Intel Kills Lakefield
INTEL ISSUES PRODUCT CHANGE notifications regularly, listing chips due to be discontinued. Its last list of 24 included some surprisingly recent silicon, including tenth-generation Comet Lake and Ice Lake chips, as well as 11th-gen Lakefield chips, which will all disappear by spring 2022. Losing Ice Lake so early has to be disappointing for Intel; it’s relatively new, but never performed that well. However, the real surprise is the dumping of Lakefield—it was only launched in June 2020. As Intel prosaically put it, “Market demand for the products listed has shifted to other Intel products.” Translation: People didn’t want to buy them. It added that “they demonstrated the potential of hybrid x86 CPU and new packaging technology.”
Lakefield is Intel’s only hybrid design that mixes small and big CPU cores, in this case Atom Tremont and Sunny Cove, using Foveros, Intel’s die-stacking system. It only appeared inside a couple of high-end OEM systems, a Samsung Galaxy and a Lenovo ThinkPad. But high-speed switching between the cores was less than ideal, and the systems were outperformed by cheaper machines using simpler “big” processors. Microsoft was due to build a Surface Neo using Lakefield, but that ain’t going to happen. Hybrid designs, as proved by Apple, can be superb, but Intel’s first stab at the concept will have to be chalked up as a learning experience. The next step of the hybrid, Alder Lake, due later this year, will carry Gracemont and Golden Cove cores coupled to an Xe GPU. The second time is the charm, right?