Intel aware: our non-productive 10nm technology

The financial director of Intel, George Davis, took stock of the much discussed 10nm production node on the occasion of the TMT Conference organized by Morgan Stanley, admitting without problems what everyone really knows, namely that the new Intel production process has not proven to be among the best made by the company in recent years.

Davis was very straightforward and did not bluntly define the 10nm node not very productive in terms of economic performance, not only lower than the current 14nm technology, but also compared to the previous 22nm chip generation introduced back in 2011.

Despite this, the CFO Intel confirms that the company has a lot of meat on the fire and is preparing to face the transition to 10nm with several innovations, not only with the products already presented (see CPU Ice Lake presented in May 2019) but above all with new processors for the server market, ASIC solutions for networking, new GPUs (integrated, ed) and a dedicated video card that will debut this year.

These will then be followed by the first products built with the production process a 10nm + which, according to Davis, will debut this year, just as it had emerged during the last CES in Las Vegas. Among these of course there are the processors Intel Tiger Lake, solutions that will introduce the Core Sunny Cove architecture and integrated GPUs of the Xe family that should double the performance compared to the current iGPU.

Intel therefore does not hide (not being able) the difficulties encountered with the 10nm production node, however the expectations are good (as well as the turnover produced in 2019) and there is a lot of enthusiasm for the transition to 7nm (late 2021) which should allow the company to return to being more competitive.