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Another day, another broken Intel process node: Intel announces 7nm will be delayed
- Thread starter Grim5
- Start date
Wow, wow. wow. Reading in further behind the lines, it's obvious Intel has no forward planning in place because they have no understanding of why they are where they are now.
From where i'm looking, a company that has no understanding of where it is at this moment in time is on a downward spiral. To be giving out the same message month after month just means to me......................sell if you have ant shares.
From where i'm looking, a company that has no understanding of where it is at this moment in time is on a downward spiral. To be giving out the same message month after month just means to me......................sell if you have ant shares.
Feels a lot like the company has become almost a zombie - ploughing forward senselessly. Until it starts to hit the wallets of the right people nothing will change.
It is funny talking to some of the people (from other companies) who work with Intel - the rep they deal with is essentially lying to their face but they (the rep) don't actually know any better they are just parroting what they've been told to say and the people behind them aren't even on the same page.
It is funny talking to some of the people (from other companies) who work with Intel - the rep they deal with is essentially lying to their face but they (the rep) don't actually know any better they are just parroting what they've been told to say and the people behind them aren't even on the same page.
This is big big trouble for Intel...
Being behind on process meant they couldn’t release new architectures, and now AMD is pushing ahead even further and ARM is becoming competitive, Intel is going to have a very difficult few years.
Obvious disclaimer that you can’t compare Intel nodes to TSMC. TSMC 7nm was more comparable to Intel 10nm in terms of density. So Intel 7nm is more comparable to TSMC 5nm which will be released this year in significant volume.
Being behind on process meant they couldn’t release new architectures, and now AMD is pushing ahead even further and ARM is becoming competitive, Intel is going to have a very difficult few years.
Obvious disclaimer that you can’t compare Intel nodes to TSMC. TSMC 7nm was more comparable to Intel 10nm in terms of density. So Intel 7nm is more comparable to TSMC 5nm which will be released this year in significant volume.
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I fancy ARM being a bigger threat really - there are many areas where future ARM products will be far more applicable than what Intel can supply and by the time Intel respond/react ARM (or companies/products based on them) is likely going to be an established player in those markets.
Outside of the desktop market place I see the future being very much ARM in a lot of things. (I don't know individually what the success will be of things like Ampere's Altra, etc. but that is the way a lot of things are going).
Intel has already lost a lot of ground. They’ve lost Apple (the most high profile one), and they’ve lost a lot of Chromebooks which are now ARM and they’re excellent products. On the server side ARM is gaining significant ground and is now certain to become a major player.
Strangely their share is doing pretty darn well.
Where did you get those comparisons from? Current generation of zen2 are 7nm they are still shy of intel’s 14nm in terms raw horse power per core. Intel 14nm is really good fab.
more realistically 7nm is intel’s 14+++++++, 7+nm is intel’s 10nm probably and so on so forth.
Transistor density is different to performance per core which depends on frequency, architecture and more (which are irrelevant to comparing processes). That was just a comparison of the processes, not Intel vs AMD cores.
WikiChip is a good source to compare different processes.
Eh? You can't use "horse power per core" to compare process nodes. You can only use metrics that are common i.e. transistor gate and interconnect pitches.
As stated above in terms of transistor gate sizes TSMC 7nm is comparable to intel 10nm.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...e-heresy-not-manufacturing-chips?srnd=premium
according to this Bloomberg article, Intel is seriously considering outsourcing all its CPU production to the likes of TSMC
according to this Bloomberg article, Intel is seriously considering outsourcing all its CPU production to the likes of TSMC
It was rumoured awhile ago but nothing came of it then other than moving some non-CPU production over to free capacity.
It makes perfect sense from a business perspective to utilise someone like TSMC so they can have a serious house cleaning and get things back on track internally but maybe there are IP and/or secrecy concerns, etc.
Makes sense. I suppose when whole package is concerned intel 14nm CPUs are actually quite amazing.
however intel still hasn’t put out any 10nm stuff yet, how do we actually know how good that fabrication is? Question is why are they trying to fit so much on, why not sacrifice the density to get yield up so you can have better margin overall. Anyway if they are struggling to get 10nm or 7nm out, it will mean they may have to put up with a fabrication that gives higher yield and less density thus may actually no more than TSMC’s 7nm
Surely this can't all be because they got caught napping. I mean, sure, AMD popped up with the competition and Intel was planning on stretching 14nm for a few more generations and had no real response. However, at this point, it goes beyond being surprised. They have had enough time since AMD got competitive to start from scratch. Either they're massively incompetent, which seems unlikely, or they've had some serious bad luck.
It was about taking the wrong bets on their processing node R&D and not being able to scale it down the way they were expecting to.
Personally I don't think Intel's CPU division were caught napping, it was more a case of they were held up by the Fabrication division. If your newer designs are depending on denser processes, there's little you can do when that process is delayed.
The stretching of the 14nm was essentially all they could do - they still had to try and release new products, but at least the maturity of the 14nm process meant that they could slightly increase chip complexity (although nowhere near as much as a smaller process would allow), whilst having the luxury of better yield increasing the number of chips that were able to run at higher clock speeds (e.g. Skylake was around 4.0Ghz, Comet Lake is now over 5Ghz)
The other downside of staying on 14nm, is that they'd already offered "customers" capacity on older processes (things like chipsets, Network chips etc) all tend to move to newer "old" nodes to also benefit from cost reduction (because smaller node = more chips per wafer), which has lead to capacity issues at 14nm and ultimately shortages of Consumer CPUs.
Bad luck mostly, but a reluctance to back down on some of the "extra" features they wanted from their 10nm process. Even if their 7nm process was ready to go, they still need to get the 10nm process working, as they've spent money on the fab, and as above likely already have contracts lined up for customers down the line.
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Soldato
- Joined
- 19 Feb 2011
- Posts
- 5,849
To be honest it feels really like Intel gambled on sorting their process issues out in time to challenge and surpass AMD, they knew they still had a clockspeed advantage on 14nm variations, so could keep pushing chips on that and retain a lead in scenarios. Its no secret AMD's current Gen of Ryzen is actually better on a clock speed for clock speed basis, ie if both were at identical clockspeeds AMDs cores are faster, this is probably due to architecture and also process node size advantage i guess?
Ontop of this, Intels been constantly fighting against the gaping security holes in its chips, this is something everyone are overlooking, They may well have taken time to redesign chips to mitigate these flaws, and this could potentially lead to design issues and process issues as well.
I think Intel has been fire fighting left and right the resurgence of AMD, and are now finally admitting to their customers what everyone already knew, that Intel are going to be behind for a while but will hopefully eventually get back infront. Better to be honest now and take a hit on stocks, then once they get a few decent products out and confidence comes back their stock price rises again etc. I dont actually think they'll lose too much off their share prices, some say they lost 10% already, i dont think it'll dip too much further, not unless AMD keeps hammering them.
To be fair, Intel being open and honest about their issues, delays etc, will actually do them a favour. Will be interesting now to see how AMD acts as leaders, especially if the next gen of Zen coming takes the leadership in gaming as well, i have a sneaky suspicion if they do, AMD chips will go up in price on the next gen and quite considerably, as what are the choices? Dont get me wrong, im pro AMD but im not stupid enough to believe they wont rinse us like Intel does, when they get the chance.
Will be interesting to see how ARM evolves, once they start seriously eating into the x64/x86 market.
Ontop of this, Intels been constantly fighting against the gaping security holes in its chips, this is something everyone are overlooking, They may well have taken time to redesign chips to mitigate these flaws, and this could potentially lead to design issues and process issues as well.
I think Intel has been fire fighting left and right the resurgence of AMD, and are now finally admitting to their customers what everyone already knew, that Intel are going to be behind for a while but will hopefully eventually get back infront. Better to be honest now and take a hit on stocks, then once they get a few decent products out and confidence comes back their stock price rises again etc. I dont actually think they'll lose too much off their share prices, some say they lost 10% already, i dont think it'll dip too much further, not unless AMD keeps hammering them.
To be fair, Intel being open and honest about their issues, delays etc, will actually do them a favour. Will be interesting now to see how AMD acts as leaders, especially if the next gen of Zen coming takes the leadership in gaming as well, i have a sneaky suspicion if they do, AMD chips will go up in price on the next gen and quite considerably, as what are the choices? Dont get me wrong, im pro AMD but im not stupid enough to believe they wont rinse us like Intel does, when they get the chance.
Will be interesting to see how ARM evolves, once they start seriously eating into the x64/x86 market.