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).

Comments

This is where Intel re-labels.

[Rockoon]

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

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

Good Time to Stop Hardware Obsolencene

[BrendaEM]

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.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Big business doesn't care about faster single core

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:They better be optomistic.

[Gravis Zero]

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.