Intel has come out and clarified that its 10nm processors aren’t in trouble – or cancelled altogether, as a recent rumor suggested – but that the firm is making ‘good progress’ with these Cannon Lake CPUs.
Of course, Cannon Lake has been a long time coming; it was expected to succeed Skylake way back in 2016 – and volume production of the chips has been pushed back multiple times, the most recent blow being a delay to 2019.
And against that backdrop of disappointment, SemiAccurate reported yesterday that Intel had killed off its 10nm parts, because moving to mass production simply wasn’t financially viable, the article claimed.
Still on schedule
However, in a tweet spotted by Bit-tech, the Intel News account released a statement denying that work on 10nm was being shelved, and that everything was still on schedule in line with the firm’s assertions in its last earnings call.
Media reports published today that Intel is ending work on the 10nm process are untrue. We are making good progress on 10nm. Yields are improving consistent with the timeline we shared during our last earnings report.October 22, 2018
In other words, nothing has changed since we last heard about the delay to next year (and indeed the fact that PCs toting Cannon Lake processors probably won’t go on sale until the very end of 2019).
Intel’s current CPUs are built on a 14nm process, so as you can imagine, the drop to 10nm is a big deal. Bear in mind that a limited number of 10nm processors are out there at the low-end of the market, but mass production of the chips is obviously where Intel needs to be, and where the difficulty lies in perfecting yields.
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