Once an industry leader, Intel is now struggling to keep up with the competition. The silicon giant has now delayed its 7nm chips by several months, which it announced during the Q2 earnings call.
Intel said in a Press release that its 7nm chip plans have been delayed by nearly six months from previous estimates. In total, the company is now nearly 12 months behind on its internal target. According to Tom's material Intel now plans to launch processors based on the 7nm manufacturing process around 2022 or 2023.
Speaking of the delay, CEO Bob Swan said the company has found a " fault mode " in its manufacturing process. Intel is already looking for workarounds that could include outsourcing the work to third-party foundries. It could also use third-party foundries for the next Ponte Vecchio GPUs to power the Aurora supercomputer.
Anyway, by comparison, Intel's rival AMD already offers processors based on the 7nm process. Recently, AMD also announced that its mobile processors have become almost 25 times more energy efficient. It is possible that AMD will offer a 5nm process by the time Intel moves to 7nm, making it difficult for Intel to reach the top.
Another great example of Intel's loss of grip in the silicon market is Apple's switch to homemade ARM processors. According to sources, Intel was unable to deliver the chips on time, and the chip resulted in several hardware issues.
The most recent things we can expect from Intel are chips based on the Tiger Lake microarchitecture (10nm ++). These chips will benefit from new Intel Xe graphics and hardware protection against malware.
Intel is also expected to launch its first 10nm desktop chips based on the Alder Lake microarchitecture in the second half of 2021.
via Windows Central