Intel Might Drop 10nm node for Desktop processors
Yesterday evening the news reached the web that Intel could be skipping their troublesome 10nm node altogether, for desktop processors. And that would mean the next-gen Ice Lake processors.
Website HardwareLuxx.de reports that Intel will not manufacture any 10nm processors for desktops, focusing on 7nm chips for the specific segment, set for launch in two years. This means that Intel will confine its 10 nm microarchitectures, "Ice Lake" and "Tiger Lake" to only the mobile platform, while the desktop platform will see derivatives of the 14nm "Skylake" until 2022. Essentially, the report claims that Intel will not launch the "Tiger Lake" and "Alder Lake" chips based on a 10nm process, at least at their previously scheduled time frames. Intel has been challenged to migrate from the 14nm to the more advanced 10nm manufacturing process, at least for desktop chips, which have high clock rates. The company has announced the 10nm Ice Lake processors for mobile devices.
Meanwhile, intel was very quick to out some words on this to Toms hardware: desktop processors based on the 10 nm silicon fabrication node are still on the company's roadmap.
"We continue to make great progress on 10 nm, and our current roadmap of 10 nm products includes desktop," the company said in its communication.
Node | CPU Architecture | GPU μrch | Launch | |
Coffee Lake-S | 14 nm | Skylake | Gen9.5 | 2018 |
Skylake-X | 14 nm | Skylake | - | 2018 |
Cascade Lake-X | 14 nm | Skylake | - | 2019 |
Comet Lake-S | 14 nm | Skylake | Gen9.5 | 2019/20 |
Rocket Lake-S | 14 nm | Skylake | Gen12 | 2021 |
- | - | |||
Meteor Lake | 7 nm | - | - | 2022 |
* Table courtesy hardwareluxx
Intel is expected to release the 14nm Comet Lake S processors this year, which will offer up to 10 cores. Back in May, the company shared info to release Tiger Lake chips in 2020. These will be mobile chips featuring Intel's new Xe graphics engine.
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Senior Member
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No Intel 14nm isn't competitive any more. You cannot compare an 8core CPU (9900K) with a 12 core (3900X) or 16 core (3950X).
Thats why you compare an 8 core to an 8 core. And Intel will also sell you a 10/12/14/18 core at greatly reduced prices soon (and don't start with the cost of the X299 platform, X570 is also rather expensive).
All I care about is performance and price, and with the much cheaper HEDT refresh coming up, that is very much competitive.
AMD may have caught up with Intel, but if Intel reduces their prices, like they are doing with the HEDT refresh, they are very much still competitive.
And that includes the next round in 2020 (Zen 3) and the CPUs after that in 2021 (Zen 4) with DDR5 & PCIe 5.0.
And you don't know what happens next year or even in two years.
Senior Member
Posts: 1499
Joined: 2017-06-26

Ryzen owner here who gives a fck about benchmarks. I bought Ryzen because the price was half of an Intel one and Intel made big news with security vuls. at that time.
I don't care which is faster, I care about price/performance ratio and security. I got a renewal cycle of 5 to 8 years. Beat that.

Senior Member
Posts: 861
Joined: 2015-11-21
7nm doesn't work properly
Intel is learning with Ryzen troubles and smart to make something that works rather than beta test their technology on consumers, now if only they started sacrificing wafer space and not compacting so much their cores onto a tiny die area (it lowers their manufacturing cost, more dies on one wafer) they would be easier to cool and work better
in case you didn't know the 9900k and those others chips are super small, dwarves compared to Ryzen Intel should understand that you can't properly cool a pinhead
Senior Member
Posts: 217
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i upgrade my 7700k at 5.05 ghz to a ryzen 3900x, all i can say is even tho i lost a bit of single core performance, not even that much 218 single core on cine15 to 210 with the 3900x my games dont stutter anymore, and i can stream with a one pc setup without performance loss, my system is running great with a 1080ti, there is no bottleneck or almost none, and with the new console coming with ryzen and navi, im looking forward to the high end gpu, it ll probably be the way to go for gaming for the next 5 years
Senior Member
Posts: 2080
Joined: 2005-08-05
No Intel 14nm isn't competitive any more. You cannot compare an 8core CPU (9900K) with a 12 core (3900X) or 16 core (3950X).
And that includes the next round in 2020 (Zen 3) and the CPUs after that in 2021 (Zen 4) with DDR5 & PCIe 5.0.
I have both 3900x and 9900k, and yes 9900k is stil very competetitive in performance. It can due to very low latency, and beats 3900x in many scenarios. Overclocked even more.
Owners of Ryzen likes to think performance is all about playing Cinebench 24/7. It's not
3900x with lower latency than 9900k would be an epic deal.
Ps: I like both 3900x and 9900k. I use it for different things