Intel first brought its chip manufacturing to 14 nanometers with the Broadwell architecture, the “compression” of Haswell. Then came Skylake, technically the “tock” of Broadwell, but that rhythm broke with Kaby Lake, which introduced the new “Process - Architecture - Optimization” model.
Kaby Lake and the pressure of competition
Kaby Lake made its desktop debut earlier this year, and although benchmarks had no trouble putting its processors at the top of the charts, we all agree that Intel has not made performance a priority. The main reason in consumers' minds is none other than a lack of competition, but that is expected to change with Ryzen. In recent hours, several benchmarks and prices for AMD's new hardware leaked. I admit I'm doing everything I can to avoid falling for the “hype”; however, if even 25 percent of that data is true, Intel will feel some pressure. In fact, other outlets indicate that Santa Clara will respond by launching two new Core i5 and i7 chips with unlocked multipliers, and the Core i5 will have Hyper-Threading, something that has never happened before.
Coffee Lake and the 10nm delay
Another point of discomfort for Intel lies in the development of its 10nm technology. Production numbers are not what was expected, so at its latest Investor Day the company confirmed that there will be a second optimization on 14nm for the eighth generation of processors, under the code name Coffee Lake. You have to go back to July 2016 to find the first references to Coffee Lake, which indicate a sort of “coexistence” with Cannonlake (10nm). Another leak even gave it a launch date of February 2018. Now, Coffee Lake will see the light before the end of the year, and Intel promises a 15 percent performance jump... something it also did with Kaby Lake (and which, by the way, did not materialize).
A look ahead
The rest of the information points to a higher priority on data centers at 10nm. That leads us to imagine a new series of Xeon units, but we must not forget that Intel offers alternatives based on Atom chips. In short: Intel broke its shiny “PAO”, will have a fourth development phase on 14nm, and will have to face the competition presented by AMD.
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