit their yields, most probably including respinning their masks to a density nearly identical to TSMC.
Buried in there somewhere I did find one credible little nugget... Semiaccurate pointed out that last spring's 8121U Cannon Lake part, produced in limited quantities and only ever seen in the hands of a few reviewers, is specced without a GPU. Not because it doesn't have one, but because does have one but it doesn't work. I find that credible. Debugging both a processor and a GPU is much more work that just a processor or GPU alone. In contrast, AMD doesn't try to fab APUs until both the processor and GPU have been successfully fabbed separately. Excellent strategy, a big risk reduction.
Another huge thing AMD did to cut the 7nm risk was, jumping into bed with the phone industry. Intel convinced themselves it was a good idea to go it alone as usual, and were proved colossally wrong. Though I am not going to claim any special inside information, I think that Intel is going to bring up its Cannon Lake production successfully, 3 or 4 years behind schedule as they say, and that this is the end of the line for Intel as an independent fab. It's simple: the days of always being a node ahead are over, today they are half a node behind. From here on, there are no advantages to running an independent fab, only disadvantages. When Intel finally does ramp up Cannon Lake they will be in an excellent position to negotiate a new, cooperative deal with the rest of the industry, but if they persist in marching to their own drumbeat they will pay an enormous cost in market share and operating income over the next few years.
I am going to take a wild guess here: Intel plays around with EUV a bit, gets some first hand data on what horribly nasty stuff that is, then makes a deal with TSMC. Intel is going to do just fine as a pure Engineering/IP player like AMD but they risk everything by running their own vanity fab.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.