Allen
Hotshot
Joined: Oct 1999
Posts: 8,856
Ohio USA
On the competition front:
Quote
Intel 10nm is better than everyone thinks
But Intel wants higher yields
Of course, our well-placed sources want to remain unnamed but Intel’s 10nm delay was for a financial reason and not the inability to make a good 10nm CPU..
..let’s assume that the new 10nm wafer could easily cost close to $700. Since Intel aims for very high yields, sometimes up to 90 percent, they want most of the 10nm dies to work. Let’s assume that the next gen 10nm Ice Lake core is 15x10mm (150mm2). This would mean that Intel can get approximately 394 dies per wafer.
Now, imagine these cores in 10nm, in the course of 2018..
The article prognosticates a cost as low as $2.00 per usable CPU die -- more likely $3.50. They don't say how many CPU cores that would be.
Anyhow, Intel may be moving towards "price competition". As the article notes, until the last year when AMD brought out Ryzen and Threadripper, Intel did not have to compete on price or performance -- now it does.
