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Their design for 10nm and the implementation didn't line up. Whatever their (still undisclosed) problems were, the entire node was fundamentally flawed. It mig
by zanny 7y ago
Their design for 10nm and the implementation didn't line up. Whatever their (still undisclosed) problems were, the entire node was fundamentally flawed.
It might have been hubris at having been at the cutting edge of fab tech for so long. It could have just been the fruits of pushing the envelope - sometimes what you predict will happen when you put theory to application proves false.
It has warped their business heavily for 4+ years now, but in the same way AMD had to "get their act together" with their processor design after Bulldozer failed spectacularly in practice and took ~7 years to fix it companies at these scales cannot turn on a dime - Intel had their roadmap planned a decade in advance, and to have it so thoroughly trashed starting around ~2015-2016 will require until at least 2021 to correct in all likelihood.
- chx 7y agoI more and more tend to believe the rumors (started by Semiaccurate) we will not see 10nm in mass quantities and 7nm is the next. We will see very, very soon: Intel said 10nm CPUs in client systems will be on shelves for the 2019 holiday season.
- DuskStar 7y agoBut weren't there Intel 10nm chips sold for revenue in 2017? [0] Granted, it was an OEM-only part for some China specific education laptops... 0: 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-...
- chx 7y agoCannon Lake was released only because many at Intel have their bonuses tied to the process node launch. Well, they launched a 10nm CPU... so bad the GPU is disabled, performance/watt it's worse than KBR and it was only available in limited quantities.
- dfrage 7y agoKBR = Kaby Lake Refresh. Interesting, in that Intel's "10nm" node is said to be more power efficient than their "14nm" node, in this case, per AnandTech (https://www.anandtech.com/show/11738/intel-launches-8th-generation-cpus-starting-with-kaby-lake-refresh-for-15w-mobile https://www.anandtech.com/show/11738/intel-launches-8th-gene...) KBR was launched with 14+nm. Could be that early of a 10nm part wasn't yet very power optimized. And that would be a very good explanation for why the GPU was disabled vs. the yield issue, which we're pretty sure is much more fundamental than specs of dust and other isolated things that can disable a part of a die without killing it altogether.
- chx 7y agohttps://semiwiki.com/semiconductor/intel/7433-intel-10nm-yield-issues/ https://semiwiki.com/semiconductor/intel/7433-intel-10nm-yie... The GPU was disabled because it is those blocks which are the most problematic yield wise.
- dfrage 7y agoHits forehead for forgetting to check SemiWiki. But note that since then Global Foundries has abandoned for now offering this general node, 7nm as they name it, 10nm as Intel does. But isn't the whole die exposed and otherwise processed as a whole piece? Very much not deeply educated here and can't justify the investment to change that, my primary mental models for defects are either something that takes out a whole die, like one lithography step being misaligned, or spot damage like a piece of dust. But there are clearly issues in between that are statistical inside a die, I recall Semiaccurate saying one of Nvidia or AMD did a GPU tape out to a TSMC process where they duplicated vias because that process' were iffy, and they compensated with a less dense design where either one or two working was OK. If Intel is suffering that sort of problem, then the GPU is a big part of the die that can be fused out while you still have something useful. If all your CPUs or all your L3 cache banks fail, a working GPU is pointless. That article points out two particularly suspect things Intel is uniquely trying at this node: SAQP for the metal layers, which I've seen cited before, and which they generically officially blame, and cobalt in interconnects. And at least one other thing was mentioned as suspect, and four new things total. One ray of hope is mentioned for Intel, in that they were the most aggressive in the industry with their 14nm and 10nm nodes, and in both cases paid the price in yields, while they're being conservative for their 7nm node, no doubt because EUV is a very big step for everyone. Semiaccurate also commented and/or theorized that a compelling reason Intel is continuing to work on their 10nm at one fab is that one or more things in it are also going to be used in their 7nm, so they might as well debug them now and there, and sell some chips while they're at it. Now to do some catching up on SemiWiki, thanks!
- ulzeraj 7y agoI've seen some recent tests showing that bulldozer is quite competitive with new multithreaded friendly stuff like DX12 and Vulkan. Roughly saying... if you think of it as a rematch against the same intel products then bulldozer can win on lots of situations.
- spronkey 7y agoIt's certainly better at multithreaded workloads than single threaded. But performance per watt is nowhere near Intel or Ryzen parts.