Just months after Intel announced its abandonment of tick-tock for a more leisurely 3-step process, they have announced that a fourth 14nm chip is being developed.
In general, they are still targeting a performance bump of 15 percent, but this news could potentially become an opportunity for AMD’s Ryzen line as well as bring Intel into unfamiliar territory (being behind the competition on fab processes).
On the second part, there’s been reports that a 7nm process is in the works for mobile chips (that might also contain tri-state transistors that adds a new dimension to the 0’s and 1’s we’re used to seeing). In other words, Intel’s lead is looking a lot less solid these days.
Also, I wonder what Intel’s going to call its new process now with there now actually being more than 3 steps for the time being (for desktops at least).
Also. Intel can and will make a CPU as fast and cheap as AMD’s. They just want to know how fast it is and how much it will cost at the stores.
Just look at AMD’s RX 480… They had the price and performance lead just for a few months. Then 1060 from nvidia gets released and it’s faster that the 480 for almost the same price.
Intel has very little foothold in the mobile section, so racing to the smallest fab isn’t necessarily in their best interest. What good is a smaller fab if yields are bad, or cost overruns significantly? It’s also not clear that AMD will have access to smaller fabs earlier, foundries might be booked out due to the next iPhone/Galaxy, or simply be too expensive. AMD doesn’t have to move if Intel doesn’t move. Just like with GPUs, it took very long for both AMD and NVIDIA to switch over to the smaller fab.