Published in PC Hardware

Intel does not believe users will care about processes

by on01 March 2017


14nm, 10nm users will never notice

Chipzilla thinks that users don’t give a monkey’s what process their chip has and will be more interested in its performance, according to a man with long job title.

President of Intel’s Client and Internet of Things businesses and Systems Architecture Group, Venkata Renduchintala, thinks that rather than tying chip upgrades directly to the manufacturing process involved, Intel will look at delivering a sustained set of performance upgrades with each new chip architecture.

“We’re going to be focused more on the generation by the amount of performance increment it will give us. I don’t think generations will be tagged to node transitions,” he said.

He claimed that the performance benefits will matter more, and the process technology that lives underneath is going to be less conspicuous.

“We can translate that into more predictable cadence of product, which delivers meaningful performance to stimulate PC upgrades,” Renduchintala said.

In the good old days, Intel used to deliver two generations of PC chips with each manufacturing process node,

But Intel has made three generations of chips including Broadwell, Skylake, and Kaby Lake, on the 14-nanometer process. The company recently revealed that the 8th Generation Core processors will also be made on the 14-nm node. This was a little weird as Intel’s next-generation 10-nm process, dubbed Cannonlake, is supposed to be ready.

Now it seems that the company hasn’t yet decided how it’ll brand or market the Cannonlake chips due later this year.

“If Cannonlake comes out at the end of the year, it’ll be interesting what we actually market it as. We haven’t decided it yet,” Renduchintala said.

Of course a cynic might say that Intel can’t keep up and it is therefore hoping to God no one notices.

Last modified on 01 March 2017
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