Intel to further delay its first 10nm processors to late 2019

Some interesting remarks have been made by Intel during a quarterly financial discussion, an Intel representative mentioned that data center products will be followed by desktop processors fabbed at 10nm at the earliest by 2019. So, long story short, all procs for another year will be based on 14nm.

This means that 10nm Cannon Lake desktop products will not be arriving until late 2019. Intel’s 10nm “Cannon Lake” in small volumes have spotted in early stages back in January 2017. However products based on the chip were slated to arrive by the end of 2017, that never happened. Intel instead pushed back its Cannon Lake rollout until 2018 due to manufacturing difficulties originating from the 10nm process. The delay on 10nm chips is not only limited to desktop and notebook computers, as it also applies to servers parts. It seems Intel is fighting yields in the 10nm process. 

Micro-architecture	Core Generation	Fab Process	Year
Sandy Bridge	2nd	32nm	2011
Ivy Bridge	3rd	22nm	2012
Haswell	4th	22nm	2013
Broadwell	5th	14nm	2014
Skylake	6th	14nm	2015
Kaby Lake	7th	14nm+	2016
Coffee Lake	8th	14nm++	2017
Whiskey lake	8th	14nm++	2018
Cannon Lake	8th	10nm	2019
Ice Lake	9th	10nm+	2019

Realistically, the smaller the processor components, often the more problematic the manufacturing process becomes. We've seent hat in the past, and it seems to apply to complex 10nm designs in their yields, e.g. producing a higher number of defective chips per wafer. Interestingly enough, 14, 12 and 7nm seem to be going strong, AMD is on track with 7nm for ZEN2 and VEGA. This year the company will continue to focus on 14nm based processors of which the first generation was released in 2014. By the end of this year, Intel’s fifth and last generation 14nm technology based CPUs should be introduced, which are code-named Whiskey Lake.