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Intel Optimistic About Its Next-Gen 7nm Process Technology (anandtech.com)

From a report: Originally planned to enter mass production in the second half of 2016, Intel's 10 nm process technology is still barely used by the company today. Currently the process is used to produce just a handful of CPUs, ahead of an expected ramp to high-volume manufacturing (HVM) only later in 2019. Without a doubt, Intel suffered delays on its 10 nm process by several years, significantly impacting the company's product lineup and its business. Now, as it turns out, Intel's 10 nm may be a short-living node as the company's 7 nm tech is on-track for introduction in accordance with its original schedule.

For a number of times Intel said that it set too aggressive scaling/transistor density targets for its 10 nm fabrication process, which is why its development ran into problems. Intel's 10 nm manufacturing tech relies exclusively on deep ultraviolet lithography (DUVL) with lasers operating on a 193 nm wavelength. To enable the fine feature sizes that Intel set out to achieve on 10 nm, the process had to make heavy usage of mutli-patterning. According to Intel, a problem of the process was precisely its heavy usage of multipatterning (quad-patterning to be more exact).

10 of 114 comments (clear)

  1. This is where Intel re-labels. by Rockoon · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Intel will now re-label their 10nm as 7nm.

    And before you go there, Intel was the first company to lie about node size.

    --
    "His name was James Damore."
  2. Good Time to Stop Hardware Obsolencene by BrendaEM · · Score: 4, Insightful

    With chip makers struggling to make faster chips, this is a good time to make a stand to stop companies from making comparable hardware obsolete--just because they want to sell chips. If they can make faster chips then buy them, but please do not buy side-graded hardware, that's no better than what you have--because it fills up the landfills. My 7-year-old intel 2600k is only 30% slower than current quad-core offerings. I need more cores, but I am not throwing this motherboard, chip, and memory out, any time soon.

    --
    https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
    1. Re:Good Time to Stop Hardware Obsolencene by UnknownSoldier · · Score: 2

      That Gamers Nexus 2017 i7-2600K benchmark has been updated for 2018: i7-2600K benchmark.
      i.e.
        They added Threadripper 2990WX metrics both in Creator Mode and Game Mode.

      Sad that modern CPUs only give single digit performance increases. :-/

      Glad you mentioned Civ 6 -- a perfect example that shows some games are still dominated by single core performance. (Quad core has been a standard for *years* but some game devs are still not using it efficiently. Granted not everything is parallelizable but console game devs can't get away with this due to their poor single core performance. Well aside from Dark Souls which was addressed with the remaster.)

      With such a wide difference in performance one really needs to compare what apps they are using with the hardware to make sure they are getting the expected bang/buck.

      Indies, while I love them, tend to be the worst at not using multi-core -- either at all, or poorly. Hopefully with cheap(er) multi-cores this will motivate people to start using cores more efficiently.

      It's good we finally have some competition again. Ryzen is keeping Intel "honest."

  3. They better be optomistic. by AbRASiON · · Score: 2

    The 10nm delays were hailed as "the end of intel!" and "AMD will destroy them" and other kinds of ridiculous things, over a year ago.

    A year later and I'll say, these delays are very significant now, it's very likely that AMD will genuinely have a processor out that has superior process technology in it. May not be faster due to design but the gap closing faster.

    Also, Intel 7nm chips will be superior to other "7nm" chips out there, since companies kind of just make up the numbers now. Intel 10nm = TMSC 7nm basically. Quite frustrating.

    Regardless Intel needs this, 14nm is seriously long in the tooth for Intel and there are very obvious limitations to what can be done for efficiency, performance, they're very much running out improvements.

    1. Re:They better be optomistic. by Gravis+Zero · · Score: 3, Interesting

      The 10nm delays were hailed as "the end of intel!" and "AMD will destroy them" and other kinds of ridiculous things, over a year ago.

      It's funny you say that because that's happening right now. You can claim an Intel core is faster but when you factor in Specter and Meltdown mitigations then it's slower, especially because server hosts disable SMT entirely for Intel CPUs. Gamers may not be interested in tight security but that's exactly what the server world wants and that's where the real money is.

      Right now, Intel is hemorrhaging money to try to keep up their PR/anti-competitive game in hopes that they will be able to come out with a core without such flaws before the damage is too much to come back from. This bullshitting is just part of their PR game.

      --
      Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
    2. Re:They better be optomistic. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      That's not the case. In fact, that's horseshit starting from a flawed inception, that all IPC measurements are taken equally. They aren't. Intel chips dominate AMD in terms of forcing developers to optimize for them exclusively.

      Such is the case with several benchmarking tools that have been exposed and "known" to do this for some time.
      They don't really demonstrate a real-world measurement, they demonstrate a business dev budget in the billions.

      In the real world, Intel has something around a 7% lead in IPC for the average load which includes some arguably Intel-optimized testing and some (most) agnostic.
      That is completely wiped in some other workloads by AMD's greater bus bandwidth though, and all of this is predicated on existing known SPECTRE/etc vulns.
      Those will need to be patched, and so far Intel has shown to be vulnerable to a much larger swath of these than AMD, intimating further IPC slowdowns upcoming.

      Does this mean AMD can afford to stop innovating, no. They need to kick ass right now as hard as they can with Threadripper, bring that price down and give it the efficiency and security touches, and coming in already as they do at UNDER HALF of what Intel is charging AFTER considering the narrow performance gap in single core (which doesn't even help you in gaming anymore that much given the bloat and continued dev focus towards parallelization) - and ultimately this has always been AMD's shining selling point - it does a comparable job for half the price, and they're not complete assholes like Intel. That's a win/win for me.

      You need that last 7% and want a backdoor with no password baked into your Gallium, well, I hope they're paying you something for your willing bondage, but I doubt they actually are.

  4. Mind-bending by AlanObject · · Score: 2

    Given that the diameter of a silicon atom is around 0.2nm, that means they are now building transistors out of something like 30-35 atoms across. How far down can this go before it all disappears in some kind of quantum uncertainty blob?

    1. Re:Mind-bending by Kohath · · Score: 2

      Ok, we won't quote you, random internet guy.

  5. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 4, Informative

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  6. Big business doesn't care about faster single core by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    AMD already has a *much* better processor out there. Because businesses calculate in dollars per performance. They like as many cores as possible with the fastest interconnects.

    In all of those aspects, Intel currently is a joke, compared to AMD.
    Which is exactly, why Epyc processors are currently making big cuts into Intel's Xeon revenues.
    Intel is currently in panic mode.

    It's really pathetic, how Intel fanboys always cling to the one thing they have left: Meltdown-included single core performance.
    By acting as if that's equal to "speed". Because current generation games are still programmed for consoles with very few threads. And a few algorithms can't be parallelized.
    Which will be meaningless, as soon as the next consoles come out, and because nobody in the real world runs just one algorithm at the same time on his system.

    And no, Intel's "7nm" will not be superior to other "7nm" chips, because it WILL be Intel's 10nm process! ^^
    (Intel came up with it, btw, according to the current top comment.)

    Grow up. You are not Intel. You don't have to project your self-worth onto something else, just because you subconsciously think your own life sucks so much. Your life could be much greater, if you'd actually deal with it, instead of running away.