Friday, April 26th 2019
Intel 10nm Ice Lake to Quantitatively Debut Within 2019
Intel put out interesting details about its upcoming 10 nanometer "Ice Lake" CPU microarchitecture rollout in its recent quarterly financial results call. The company has started qualification of its 10 nm "Ice Lake" processors. This involves sending engineering samples to OEMs, system integrators and other relevant industry partners, and getting the chips approved for their future product designs. The first implementation of "Ice Lake" will not be a desktop processor, but rather a low-power mobile SoC designed for ultraportables, codenamed "Ice Lake-U." This SoC packs a 4-core/8-thread CPU based on the "Sunny Cove" core design, and Gen11 GT2 integrated graphics with 64 execution units and nearly 1 TFLOP/s compute power. This SoC will also support WiFi 6 and LPDDR4X memory.
Intel CEO Bob Swan also remarked that the company has doubled its 10 nm yield expectations. "On the [10 nm] process technology front, our teams executed well in Q1 and our velocity is increasing," he said, adding "We remain on track to have volume client systems on shelves for the holiday selling season. And over the past four months, the organization drove a nearly 2X improvement in the rate at which 10nm products move through our factories." Intel is prioritizing enterprise over desktop, as "Ice Lake-U" will be followed by "Ice Lake-SP" Xeon rollout in 2020. There was no mention of desktop implementations such as "Ice Lake-S." Intel is rumored to be preparing a stopgap microarchitecture for the desktop platform to compete with AMD "Matisse" Zen 2 AM4 processors, codenamed "Comet Lake." This is essentially a Skylake 10-core die fabbed on existing 14 nm++ node. AMD in its CES keynote announced an achievement of per-core performance parity with Intel, so it could be interesting to see how Intel hopes 10 "Skylake" cores match up to 12-16 "Zen 2" cores.
Source:
AnandTech
Intel CEO Bob Swan also remarked that the company has doubled its 10 nm yield expectations. "On the [10 nm] process technology front, our teams executed well in Q1 and our velocity is increasing," he said, adding "We remain on track to have volume client systems on shelves for the holiday selling season. And over the past four months, the organization drove a nearly 2X improvement in the rate at which 10nm products move through our factories." Intel is prioritizing enterprise over desktop, as "Ice Lake-U" will be followed by "Ice Lake-SP" Xeon rollout in 2020. There was no mention of desktop implementations such as "Ice Lake-S." Intel is rumored to be preparing a stopgap microarchitecture for the desktop platform to compete with AMD "Matisse" Zen 2 AM4 processors, codenamed "Comet Lake." This is essentially a Skylake 10-core die fabbed on existing 14 nm++ node. AMD in its CES keynote announced an achievement of per-core performance parity with Intel, so it could be interesting to see how Intel hopes 10 "Skylake" cores match up to 12-16 "Zen 2" cores.
46 Comments on Intel 10nm Ice Lake to Quantitatively Debut Within 2019
Screw it, anything AMD will be a great upgrade from 3770K.
In other words, its not coming in 2019. Its getting a paper launch + maybe some halo mobile product nobody will want. Well played ;) At least the sun is shining in Intel's tiny little Cove with 2012-era core counts. Real roadmaps tell us another story: 2021 at best.
If they were just lazy they'd sell 10 nm 4 core CPU's for desktop -K series. Intel benefits from transitioning to 10 nm, they get more chips from every wafer.
Intel does not benefit from trying to transition to 10 nm for >4 years or whatever, that's just crazy expensive. If they were lazy they wouldn't even try going beyond 14 nm.
This usually never holds true:
"Brand X is lazy!" "Brand X is doomed!" "Game over, brand X!" "Product Y is a product Z killer!!!!!111!!!!!"
Yields are bad. They get less CPUs. They get more candidates for CPUs - many of which go to the bin.4 core U CPUs are one of their best selling products, so I don't really get what you're trying to say.
This is why their focusing their 10nm capabilities on this segment.
Intel has to think about future (short and long term), but also about current cashflow.
Their 10nm wasn't cost-effective for mainstream desktop chips and may still not be.
Since the final retail product costs $100-200, production cost would have be $30-50 at most.
Apple reportedly pays TSMC $72 for a single A12, which is less than half the size of a 9700K.
It's possible that Intel underestimated AMD, I'm not saying anything about that. My point is, if it was laziness then they'd still be at 10 nm with a dumb shrunk Skylake.
Delaying the next big CPU since Nehalem or Sandy Bridge because of lack of competition: maybe possible.
Delaying 10 nm because of lack of competition: no way.
The two are tied together, but still separate.Nope, you'd better read before you reply. He strictly replied to ---> 10 nm YIELDS.
-I said Intel benefit from moving to 10 nm.
-He said no, the yield is too low, which is true.
-I said I meant when the yield is high it's better in the long run than 14 nm.
-He went offtopic.
-You explained WHEN 10 nm is needed, also offtopic, it's got nothing to do with what I wrote.
It's pretty obvious when 10 nm was needed.
The 8700K was a great CPU that worked well, 14 nm wasn't really a problem from a consumers point of view.
The 9900K on the other hand could have benefitted from 10 nm even though it's very fast as it is.
So yes, mass production of 10 nm was very much needed in 2018.
You said it yourself: low yields. So this product is not a sign 10nm ia ready... its an attempt to make us believe Intel made good progress over the last six months. But we knew a part like this would be coming already. The lack of announcing everything else is the real message here.
Another real message is them readjusting fab lines towards continued 14nm. Thats a mid term investment.Exactly, its a recent slide and similar to other ones weve seen lately, and they all tell the same story.
en.wikichip.org/wiki/intel/cores/kaby_lake_uYou could define lazy as being content with providing just quad cores for well over a decade or in fact overcharging for HEDT. They weren't as lazy as much as greedy IMO - quad cores since forever, dual core ULV also being the norm since at least half a decade! They could've released more cores & yet they didn't want to, of course because they didn't need to.
The slides say that Intel won't be able to go full 10nm in this segment.For majority of their CPUs 14nm is perfectly fine. As long as 10nm is more less profitable, there's no reason to switch.
It's a different story with AMD. They're strategy is strongly based on 7nm, which lets them make high-core CPUs and implement a chiplet design. But even they "admit" TSMC 10nm is either expensive or limited by staying on 14nm with the I/O die.
If AMD didn't have access to 7nm, they would have to redesign the Zen CCX to fit more cores on the AM4 socket, which totally kills the whole cost-cutting idea.
Intel still has a lot of space in the LGA1151 package - especially if they drop GPU for high-core models (which is just disabled in existing -F parts).
Intel has a big lead in single-thread performance - something they can sacrifice on the way.
i5-8600 matches a heavily overclocked 2700X in single-thread, but stays within 65W TDP under full 6-core load.
In other words: they can make a 130W 12-core if they need one (HT will add another 20W).
Sure, AMD Zen2 12C/24T will use 120W instead of 150W at similar clocks. Some believe this will make people move from Intel to AMD. I think we'll simply see slightly larger coolers. ;-)It's a corporate offer roadmap. Mass market CPUs for OEMs.
In this market Intel desktop CPUS are competing with AMD APUs. 14nm is fine for 8 cores.They're in most laptops that cost over $500...
But in all the Zen(2) hype, it's easy to forget that despite all these troubles, Intel still have the fastest core performance, and is quite likely going to do well against Zen 2 for the mainstream platform. The only "hole" will be the lack of a direct competitor to AMD's expected 12-core CPU, but that shouldn't matter a lot. Coffee Lake (v2) will not be inferior when Zen 2 launches, the only sad part is that Intel will be stagnant and seemingly have nothing new in this segment this year.
I'm more curious in what lies ahead. We still don't really know much about Comet Lake-S, and as far as I can see there are three possibilities;
1) Just another iteration of Skylake with no real IPC changes, but minor tweaks in the layout to achieve better thermals and lower voltage, which is utilized for marginal clock gains. This is very much possible, but boring.
2) Some architectural tweaks (like Cascade Lake-SP) to achieve small IPC gains.
3) A "backport" of Ice Lake/Sunny Cove to 14nm.
(or a combination of these)
The only indicator I've seen so far is the support in Core Boot and Linux indicating it may be a relative of Skylake.