Intel’s difficulties with 10nm fabrication process seems to be ending at last as they have recently announced that by the end of June this year they will be ramping up the production of previously launched 10nm mobile/low-powered processors commonly known as Ice Lake series of CPU’s.
What this means is that whatever difficulty Intel was facing in increasing the yield of their 10nm CPU’s, it is finally over for good. Still there are no concrete signs on when we will be able to see the 10nm high performance desktop CPU’s. But who cares about the niche desktop/gaming market. Intel’s current goal is to maintain its dominant position in the laptop and datacentre segments where it is facing stiff competition from both AMD and ARM.
With the good availability of 10nm highly efficient Ice Lake chips from Intel we will soon be witnessing the launch of multiple laptops from various OEM’s such as DELL, HP, Lenovo and Acer powered by Ice Lake cores. Will end user be interested in these offerings? This thing is debatable. There can be a scenario where Ice Lake turns out to be too little too late or it may turn out to be super efficient there by increasing the battery backup considerably. We have to wait and see how everything goes with Ice Lake. But one thing is sure that Intel will soon catch up with AMD as far as fabrication process is concerned (TSMC 7nm is almost equal to Intel 10nm. Please don’t get fooled by the fact that 7nm is better than 10nm.)
Apart from this Intel has also revealed that their next Core i7 mobile offering will offer considerable increase in graphics performance (2x increase) as compared to previous generation. Transcoding performance will also increase by a factor of 2 which means that content creators/ youtubers will be able to transcode their videos much faster on the new Core i7 mobile CPU. Not only this, the new Core i7 will also gives boost to the AI performance of the chip.
10nm sounds good on paper but will it be able to restore the old glory of Intel? That question remains unanswered but not for too long.