Quote:During its annual investors day, Intel shed some light on upcoming Cannonlake architecture. The company promises over 15 percent better performance compared to Kabylake. While no exact numbers were shared, it was told that they are based on SysMark benchmark.

More importantly, Intel Cannonlake is currently expected to ship in the second half of 2017. This probably means entry-level parts with faster CPUs coming at a later date.

It’s also worth noting that the slide below is clearly comparing i7 series, a direct competitor to AMD Ryzen, which is expected to launch later this month.

Quote:By "on track," Intel seems to be reinforcing its guidance that Cannon Lake chips will begin shipping in the second half of this year. Shipments of Cannon Lake in volume will begin in the first half of 2018, according to transcripts of Intel CEO Brian Krzanich by Ashraf Eassa at the Motley Fool.

Quote:The company is already looking to the future, however, and today revealed the codename for the 9th generation of processors that will follow. In Intel's 3-step 'Process-Architecture-Optimisation' cadence, Coffee Lake will represent a second optimization stage following the current Kaby Lake. Succeeding this will be Cannonlake, which will be a new process - and Intel's first to shrink the die to 10nm.

This will be followed by the 9th generation of Core processors, representing a new architecture phase under the guise of Ice Lake. These processors will "utilize Intel’s industry-leading 10nm+ process technology."

It's still unclear as to how the 10nm+ process will differ from the 10nm process in Cannonlake, though we may gain a better picture of the company's future plans at their unveiling of Coffee Lake on August 21.

Quote:Intel displayed a laptop bearing a 10nm Cannon Lake processor earlier this year, but it displayed a 10nm Cannon Lake wafer at TMD and unveiled details of its new "Falcon Mesa" FPGA. Interestingly, Intel's 10nm Falcon Mesa comes bearing the PCIe 4.0 interface. We recently caught up with the PCI-SIG at Hot Chips, and while the organization indicated that PCIe 4.0 is finally almost ready for prime time, it could not share expected deployment timelines for major vendors (such as Intel and AMD).

Although the Falcon Mesa FPGA isn't destined for the desktop PC in any fashion, it is encouraging to see Intel bring the interface to the 10nm platform. It also implies we might see it debut on 10nm desktop processors. We've waited seven years for the new interface, but we might have to wait for yet another, as Intel's 10nm products are widely predicted to make their debut next year.

Quote:Intel also displayed a 10nm wafer with ARM Cortex-A75 CPU cores that the company claims can perform in excess of 3GHz. The 10nm ARM cores are the result of an agreement between ARM and Intel's Custom Foundry as the company attempts to compete with other major fabs for a piece of the broader custom market. Intel also continued the custom foundry parade with a 22FFL (a low power FinFET process) wafer, which is geared for mobile applications. Intel claims the 22FFL process powers CPUs up to 2GHz but with 100x lower leakage. Intel’s custom foundry business is a great idea for utilizing its manufacturing capabilities to generate another source of revenue, but competition is stiff with established custom foundry competitors like Global Foundries and TSMC.

Quote:Intel revealed the very first hint at its post-"Ice Lake"/"Tiger Lake" processor lineup, which will likely be built on the company's 7 nanometer silicon fab process. Its 12th generation Core processor will be built on the new "Sapphire Rapids" silicon, which will be a major micro-architecture change, and could put 8-core into more hands. The processor, along with its companion chipset, will make up the "Tinsley" platform, which is expected to hit the market in 2020.

Quote:But as 2017 draws to a close, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich says the company is “on track to ship our first low-volume 10-nanometer part by the end of the year.”

Speaking during the company’s most recent earnings call, Krzanich said Intel plans to ramp up production in the first half of 2018, with “high volume and system availability in the second half of 2018.

In other words, the first 10nm chips from Intel are coming this year. But the processors, which are code-named “Cannon Lake,” will only be available in limited quantities and you may have to wait until mid-2018 at the soonest to walk into a store and by a PC powered by one of the new processors.

Oddly, Intel is expected to brand the chips as part of the 8th-gen Intel Core processor family, which already includes 14nm Kaby Lake Refresh chips for laptops and Coffee Lake processors for desktops.

Quote:Gregory Bryant, Intel's senior vice president and general manager of the Client Computing Group at Intel Corporation, announced at an early morning event at the company's booth that it is shipping 10nm Cannon Lake products.

Bryant provided little context to his statements, but he did indicate that the company began shipping 10nm Cannon Lake processors before the end of last year. There have been unconfirmed rumors that Intel had shipped a dual-core 2.0 GHz processor, which comes in a 2+0 configuration (no graphics), for low-power applications.

Quote:There could be light at the end of the tunnel for Intel's silicon fabrication business after all, as the company reported that its 7 nanometer silicon fabrication node, which incorporates EUV (extreme ultraviolet) lithography, is on track. The company stressed in its Nasdaq Investors' Conference presentation that its 7 nm EUV process is de-linked from its 10 nm DUV (deep ultraviolet) node, and that there are separate teams working on their development. The 10 nm DUV node is qualitatively online, and is manufacturing small batches of low-power mobile "Cannon Lake" Core processors.

Cannon Lake is an optical shrink of the "Skylake" architecture to the 10 nm node. Currently there's only one SKU based on it, the Core i3-8121U. Intel utilized the electrical gains from the optical shrink to redesign the client-segment architecture's FPU to support the AVX-512 instruction-set (although not as feature-rich as the company's enterprise-segment "Skylake" derivatives). The jump from 10 nm DUV to 7 nm EUV will present a leap in transistor densities, with Intel expecting nothing short of a doubling. 10 nm DUV uses a combination of 193 nm wavelength ultraviolet lasers and multi-patterning to achieve its transistor density gains over 14 nm++. The 7 nm EUV node uses an extremely advanced 135 nm indirect laser, reducing the need for multi-patterning. The same laser coupled with multi-patterning could be Intel's ticket to 5 nm.

Quote:Intel is wheeling a ton of its NUCs (Next Unit of Computing) into the retirement home and, maybe even more notably, the ones based on the chipmaker's unfruitful Cannon Lake (CNL) microarchitecture.

Cannon Lake will forever be a dent in Intel's push for 10nm supremacy. With just one single chip, the Core i3-8121U, to show for it, it's a wonder why Intel didn't retire Cannon Lake sooner. Only a handful of devices, including Intel's own NUCs, employed the Core i3-8121U. While the chip's performance wasn't horrible, the lack of integrated graphics certainly didn't earn it any extra points, either.