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Intel's revised roadmap looks beyond 1 nanometer chips
Forget about "SuperFin Enhanced," the previous name for the node powering Intel's upcoming 10nm Alder Lake processors. Now, that node is just called "Intel 7," according to the company's revised roadmap.
Intel invests $20 billion in two Arizona factories, 7nm chips coming in 2023
Intel is pushing to make itself more of a chip fabricator with a $20 billion investment in two Arizona plants.
Intel puts Dr. Ann Kelleher in charge of its delayed 7nm CPU project
Last week Intel announced its 7nm process is running behind schedule. This week it announced the departure of chief engineering officer Dr. Murthy Renduchintala amid a restructuring of its technology group.
Intel's 7nm CPUs are delayed, won't arrive until at least 2022
Intel delivered bad news to its investors today, announcing that its plans for 7nm chips have slipped another six months, and yields are now running a year behind original projections. This comes after Apple announced plans to rely on its own CPUs for future computers, and as competitors like AMD and NVIDIA already take advantage of 7nm tech to build more efficient processors. Intel is accelerating its transition to 10nm products this year with increasing volumes and strong demand for an expanding line up.
Intel will ramp up 10nm CPU production in June, 7nm in 2021
Intel is nearly ready to ship 10-nanometer processors in large volumes -- no, for real this time. After years of delays, the semiconductor giant has announced that its 10nm mobile Ice Lake processors will start shipping in June. It's not certain just when you'll see the first laptops based on the new parts (Intel offers a generic in-time-for-the-holidays figure), but Intel is boasting that a future Core i7 quad-core chip will tout twice the graphics performance over its 8th-gen counterpart, twice the video transcoding speed and up to three times the AI brawn. You still aren't likely to be doing heavy duty number-crunching with it, but that's still an improvement over years of modest upgrades to Intel's long-in-the-tooth 14nm technology.
AMD launches the first 7nm GPUs, but they're not for you
AMD is following through on its promise of releasing 7-nanometer GPUs -- not that you can use one yet. The company has formally launched Radeon Instinct MI50 and MI60 cards that use the denser, more efficient chip technology to accelerate specialized computing tasks like AI, cloud services and scientific calculations. The MI60 in particular is billed as the fastest double-precision accelerator of its type, pumping out 7.4 teraflops when crunching 64-bit floating point data. Both boards pack very high-bandwidth (up to 1TB/s) HBM2 memory and can work together in "hive rings" of up to four GPUs thanks to 200GB/s peer-to-peer links.
Huawei's 7nm Kirin 980 chip could give Qualcomm reason to worry
The race to deliver a seven-nanometer chip is heated, and Huawei has just proclaimed itself the winner. The company just unveiled its Kirin 980 CPU here at IFA 2018, and says it is the world's first commercial 7nm system-on-chip (SoC). But that's not the new processor's only claim for the record books: The 980 is also the first to use Cortex-A76 cores, dual neural processing units, the Mali G76 GPU, a 1.4 Gbps LTE modem as well as support faster RAM. Whew. That's a lot.
Qualcomm's 7nm Snapdragon chip will be ready for 5G phones
Qualcomm is keeping up its habit of using bleeding edge manufacturing for its mobile processors. The chip designer has confirmed that its "upcoming flagship mobile platform" will include a system-on-a-chip (read: the next Snapdragon) built using a faster, more efficient 7-nanometer process. You won't hear details about the chip itself until the fourth quarter of the year, but it will play nicely with the Snapdragon X50 5G modem -- conveniently, just in time for the arrival of the first mobile 5G networks.
ARM says its next processors will outperform Intel laptop chips
ARM-based laptops have been pretty pokey to date, but you might have a different impression of them in a year or two. The company has offered a rare peek at the performance expectations for its future processor architectures, and the figures might make Intel nervous. While ARM already believes that its recently unveiled Cortex-A76 is competitive with Intel's 2.6GHz Core i5-7300U, it expects its 2019 "Deimos" and 2020 "Hercules" designs to clearly outperform that CPU. You would get "laptop-class" speed from a more efficient mobile chip, according to the company.
AMD shows off the world's first 7nm GPU, but it's not for games yet
AMD wasn't content just to unveil its 32-core Threadripper chip today. The company also gave us a glimpse of the Vega 7nm GPU, the first graphics processor to be built on such a small process. It's part of the company's Radeon Instinct line, and consequently, it's mainly meant for servers and complex tasks like machine learning. AMD CEO Lisa Su assured the crowd that 7nm Navi chips are on the way for gaming cards, but there's a good chance we won't see those until 2019.
You won't buy IBM's 7nm chip, but it's a big deal for computing
While Intel is finally getting its 14-nanometer sized chips out to the public, IBM today announced an even more impressive silicon breakthrough: The production of the first working 7nm chip. It's particularly impressive since it took years for chip makers like Intel to move from 22nm chips to 14nm, which offer better power efficiency and faster overall speeds thanks to their denser manufacturing. IBM's 7nm chip, produced together with partners including GlobalFoundries (which is taking over IBM's semiconductor business) and Samsung, will offer similar benefits, but the road to get there was vastly more complex than 14nm chips. IBM says it's using silicon germanium in electricity-conducting channels on the chip, as well as a new lithography method, dubbed Extreme Ultraviolet, to print finer circuits (which are around 10,000 times thinner than human hair). Perhaps most intriguingly it also keeps Moore's Law, the notion that computing power will double roughly every 18 months, alive for the next few years.
Intel sets sights on 5nm chip; already gearing up fabs for 14nm production
Ivy Bridge, Intel's first generation of chips to use the 22nm fabrication process, is hardly out of the gate, and yet talk has already turned to the company's next manufacturing technologies. According to Xbit Labs, which got its hands on some telltale slides, Paul Otellini et al. have the roadmap for 10nm, 7nm and 5nm processes locked down, and the company is preparing fabs in the states and Ireland to make chips using the 14nm fabrication method. Given that timeframe, Intel says 10nm chips will ship in 2015, with work on 5nm technology beginning that same year. While the slides in question look legit -- and that timeline matches previous reports -- we're not sure just when these mystery slides first made the rounds. Alas, we'll have a good few years to sort 5nm fact from fiction.
