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Intel Kills “Tick-Tock”
- unchocked 11y agoSo now it's "Tick-Tock-Tweak".
- acqq 11y agoNot even that, the question is if there will ever be more than one or two more "ticks" in the traditional sense. Apparently the sizes of the elements on the chips are roughly the same on Intel's 10nm and some other 7nm. As an example of what people in the field say: if nothing changes, at 5nm, 80% of the transistors would have to be "dark" (unpowered) all the time. EUV, often presented as the new solution in the processes, would also possibly be too expensive under 7nm even if it's still not even introduced. So the "tweak-tweak" can become the major cycle soon on more levels.
- Dylan16807 11y agoThe question is what "nothing changes" means, and whether that's a desktop context or not. If he means a chip with 10x as many transistors can only keep 2x active at the same power budget, that's not a big deal. Give me a physically smaller chip in my phone, and a bigger cooler on my desktop.
- 0xcde4c3db 11y agoAs far as I understand the issues with the current tech, it's not good enough that a chip only generates, say, 45 watts. You need to know that the dissipation is spread out enough in area+time to not overheat any individual components, which gets harder as the components get smaller.
- dzdt 11y ago"Tick-Tock-Tweak" is a great summary, so much easier than the "Process-Architecture-Optimization" label that Intel gave to explain their new plan.
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- maaku 11y agoSome PR person at Intel is kicking themselves now.
- acqq 11y agoNot necessarily, maybe they know it's time not to give the "tick" expectations anymore. They can be very soon away, and from their perspective, it's time to be identified with other aspects, not with "ticks."
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- djcapelis 11y agoI like Tick-Tock-Punch personally, but it doesn't really matter. I wonder how long this next pattern will last? Probably not nearly as long as tick-tock.
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- echoes01 11y agoTick-Tock-Twerk
- alex_young 11y agoTick. Tock. Tweet.
- Reason077 11y agoSo Intel's "Ticks" weren't quite keeping up with the "Tocks".
- avs733 11y agotranslation: this transition has been inevitable since we discovered that immersion lithography is a bear, the deposition processes to support atomic layer deposition are a bitch, copper has issues being anorexic, our fabs are so sensitive that they are effected by nearby farms, and EUV litho is a piper dream (in a vacuum). Not to judge, they make things that are mere atoms in size...but the corollary to Moore's law should always have been EY's law: The cost of each major change in semiconductor production methods doubles
- revelation 11y agoOr they figure there is no point in pouring exponentially more cash into R&D when there is no viable competition left. It's hard to tell with Intel.
- raverbashing 11y agoAnd less and less people buy new PCs with their products Some phones have Intel processors but they're not popular
- beeboop 11y agoI found this hard to believe but from a quick Google search it appears you're right - Intel desktop CPU sales have been on a downward trend since 2011.
- creshal 11y agoThat's partially related to Intel running against a wall with CPU speeds around that time, and partially to the mobile boom. An 2011 i7-2600K desktop CPU is still competitive with current generation i7 CPUs for general-purpose computing – most improvements were in specialized instruction sets like AVX or TSX (which infamously was broken on the first generation shipping it). Lower-end i3 and i5 are even worse off, because they don't get most acceleration instruction sets in the first place. For consumers, it makes absolutely no sense to upgrade their desktop PCs unless they break.
- ricw 11y agoMain take away: Intel is doing three phases instead of two tick-tocks. Secondary take away: due to the increased time to move to a better manufacturing process, Intel will likely not have as much a competitive advantage anymore. Though the number of competitors will (and has already) decrease due to the high investments. Would be interesting to see how long intel estimates the process cycles are going to be, i.e. how Moore's law will progress. Weird statement in the article: "it (TSCMs 7nm tech) should be very similar in terms of transistor density to Intel's 10-nanometer technology". This makes no sense as it would be comparing apples and pears. Surely they are referring to TSCMs 10nm tech?!
- ghaff 11y ago>Weird statement in the article At this point, process nodes don't map to a particularly well-defined set of feature sizes across vendors. So what I assume they're saying is that what Intel calls 10nm is actually pretty similar in terms of transistor size/density to what TSMC is calling 7nm. (No idea if that's actually true but it's what I believe is being said.)
- creshal 11y agoYes. Node sizes and actually physical sizes have no correlation anymore. Smaller nodes are smaller, but nowhere near the sizes suggested by names. The already a decade old 45nm process highlights this nicely: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/45_nanometer#Technology_demos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/45_nanometer#Technology_demos Effective sizes are all over the place, and Intel's process in particular is nowhere near 45nm for any relevant dimension. It's similar with more recent technologies (and with 3D transistors, the distance between two arbitrary points becomes even less comparable.)
- phkahler 11y agoI've been wondering if EUV will bring things back in line. They say the light sources are not bright enough yet, but isn't doing a 2-4x exposure better than double or triple pattering? If the total time were the same you'd still have the benefit of the shorter wavelength allowing dramatically smaller features. What am I missing?
- arielweisberg 11y agoI've been really disappointed in Intel's desktop offerings. At the 300$ high end (quad core i7) desktop price point we have been at 4 cores for years. I would really like an option for more slower cores at that price point. I guess I kind of get why. Might be a socket compatibility and cost issue, the allocation of die space to a GPU, but it would nice to see some movement. Also probably zero demand outside of software developers, but I have to wonder if it is kind of chicken and egg problem. It's actually kind of funny if I recall on desktops more of the die is GPU than CPU.
- deelowe 11y agoLarge core counts are the bread and butter of enterprise/cloud. I suspect Intel is binning those chips for their real customers (not desktop users). Probably has to do with wafer yields or something if I can hazard a guess.
- arielweisberg 11y agoI don't think so because it's not the same layout. Server's don't have GPUs and not the same GPUs when they have stuff for CUDA. They also don't use the same sockets or number of memory channels.
- deelowe 11y agoI meant high core count CPUs (intel), not GPUs.
- arielweisberg 11y agoThe desktop chips and server chips are not the same chips. You can't bin a different chip as something else. Binning is the practice of taking identical silicon and separating it based on grade and functionality (disabling cores, turning off functionality etc.). Server CPUs don't even use the same sockets they are fundamentally different.
- 11y ago
- carsongross 11y agoPeople still haven't completely worked through the fact that Moore's Law has died. I think the anger phase was the late 2000's, when quantum computing, etc. was trotted out to denounce anyone noticing the slowdown. This looks like bargaining to me.
- notzorbo3 11y agoNah, you're not taking in account Moore's Meta Law: "Whenever Moore's law is no longer applicable, its definition is changed to accommodate some new version of 'computers get faster'." Moore's Law was dead a long long time ago.
- carsongross 11y agoCompletely agree on both counts. There are seven stages of grief, so these things take time.
- js8 11y agoIt seems to me that there is still some progress to be made in Moore's Law. Maybe not directly by shrinking the manufacturing process, but: AlphaGo requires huge amount of energy and CPU power to accomplish what human brain does in 20W, just using a smallish portion of its capabilities. There must be a plenty of undiscovered architectural improvements to computers that can still kick the Moore Law for a couple years.
- 11y ago
- mrb 11y agoThis turn of events was evident as of 2 months ago. I wrote: "Intel's Tick-Tock is no more. Say hello to Tick-Tock-Tock." https://plus.google.com/+MarcBevand/posts/ZpuSkXqaBfK https://plus.google.com/+MarcBevand/posts/ZpuSkXqaBfK
- coverband 11y agoWould it be fair to say ... ... they're switching to Tic-Tac-Toe? (Thank you, don't forget to tip your waitress) ;-)
- znpy 11y agoThis is actually a nice joke.
- beloch 11y agoFun fact: The distance between silicon atoms in a crystal is on the order of 0.2 to 0.5 nm. The 10 nm process is therefore operating on the order of tens of atoms. That's just nuts. Quantum effects must really complicate things at this scale!
- devindotcom 11y agoYeah, I've been looking forward to how they'll go past 10nm for years! Crazy to think how much control they have in the manufacturing process.
- npunt 11y agoThey should call this tick-tock-tack, since the last stage is when they tack and introduce new architecture. You heard it here first.