Intel May Be Facing More Process Delays

Last year, Intel finally admitted to a major roadblock in their silicon manufacturing. Despite holding to the Tick-Tock strategy for the better part of a decade, the chip giant simply couldn’t justify moving to a new process node every other year. This led to the development of a new plan called Process,  Architecture, Optimization which would introduce a new process node every third year instead. Now it seems that the schedule may be slipping even further with 10nm and 7nm products set to arrive later than expected.

According to the latest report, Coffee Lake and Cannon Lake may be utilizing the 14nm process and not the 10nm process as expected. The 14nm process first debuted with Broadwell and has been used for Skylake and Kaby Lake for the subsequent years. Apparently, there has been issues with the 10nm process, causing an additional delay of up to one year. This means that instead of getting 10nm for Cannon Lake, it may be stuck on 14nm, meaning a 4th year on 14nm and potentially even longer. This pushes Tiger Lake and Ice Lake to be the 2 10nm products instead of Ice Lake being the 7nm shrink.

Of course, this report is still unconfirmed at this point so don’t take it as fact. Given that we’ve only just been given the new PAO strategy its hard to see how Intel wouldn’t ahve been able to anticpate the 10nm issues given the long-term planning involved. Even with the delays, the worst case scenario is that Intel is on par with their competitors. Hopefully, we’ll be getting more information in the days ahead to clarify the whole situation.