10nm In Trouble

[SteelCrysis]

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-...37964.html

Intel's unusually quick response is telling. The company certainly doesn't need any lingering questions surrounding its progress on its 10nm node, particularly as it nears its earnings call later this week. As an official dispatch from an Intel twitter account, the statement does hold all of the legal weight of any official Intel statement, and misleading statements to investors is a punishable offense.

In other words, Intel is throwing its weight behind the assertions it made in its most recent earnings call that systems with 10nm processors will come to market in the second half of 2019. There has been speculation that Intel could skip its 10nm process in favor of moving directly to its nascent 7nm node. But there is nothing to substantiate those rumors.

Demerjian has been right in the past, correctly claiming that Intel's 10nm process was facing delays while the company claimed otherwise, which does give some weight to his claims. Most of Demerjian's article is behind a paywall, so it's hard to analyze the full rationale behind Demerjian's statements. No analyst is infallible, so only time will tell if Demerjian's claims are accurate, or if Intel is indeed making strides toward wide-scale 10nm availability.

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/27...nm-process

Unfortunately, it’s not possible to see the actual evidence SemiAccurate provides (archival link, the site is down) for its argument because that information is subscriber-only. It’s difficult, therefore, to test the evaluated claims. But the better question to ask, given the paucity of information, is this: Regardless of whether Intel canceled its previous 10nm process, would Intel walk away from being a leading-edge foundry? And the answer there is an obvious “No.”

There is a multitude of reasons why Intel won’t accept this outcome, starting with the fact that it’s tantamount to ceding future progression to outside companies. And in this context, ” canceling” 10nm could mean something more akin to “drawing up a new plan for future node progression” as opposed to “walking away from the leading edge forever,” even assuming SemiAccurate’s rumors are correct. There’s too much at stake as far as Intel’s perceived manufacturing prowess. Leading edge development is simply too important to the company to quit.
...
Our final thought is this. While it’s true that Intel’s 10nm slips have already been unprecedented, regardless of whether this rumor is true, these problems do generally fit the theory we’ve talked about over the years: Specifically, node slips and problematic improvement cycles were going to become more normal than they used to be, as the difficulty of further improvement only grew. Intel isn’t the company we expected to slam into these problems first, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t real.

That doesn’t mean Intel hasn’t made mistakes throughout this process. But it does make those mistakes intrinsically more likely to occur.