Intel Talks 10nm Again
INTEL’S MOVE to 10nm has been dogged by delays. Last month, we finally learned a little about Sunny Cove, the new 10nm core architecture. This month, we get a little more: Ice Lake-U, the first to go 10nm, will be a mobile chip. It will be four-core and eight-thread, with a TDP of just 15W. We get Generation 11 graphics, and memory bandwidth is in the 50–60GB/s range. There’s also Wi-Fi 6 and Thunderbolt 3 over USB-C. We also learn of Lakefield, a hybrid x86, actually a Sunny Cove core coupled with four Tremont Atom cores. The upshot is a device that can draw minuscule amounts of power on standby. It was apparently a request from a manufacturer—we don’t know who, or why, yet. And that’s it. Looks like we will have to wait even for vague details on the 10nm desktop parts.
Last month, we also reported on Intel’s new F-series of chips. These are high-end processors without integrated graphics, which we hoped would be cheaper than the full versions, especially the Core i9-9900KF. It transpires that Intel is selling them for the same price. F-series chips are standard chips where the integrated graphics have failed. There’s no problem with this—many i9 buyers aren’t ever going to plug a monitor into the board socket—but a few dollars off the price wouldn’t have hurt. It shows how the chip shortage is biting, fueled by massive demand for profitable Xeon chips, thanks to the expansion of cloud services worldwide. Intel can’t make the 14nm chips fast enough, and its 10nm desktop replacements are a year away or more.
This could be a tough year for Intel, following a not particularly good end to 2018— its last quarter figures weren’t impressive. Plans are afoot, though, as the company restructures itself away from the PC market, toward a data-centric one, and invests heavily in fabrication capacity, including Optane and 5G silicon. All well and good, but at its original core business, there’s something of a gap emerging.