Intel's 10nm Chips Arrive in June, 7nm in 2021

Intel's 10nm processors are finally set to arrive next month, but the chip giant is already thinking about what comes next and is promising 7nm chips by 2021.

Yesterday, Intel held its 2019 Investor Meeting in Santa Clara where Dr. Murthy Renduchintala, Intel's chief engineering officer and group president of the Technology, Systems Architecture and Client Group, detailed what comes next for the company. Top of the list is Intel's much-delayed 10nm processors, which are going to start shipping in volume from June.

The first 10nm chips will be for mobile platforms and offered under the name "Ice Lake." Intel is boasting Ice Lake offers three-times faster wireless speed, two-times faster video transcoding, two-times faster graphics performance, and up to three-times faster artificial intelligence performance.

When we get to experience this higher performance in new devices has yet to be pinned down. Intel is only stating its partners will have new hardware containing 10nm chips on shelves by the "2019 holiday season," which it has been stating since July 2018. Further 10nm chips will appear in client and server products, the Intel Agilex FPGAs, the Intel Nervana NNP-I AI processor, and the "Snow Ridge" 5G-ready network system-on-chip by 2020. Most interesting of all is a general-purpose GPU which will also take advantage of Intel's 10nm production process.

While it's good to see Intel isn't abandoning 10nm chips, it doesn't look as though they will be the company's focus for long. Renduchintala also talked about Intel's 7nm chip plans and the first product arriving in 2021. It will be a general-purpose GPU for data centers where there's demand for AI and high-performance computing tasks. After that, surely the focus will move to 7nm across the board for Intel's chip line-up as it promises, "approximately 20 percent increase in performance per watt."

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