Intel’s 10th-gen Core CPUs are here, and with them its long-awaited 10nm production process. However, as Jeremy Laird dscovered, the power of 10 is proving a little problematic
It’s been five long years since Intel’s very first 14nm CPUs came to market. That’s worth repeating. It’s taken fully five years for Intel to roll out the 10nm successor to its 14nm production node. This from the company that has led the industry in manufacturing integrated circuits for decades. More than anything, it’s Intel’s advantage in chip manufacturing that has defined the company. But only now is it ramping up production of 10nm silicon as part of its new 10th generation of Core processors.
Of course, this is Intel, and nothing is ever simple. Strictly speaking, Intel trickled out a few dual-core 10nm chips in 2018. But if you can point us at an available retail product that uses these ultra-rare Cannon Lake chips, you’d be smarter than us. The 10th-generation Core CPUs thus represent the first true availability of 10nm processors from Intel. Likewise, while Intel’s new 10th-gen line-up does include both 10nm silicon and an exciting new microarchitecture, it also encompasses not just one but two 14nm designs based on existing microarchitectures. Intel 10th-gen, in other words, means a lot of different things.
That’s just 10th-gen as we know it today. Don’t be surprised if it becomes even more complicated. And that’s just the products themselves. When it comes to branding, something Intel seemingly sees primarily as an opportunity to confuse its customers, the company is arguably achieving new lows with 10th-gen. The new nomenclature is so complicated and contradictory, it feels like you need a couple of MBAs, a law degree, and a PhD just to grasp the basics. But don’t despair. There is some genuinely new technology buried beneath the brain-dead marketing. What’s more, we’re here to do the donkey work for you, and make sense of Intel’s marketing madness. Let’s begin.
Before we deep-dive into all those new 10th-gen chips, there’s an elephant that needs escorting from the path ahead. We speak of the extraordinarily long delay to Intel’s 10nm production process, the successor to 14nm in all its many forms. According to Moore’s Law, 10nm tech ought to have been in full flow by late 2016. After all, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore famously predicted the doubling of transistor density every couple of years, and this essentially dictates a new process from Intel every two years.
Years sailed by. In 2018, Intel released a very small number of dual-core processors based on its 10nm node. But they were vanishingly rare and not true retail products. Even Intel described those initial 10nm products as ‘low volume’. If we were cynics, we’d say they existed only so that Intel c
