Wednesday, July 17th 2019
Intel's CEO Blames 10 nm Delay on being "Too Aggressive"
During Fortune's Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen, Colorado, Intel's CEO Bob Swan took stage and talked about the company, about where Intel is now and where they are headed in the future and how the company plans to evolve. Particular focus was put on how Intel became "data centric" from "PC centric," and the struggles it encountered.
However, when asked about the demise of Moore's Law, Swan detailed the aggressiveness that they approached the challenge with. Instead of the regular two times improvement in transistor density every two years, Swan said that Intel has always targeted better and greater densities so that it would stay the leader in the business.
With 10 nm, Intel targets improved density by as much as 2.7x compared to the last generation of 14 nm transistors. He addressed the five year delay in delivering the 10 nm node being caused by "too aggressive innovation," adding that "... at a time it gets harder and harder, we set more aggressive goal..." and that's the main reason for the late delivery. Additionally he said that this time, Intel will stay at exactly 2x density improvements over two years with the company's 7 nm node, which is supposed to launch in two years and is already in development.
When talking about the future of Intel, Swan has noted that Intel's current market share is 30% of the "silicon market", saying that Intel is trying to diversify its current offerings from mainly CPUs and FPGAs to everything that requires big compute performance, in order to capture rest of the market. He noted that Artificial Intelligence is currently driving big demand for such performance, with autonomous vehicles expected to be a big source of revenue for Intel in the future. Through acquisitions like Mobileye, Intel plans to serve that market and increase the company's value.
You can listen to the talk here.
However, when asked about the demise of Moore's Law, Swan detailed the aggressiveness that they approached the challenge with. Instead of the regular two times improvement in transistor density every two years, Swan said that Intel has always targeted better and greater densities so that it would stay the leader in the business.
When talking about the future of Intel, Swan has noted that Intel's current market share is 30% of the "silicon market", saying that Intel is trying to diversify its current offerings from mainly CPUs and FPGAs to everything that requires big compute performance, in order to capture rest of the market. He noted that Artificial Intelligence is currently driving big demand for such performance, with autonomous vehicles expected to be a big source of revenue for Intel in the future. Through acquisitions like Mobileye, Intel plans to serve that market and increase the company's value.
You can listen to the talk here.
111 Comments on Intel's CEO Blames 10 nm Delay on being "Too Aggressive"
4 cores 65 nm Kentsfield
4 cores 45 nm Clarksfield/Bloomfield/Lynnfield
4 cores 32 nm Westmere/Sandy Bridge
4 cores 22 nm Ivy Bridge/Haswell
4 cores 14 nm Broadwell/Skylake/Kaby Lake
For some reason, they stopped innovating over that entire time on the core architecture but instead focused only on die shrinks in the total absence of any competition. I'm guessing that with each shrink they could make more volume for less money to sell more chips (up to a point of course). Its all about profit and in the absence of competition, companies choose greed over innovation. No Intel, your 10 nm delay is not because you were too awesome. It would have been awesome if you went from 4 cores at 65 nm to over 32 cores at 14 nm regardless of your competitors. That would have been impressive. No, instead you were just greedy. Sadly most companies are like this.
thats now over 4 years ago
Desktop 10nm isn´t anywhere near, maybe we can buy it Q2´2020
thats 5 years after 14nm launch
wow thats way too aggressive
intel simply fell asleep over their single-thread-lead
and now tsmc and samsung are knocking
Now they are stuck for a bit and are paying top dollar to catch up. However Intel probably still made more profits this way than not showing down their innovation.
Let's be real here, you don't fall behind because you don't have competition, if anything that should give you an advantage just look at Nvidia.
After the dust settled my only conclusion is that Intel is simply dealing with a good deal of incompetence right now that's cushioned by a large market share.
They sort of knew only 1 way to beat AMD (pre Dozer) & that was node shrinks, when you become a 1 trick pony this was bound to happen. Yes they did bring some major innovations & changes to the x86 space however their last major release was SB IMO, since then they've been meh at best & definitely greedy by restricting the consumer space to quad cores!
You could call it being too aggressive or unrealistic, you don't beat Physics with (extra) money that's a life long lesson Intel would've learnt!
(There's also the ideal scenario where Intel didn't essentially waste their resources on their failed mobile endeavor, but let's cut them some slack there)
Intel's revealing more of their cards now because they are forced to, they wouldn't have been in that position if they were more customer centric & less profit driven.