Intel makes its first 10nm Cannon Lake chips official

Intel makes its first 10nm Cannon Lake chips official

6 years ago
Anonymous $CLwNLde341

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/05/intel-makes-its-first-10nm-cannon-lake-chips-official/

Intel's transition to building processors on a 10nm manufacturing process has been delayed repeatedly. Once upon a time the company said that it'd go into mass production at the end of 2015; with its most recent financial results the company pushed that back, again, to 2019. But the company has also said that, although the yields aren't good enough for large-scale production, it has been shipping 10nm processors, codename Cannon Lake, to an unspecified customer.

That customer is Lenovo: the IdeaPad 330 has been listed by Chinese retailers, and it includes a mysterious processor, the Core i3-8121U. The name tells us the market positioning—it's an i3, so it's low-end—the power envelope—the "U" at the end means that it's a 15W chip—and the branding—the number starts with an 8, so it's going to be another "8th generation" chip, just like the Kaby Lake-R, Kaby Lake-G, and Coffee Lake processors. This means that "8th generation" is a rather vague label that describes several different processor variants, built on several different manufacturing processes (two 14nm variants and now 10nm).