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Intel's new CEO is facing the same old challenges
After seven months as interim CEO, Robert "Bob" Holmes Swan has been appointed as Intel's seventh full-time leader. Swan started life at General Electric, spending 15 years there before leaving to become vice president (and later CEO) of the doomed online grocery business Webvan. In 2006, he returned to the technology industry as eBay's CFO, a position he held for nearly a decade. In 2016, he joined Intel as CFO, one of a handful of "outside hires" the notoriously inward-looking company placed in leadership roles. And he takes the helm at a crucial time for the chipmaker as it looks to revitalize itself in a world that may no longer need the technologies the giant offers.
Intel finally made a 10nm processor
Around two years later and Intel is finally shipping its 10nm Cannon Lake CPUs. The chip itself is a bit of a bore, but given its legacy of delays and how long Intel has been talking about it, that they're finally being found in the wild is worth mentioning. The 8th-gen i3-8121U is a dual-core, four-thread CPU with a base clock of 2.2GHz and boost clock of 3.2GHz. With a listed TDP of 15W, the i3-8121U is almost identical to the i3-8130U, a 14nm processor released earlier this year. The difference, at least according to Intel's spec sheet, is that the new 10nm processor doesn't have an integrated GPU. That either means Intel still hasn't worked out how to shrink its GPU tech down to 10nm reliably, and has disabled that part of the chip, or it's just bad at filling in specs in its ARK product database.
Intel delays its 10-nanometer 'Cannon Lake' CPUs yet again
Intel has announced that, once again, mass production of its 10-nanometer "Cannon Lake" chips will be delayed. The company is already shipping the chips in low volumes (though no one knows to whom at this point), but said it "now expects 10-nanometer volume production to shift to 2019 [rather than the end of 2018]." It announced the move in its first quarter earnings report, which saw it collect a record $16.1 billion in revenue and $4.5 billion in profit, a 50 percent jump over last year.
Intel's second 10-nanometer chip architecture is Ice Lake
Intel still hasn't shipped its first 10-nanometer processors, but that isn't stopping it from teasing the next batch. The company's codename page has revealed Ice Lake, a series of chips built on a "10 nm+" (read: iterated 10nm) process. There's virtually nothing else known about it at this point, but AnandTech speculates that this will be the more comprehensive 10nm launch. The initial architecture, Cannon Lake, may be focused on mobile CPUs that are smaller and thus easier to make when chip yields are relatively poor. Ice Lake would come once yields are relatively stable and can handle bigger desktop-class parts.
Intel's 8th-gen Core processors won't be revolutionary
It's clearer than ever that the days of tick-tock Intel chip upgrades (new process one generation, new architecture the next) are long gone. Intel has revealed that its 8th-generation Core processors, due in the second half of 2017 will once again be built on a 14-nanometer process -- yes, for the fourth time in a row. The company is shy on what these new chips will entail, but it's claiming that it'll manage another 15 percent performance improvement (in SysMark tests, anyway) like it did with the 7th-generation Core designs you see now.
