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Intel Stockpiling 10nm Chips
- dsr_ 8y agoSemiaccurate claims that this is entirely Intel marketing fluff, and that in reality Intel can't get 10nm yield up to useful levels, now or ever. (that's a tl;dr for https://www.semiaccurate.com/2019/04/25/leaked-roadmap-shows-intels-10nm-woes/ https://www.semiaccurate.com/2019/04/25/leaked-roadmap-shows... )
- liuliu 8y agoMy understanding is that Intel is doing OK with smaller die size 10nm (Cannon Lake-U / Ice Lake-U) for Ultrabooks. But for bigger dies such as HEDT or server CPUs, the Ice Lake SP is still pretty much in the air with Intel's vague timeline of "sooner than expected end of 2020" claim.
- happycube 8y agoCannon Lake-U is definitely not OK, the GPU is disabled in all shipping parts, and aside from AVX-512 really isn't much better than the equivalent 14nm part. Ice Lake-U sounds better on paper - at the very least it's a 4C die.
- TazeTSchnitzel 8y agoIsn't that “Ultrabook” part the one with the broken GPU that's shipping only in an obscure variant of a cheap Chinese education-only laptop?
- shorts_theory 8y agoYes, that's the one. Anandtech did a pretty good analysis of Cannonlake here: https://www.anandtech.com/show/13405/intel-10nm-cannon-lake-and-core-i3-8121u-deep-dive-review/ https://www.anandtech.com/show/13405/intel-10nm-cannon-lake-...
- AmVess 8y agoCanon Lake is the opposite of OK. Its turbo modes are much lower than the previous gen, and it clocks itself lower by 600 MHz under the same workloads. Intel's first crack at 10nm was a jaw-dropping affair for how poorly it showed.
- steve19 8y agoSemiaccurate is anti-Intel, they are not a bias free source of information.
- robert_foss 8y agoThat may or may not be, but what certainly is true is that Intel's public messaging about 10nm production has been much less accurate than that of SemiAccurate.
- 0-_-0 8y agoYou could even say that it was less than semi-accurate
- CoolGuySteve 8y agoThe leaked roadmap is not from SemiAccurate though, it's from here: https://tweakers.net/nieuws/151984/roadmap-toont-dat-intel-in-2021-nog-desktop-cpus-op-14nm-maakt.html https://tweakers.net/nieuws/151984/roadmap-toont-dat-intel-i... If you had read the SemiAccurate article you would know that.
- kristianp 8y agoAccording to that image,10nm isn't due until 2Q 2021, in Tiger Lake and Rocket Lake U series and Y series.
- 0xcde4c3db 8y agoSure, it's due in 2021 now. At this point, Intel's 10nm has been two years away for about 5 years.
- reitzensteinm 8y agoI still remember pondering whether to delay the purchase of my Skylake laptop so I could play with AVX-512 on Cannonlake. That was two laptops ago...
- mrtweetyhack 8y agoever is a long time. I mean, given "ever", I could build 10nm chips.
- mjfl 8y agoWhat are Intel and other semiconductors planning to pivot to when they can no longer reduce process size at a reasonable pace (i.e. now)? Is there a plan, or is it an existential wall?
- jonas21 8y agoLess ticking and more tocking?
- neltnerb 8y agoIt seems like they plan to shift to novel hybrid architectures, at least if things like Intel owning Altera mean anything. I'd expect them to be doing things like putting neural network accelerators down and the like. Or everyone has to make a dramatic leap to a new underlying computing physics, like the quantum dot transistor or the vacuum transistor [1] that lets them increase frequency or lower power consumption. If you double the clock frequency, I believe this still linearly increases the computing throughput, though I'm not expert enough to know if that's still strictly true. [1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/devices/introducing-the-vacuum-transistor-a-device-made-of-nothing https://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/devices/introducing...
- apcragg 8y agoA big problem with increasing the clock speed is that your processor still needs to wait for the DRAM to respond. Modern processors are crazy smart about prefetching, caching, and running instructions in parallel, but at some point Memory bandwidth and latency begin to dominate over CPU clock speed. Many players have started looking at puting multiple dies on the same substrate with high-speed interconnects to reduce memory latency and improve throughput. Those improvements could help push the usefulness of higher clocks a bit further.
- neltnerb 8y agoIs it roughly accurate to say that if your computing area operates at 10x the speed, you can do 10 cores worth of computing work with one core? That would free up a lot of die area for other things, though I don't know how to guess how much that extra space would improve the other bits. I'd kind of figure that such a technology would also speed up the RAM, but I suppose that's not true either if the underlying storage technology is too slow. But I know that's also an area of active research.
- tedunangst 8y agoStockpiling chips so partners can test them later? If the point is to validate designs, wouldn't you want to do the testing before the stockpiling?
- mbell 8y agoIt's not so the partner can test/validate the cpu, it's so the partners can test/validate their designs using the cpu. i.e. It's hard to test/validate a laptop design if no CPUs exist that work with it.
- colejohnson66 8y agoBut why build a laptop with that CPU if there’s none of it available?
- anticensor 8y agoThermal validation. It is easier to test in a laptop as it has a limited thermal flux.
- JohnFen 8y agoThey would be betting that by the time they're ready to go to market, the CPUs to support it will exist.
- tedunangst 8y agoI'd say it's equally hard to validate a laptop design if all the CPUs are hidden away in some stockpile.
- mbell 8y agoThey are stockpiling working chips to prepare to send them to the OEMs for verification. Intel probably has to send out tens of thousands of CPUs for this, every OEM is going to want hundreds to verify their systems before they start mass production. It's an indicator that Intel thinks they have worked out the major yield issues and is preparing for production runs.
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- baybal2 8y agoIntel is very likely to miss holidays with 10nm. OEM manufacturers in South China, are screaming murder, and even ones who were Intel shops for decades like Weibu are jumping the ship. Intel is losing China big time. I'd say, a lot would've been fine even if Intel gave them existing 14nm chips, but since all 14nm capacity is gobbled by server chips, it's not gonna happen. I believe Intel is making a huge error by prioritising big wholesale Xeon buyers like Amazon over OEM manufacturers. Hosting providers will be back the moment Intel regains the tech lead or finally makes 10nm Xeons, but OEMs will walk away and not return.
- dfrage 8y agoTwo conflicting thoughts on that: - If the big wholesale Xeon buyers and users qualify AMD chips and start buying a lot of them, Intel will find that landscape a lot more competitive, this is a more "sticky" market than OEM products for consumers. - They could be betting that AMD will lose the plot again, as they've done throughout their corporate history, e.g. after the 486, and after K8. The OEM consumer market is less sticky and will trivially move back to Intel if they have competitive offerings.
- baybal2 8y agoMy own experience tells me of things being quite opposite of this. Big hosting providers care little for what runs in their servers for as long as it's fast (they always can pass costs onto their clients without loosing much, especially bigger ones) In OEM, things are dominated by much more complex dynamics in between supply chain, factories, and clients. Intel had no problem with Taiwanese, as a lot of TW companies had relationship with Intel since the "Desktop First" era, but in mainland, Intel had to fight a bloody battle for the fresh and juicy laptop and tablet markets for the last decade, with kickbacks, blackjack, and hookers. Their position here was never strong to begin with.
- frankchn 8y agoXeons, even at wholesale prices, are probably much more profitable than laptop chips though.
- joncrane 8y agoThis doesn't make sense. How much "stockpiling" is required for enough processors for partners to validate? Surely the amount required for validation is at least three orders of magnitude smaller than the amount you expect to sell once they're released.
- blu42 8y agoIf Intel are stockpiling 10nm parts now (Q2) so they'd have something on the shelves for Q4 then I don't see how their 10nm facilities are in a good shape. Furthermore, when everybody in the industry uses the 'x% yield' metrics, and Intel is using phrases like 'improving at a faster rate than anticipated', etc, to communicate yields, that means their proper yield metrics are far from looking good.
- whatever1 8y agoThe intel CPU situation is pretty embarrassing. I built back in 2009 a desktop with the intel i7-920 @2.66GHz (the first real quad core from intel) which I bought for less than $300. I look today and the cpu I can get for less than $300 is a 6 core i5 9600K @3.7 GHz. According to Passmark [1], this new CPU, is less than 2.5x faster overall, despite the additional 2 cores, and the much higher frequency. Intel just spent 10 years designing sockets and mobos and mocking ARM instead of concentrating on how to push the computing (mobile & desktop) technology forward. (1) https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-i5-9600K-vs-Intel-i7-920/3337vs834 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-i5-9600K-vs-Intel...
- adrianN 8y agoThe TDP is a lot lower for the newer processor. Performance per Watt has improved quite a bit over the last years. Given that datacenters and mobile applications are increasingly more important than traditional "TDP doesn't matter" desktops, I think this is a positive development.
- effie 8y agoIntel changed their definition of TDP lately, so actual consumption can be higher than TDP. So it is not trivial to compare energy consumption of last year processors with the older ones.