
Intel delays Cannonlake 10nm processor for the third time - rbanffy
https://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/business/intel-delays-cannonlake-10nm-processor-third-time-2017-09/
======
Slartie
So I guess this means that we'll have to wait an additional year for the
MacBook Pro that finally smashes through this archaic limit of 16 gigabytes of
memory :(

Except if Intel wakes up and relieves us from our pains by inserting a Kaby
Lake revision of sorts with an updated memory controller capable of driving
more low-power RAM. I personally couldn't care less about 10-20% more
processing power per watt from Cannonlake and 10nm, it's the memory limit
that's really limiting me.

~~~
glhaynes
Add one more to the "Reasons Apple would want to take control of their own
destiny by putting their own chips in Macs" tally.

~~~
marricks
Not to mention they've already done something similar when they switched chips
from Power PC to Intel. I find it hard to see how they'd license x86, but who
knows, they do have ridiculous amounts of money piled up...

~~~
slezyr
I think it's easier for them to turn iPad + iOS into laptop that make a x86
processor.

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DoofusOfDeath
Is any other company having more success at 10 nm or smaller?

~~~
lvh
Yes. The A11 Bionic CPU Apple is shipping in the newly announced iPhones is on
a 10nm min-feature-size process built by TSMC. They announced revenue from the
process this summer.

Samsung is ahead of TSMC by a few more months; they've been shipping wafers
since March of this year.

~~~
neilmovva
Intel's "10nm" has roughly twice the transistor density vs. Samsung/TSMC
"10nm", so I wouldn't compare based on the advertised process names.

~~~
lvh
That's true, but only if Intel's _proposed_ 10nm specs matches what they ship.
They haven't shipped anything, that's the problem.

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sime2009
"Laptop vendors are reported to be preparing to skip Cannon Lake and move to
its planned successor Ice Lake."

How does that work? Wouldn't the successor also be on a 10nm process? Or at
least facing similar delays?

~~~
lvh
Sort-of. The successor (Ice Lake) is planned to be on a 10nm+ process (so an
advanced, 2nd gen version of the 10nm process). However, if the issues with
Cannon Lake are mostly about moving to a smaller feature size (i.e. it's
mostly a die shrink), and Ice Lake is more of an arch update than a feature
size reach, it makes sense that Cannon Lake gets pushed back more than Ice
Lake would be. (Yes, it'd necessarily be later -- but if you tackle most of
the hard problems now, maybe not _that much_ later, and it makes sense to skip
a gen.)

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walterbell
Coffee Lake (14nm++) is launching in Q4 2017,
[https://www.anandtech.com/show/11843/prices-of-intels-
coffee...](https://www.anandtech.com/show/11843/prices-of-intels-coffee-lakes-
cpus-published-400-for-core-i78700k)

Can a Coffee Lake CPU work on a Kaby Lake / Skylake motherboard?

~~~
magila
> Can a Coffee Lake CPU work on a Kaby Lake / Skylake motherboard?

No. Although the socket has the same number of pins it is not compatible with
Skylake/Kaby Lake. The socket will probably be called LGA 1151-v2 to
distinguish it from the earlier socket.

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narrator
Have there been any 10nm or smaller CPU chips produced yet? Seems they've been
stuck at 14nm for a while now.

~~~
arnaudsm
Qualcomm's already mass producing 10nm CPUs.

~~~
davrosthedalek
Qualcomm is fabless, so they are not producing anything. It seems they are on
Samsung for 10 and will switch to TSMC for 7 [1]

[1] [https://www.xda-developers.com/qualcomm-ends-foundry-
partner...](https://www.xda-developers.com/qualcomm-ends-foundry-partnership-
with-samsung-and-entrusts-7nm-process-to-tsmc/)

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agumonkey
Since Intel nm is not tsmc nm, maybe Intel delays 10nm for different reasons.
Like realizing that with a bit more time (that their smaller (sic) nm allows)
they could produce much better dies.

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crb002
"Vaporlake"

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deepnotderp
So what's the future? Plasmonics? TFETs? Exciton FETs? Nanoelectromechanical
switches? Actually looking at the data and realizing the interconnect is the
bottleneck?

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dabockster
Ryzen when?

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mozumder
For Apple, Apple should just go ahead and ship Macs with their ARM chips.
Their 10nm A11 chip is already as fast as their current generation MacBook
Pros, and that's with a 2 Watt cell phone power budget. Give it a 5 Watt
tablet power budget or a 15-35 Watt Laptop power budget and it would wreck
anything Intel could produce.

I'm not even sure what the issue is holding them back on switching their Macs
to ARM cores? They're already forcing devs to ship byte code to the App store.

~~~
striking
If you want to run any software besides what's on the iOS App Store, you need
a 64-bit x86 CPU. Apple hasn't released a macOS toolchain for ARM yet, and
they need to do that a couple years before releasing such a computer.
Otherwise their computer will launch with zero third-party applications
(besides the open source ones available on brew).

I did check the Geekbench scores, because I was curious about your speed
claims...
[https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/search?utf8=&q=7360u](https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/search?utf8=&q=7360u)
and [https://browser.geekbench.com/ios-
benchmarks/](https://browser.geekbench.com/ios-benchmarks/) seem way too close
to equal for me to believe. Maybe that's the way it is, but I'm assuming I'm
misunderstanding the tests. The A11 couldn't possibly be that fast, could it?

~~~
djsumdog
I remember the Rosetta era when they switched from PPC to Intel and had their
VM layer inbetween. You could go to your process list and see what was using
x86 vs PPC via Rosetta and later even x86 64-bit. Eventually Rosetta was
removed from the default install and I think it's gone entirely now, so you
can't run really old PPC apps without an older version of MacOS and an older
Mac.

~~~
striking
Yeah, if Apple tried to emulate Intel's ISA they'd very likely get sued.
[https://www.forbes.com/sites/davealtavilla/2017/06/09/intel-...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/davealtavilla/2017/06/09/intel-
puts-microsoft-and-qualcomm-on-notice-regarding-windows-10-x86-emulation-on-
snapdragon-devices/)

~~~
jsjohnst
Except isn't X86_64 ISA technically property of AMD, not Intel?

I know some of the later stuff (SIMD / AVX / SSE / etc) is Intel, but
technically I think they could leave that off and still be successful assuming
that would be all that's needed to not be infringing (which I don't know if
that's the case or not).

~~~
monocasa
It's x86_64 is so obviously inspired by 32/16-bit x86 that practically
speaking, it's patented heavily by both.

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raverbashing
It really seems a hard limit is being reached w.r.t current processes and
technologies

~~~
lvh
TSMC and Samsung, two competing foundries, have already successfully shipped
10nm wafers. They'll also be in the upcoming iPhone, which is a pretty high-
volume part.

~~~
icegreentea2
It's worth noting that node size refers to very different things between
different manufacturers, we have very little idea about whats
different/similar between TSMC/Samsung/Glofo/Intel's '10nm' nodes.

It's very possible that TSMC and Samsung are using a less technically
challenging (and potentially less technically capable) definition of 10nm than
Intel.

Or, it could be that TSMC and Samsung are actually technically ahead of Intel.

~~~
lvh
Yep, that's a fair point. In particular, because Intel isn't actually shipping
anything at 10nm, all we have to go off of is their marketing material for
what 10nm means.

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sigmar
Anyone else find it funny that Intel's first CPU with the SHA-1 instruction
set is going to be released about a year after SHA-1 was broken? (Yes, there
are still certain uses for SHA-1. But the timing is still hilarious)

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darkhorn
I guess 10nm will be more prone to cosmic rays in our homes.

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jlebrech
the future after that is more dies on the chip.

bigger chips with lower core counts that can run lots more instruction sets
per cycle then for multicore put many dies on each chip.

more yield too it's better, you can makes sure every die is operational at the
very least, and if not desolder and replace that die.

