Intel's consternation with its 10nm manufacturing process is well documented but on its Q1 earnings call yesterday, the Santa Clara chip giant painted a more positive picture on the ramp-up of its forthcoming Ice Lake processor for mobile client systems, dubbed Ice Lake-U. While many media outlets have been reporting that Intel's 10nm product wouldn't ship in meaningful volume this year, Intel CEO Bob Swan offered commentary that production output of Ice Lake has nearly doubled in the past few months.
Swan noted specifically, “on the process technology front, our teams executed well in Q1 and our velocity is increasing. We remain on track to have volume client systems on shelves for the holiday selling season. And over the past 4 months, the organization drove a nearly 2X improvement in the rate at which 10nm products move through our factories.” Beyond this, I would offer that Intel is in the process of qualifying the product with major system OEMs here in Q2, with production shipments expected likely in Q3 for retail-ready laptop system availability to consumers in Q4.
Ice Lake-U will be comprised of a quad-core variant of Intel's Sunny Cove CPU platform architecture, which will bring myriad enhancements, including support for LPDDR4X memory, an extension of its instruction set for cryptographic workloads and Intel's highly anticipated Gen 11 graphics. Intel Gen 11 Graphics will be comprised of more than double the execution units, up from 24 in the previous gen to 64 in Sunny Cove, with over 1 TFLOPS of compute throughput and support for adaptive refresh display technology similar to NVIDIA G-Sync and AMD FreeSync. In short, Ice Lake's graphics performance is expected to offer sizable gains over Intel's existing laptop platforms. Intel's 15 Watt Ice Lake--U and Sunny Cove platform also supports native Thunderbolt 3 and WiFi 6 for increased connectivity and IO bandwidth.
I'm personally optimistic about forthcoming laptop products based on Intel's 10nm Ice Lake processor platform and Mr. Swan's was also optimistic on its potential for impact in future earnings releases late this year, noting, "as I shared earlier, our confidence in 10nm is also improving. In addition to the manufacturing velocity improvement I described earlier, we expect to qualify our first volume 10nm product – Ice Lake – this quarter and are increasing our 10nm volume goals for the year.”
So it seems 10nm laptop chips -- which are a built with a much smaller die size and typically how Intel ramps a new manufacturing process node -- are back on track and not too far down the road for delivery. But what about the desktop and data center? Intel noted that Ice Lake-based Xeon processors should hit sometime in 2020, with hints of "sooner rather than later." A leaked, alleged Intel roadmap has been making its way around the web today, noting desktop chips may not arrive in 2020 but I would suggest taking that leak with a healthy dose of skepticism. We don't know when that roadmap was penned, if it's current information, and of course if it's even accurate.
And finally, let's remember semiconductor process nodes are not created equal. Intel has claimed in the past that, compared to other chip supplier process nodes, its 14nm process delivers over 20% higher transistor density per square millimeter. Regardless, we'll see how this all pans out later this year and how well these new products will compete versus AMD Zen 2-based chips, which are reportedly showing solid potential as well, as they head into a likely Computex 2019 unveil.
