back to article Intel’s first 10nm CPU is a twin-core i3 destined for a mid-range Lenovo

Intel’s revealed the existence of a real, actual, coming-to-a-PC-near-you-real-soon-now, CPU built with a ten-nanometre manufacturing process. The Core i3-8121U Processor popped up on Intel’s ARK database of its products in the last day or so. Intel’s years late delivering 10nm silicon, having foreshadowed its arrival years …

  1. This post has been deleted by its author

    1. psychonaut

      Re: Yawn indeed.

      Thats pretty harsh. Considering almost noone needs even a 10 year old i3 .(ssd, intel gxxxx gen 2 or 3, 4gb ram will do any office task imagineable very quickly for 99% of imagineable in a normal office environment) easily..this chip isnt aimed at you. No one is going to pair this chip with 64gb of ram, itd be stupid. You would spend the budget differently

    2. tip pc Silver badge

      Re: Yawn indeed.

      @shadow systems

      It’s an i3 destined for a cheap laptop, doesn’t look bad to me. If you want bleeding edge perhaps head up the intel product range towards the i7’s or higher for desktops?

      It’s like moaning about a new smart car expecting it to be an slr or a new punto expecting it be an 488.

      It’s a new low end cheap chip destined for low power gear and using the latest 10nm process intel have struggled to get right. It’s a big deal.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Yawn indeed.

      It turbo boosts up to 3+GHz? Bullocks. I want a chip that has a base speed of 4GHz or faster...

      Yawn. 4GHz? Who cares. If we want any new chip from Intel, we'll want those with Meltdown vulnerability patched on hardware level. And no Intel management engine crap.

      1. psychonaut

        Re: Yawn indeed.

        nice! the first guy to post has deleted his post! cant stand the heat? get out of the meltdown man...

  2. elaar

    It's not a particularly interesting chip, agreed. But why does the first chip of a new generation need to be top of the range?

    It's designed to go into a cheap, efficient laptop, so obviously has no need for 50 cores and 200Gig of RAM.

    Due to the difficulty they've had with 10nm, did you really expect the first CPU to be some sort of Goliath?

    1. defiler

      But why does the first chip of a new generation need to be top of the range?

      This is what I'm thinking. It's a very middling chip, so if they have problems they can pull it without making massive waves. I think this is eminently sensible. If it hits the ground running and shows positive qualities, expect the i5 and i7 range to come in quickly behind it. If there are issues, expect this to be quietly sidelined until they are fixed.

    2. Boothy

      Seems completely logical to me. They've been having lots of yield issues with 10nm.

      Going with a low clock, low core chip seems the sensible idea, keeping the transistor count down gives you more chance of producing working silicon, and keeping the speeds down, means less likelihood of a failure.

      Build these i3's in bulk gives Intel a chance to tweak the 10nm process, whilst actually managing to sell some of the silicon. Over time they should then get the process improved, get yields up, and then start producing better i3's, then onto i5's and so on.

    3. Grikath

      Very much this... This is the first of the Tick.

      Anyone with sense (and a need to upgrade) waits for the Tock. So in about a year or so you can expect the Bleeding Edge stuff that'll go into gaming rigs. And another year beofre we're on gen3, and most of the niggles have been ironed out, *and* the price has dropped for my next "not-quite-budget" box.

      1. gregthecanuck

        Price drops? Intel? Surely you jest my good fellow.

        May I present for your attention the current Intel price list: https://s21.q4cdn.com/600692695/files/doc_downloads/cpu_price/2018/Apr_03_18_Recommended_Customer_Price_List.pdf

        If our dear reader would kindly direct their attention to the "% Decrease" column one would quickly surmise that this column is some sort of insider joke at Intel. The column is null. Every cell. No decrease to be found. Keeping good company with Nessie, Bigfoot and little green men. And may I suggest that this pattern has repeated itself more often that not with new price list releases.

        Intel is still in the "we own the market" mindset. Hopefully AMD can keep their collective sh!t together long enough to start squeezing some of Intel's insane margins.

    4. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      But why does the first chip of a new generation need to be top of the range?

      Within a range the top and the bottom are the same chip but going down the range having more faulty sections disabled.

      The chip design in use will be that which they believe they can sell and you can bet that if they could get the top of the range working at 10nm then they would have as this attracts the most return. This since they had to BS their investors inorder to get the cash in order to try to get the 10nm tech working.

      If this chip is the best they can offer at 10nm then they are still having lots of expensive problems getting 10nm working and I would conclude that the investment still has yet to show a return. Add in the redesign required for meltdown and spectre and it would be fair to say that Intel have lost the top slot for quite some time yet.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: But why does the first chip of a new generation need to be top of the range?

        [Revised repeat of something I posted around here earlier in the week]

        SemiAccurate published an article earlier this month, which I haven't seen in full, on the re-emergence of "contra revenue" [1] at Intel, and the lack of emergence of Intel 10nm parts into real products - even though 10nm was first scheduled to emerge in 2015 or so?! Highlights at

        https://semiaccurate.com/2018/05/08/contra-revenue-comes-back-in-a-big-way-at-intel/

        Related coverage at:

        https://www.tomshardware.co.uk/intel-cpu-10nm-earnings-amd,news-58336.html (Article published 27 April 2018 after Intel's financial results included more details of 10nm delays)

        See also Intel's admission in 2016 that their Tick Tock model was dead:

        https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/03/intel-retires-tick-tock-development-model-extending-the-life-of-each-process/

        See also: Intel recruit chip design expert Jim Keller (ex-AMD, ex-Apple, etc), widely reported in April 2018, e.g. [2]

        https://www.anandtech.com/show/12689/cpu-design-guru-jim-keller-joins-intel

        And see also Intel's CEO unexpectedly selling all the shares he could late last year (some time before some interesting news became public), and consequently rather upsetting the financial markets, e.g. [3]

        https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenkam/2018/03/06/why-i-have-lost-confidence-in-intels-ceo/

        Maybe, just maybe, Intel's cash pile and product pipeline isn't as secure as it used to be. Still, even if the legacy x86 (largely Wintel) market hits harder times, Intel still have... er, what is there, exactly?

        It's worse than that, Intel's dead Jim. Dead, Jim.

        Ooops.

        [1] "Contra revenue": a name for Intel's incentive payments (er, subsidies) to system builders in markets where Intel would otherwise be a hopeless basket case, e.g. low power/mobile/SoC. Basically, anything which isn't legacy x86.

        [2] "[...] The prolific microarchitectural engineer [Keller] has been involved in a number of high-profile CPU & SoC projects over the years, including AMD’s K8 and Zen CPUs and Apple’s early A-series SoCs. Now after a stint over as Tesla for the past couple of years, Intel has announced that they have hired Keller to lead their silicon engineering efforts. [...]"

        [3] "[...]Krzanich acted with some urgency to sell every share he could and still keep his job as CEO about a month before the security vulnerabilities of Intel's processors became public knowledge.

        Even though Intel's stock has recovered since the news broke, as an investor, I have lost confidence that Krzanich can put the company's interests ahead of his own during a crisis."

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: But why does the first chip of a new generation need to be top of the range?

          I guess the OP has already seen Charlie Demerjian answer, but here its for the one that missed it.

          https://semiaccurate.com/2018/05/29/is-intels-upcoming-10nm-launch-real-or-a-pr-stunt/

          My coat?

    5. Tom 64
      Holmes

      Very small die, low clock speeds. Looks like intel really are having a lot of trouble with 10nm.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    About as much use as a grain of sand you say?

    There's more to this than meets the eye.

    (Give Intel some credit, don't knock 10nm, it's tough to do).

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      don't knock 10nm, it's tough to do

      I think the probable difficulty is reasonably widely understood by those familiar with the subject.

      A relevant question might be: did *Intel HQ* understand just how difficult it was going to be, before making public promises that are now several years late? (Yeah I know about the small print on the SEC forms, that ensure nothing's ever really promised or ever really late as far as the SEC rules are concerned).

    2. IanDs

      10nm is tough to do if you're Intel, but apparently not for TSMC doing 7nm (similar process) with multiple chips already in the hands of customers, some of which are *very* big chips for applications like networking where Intel-level yield would totally kill them...

      1. Grikath

        The size isn't the thing. The actual circuits, and [everything that might crosstalk/go wrong/simply refuses to work] may be an issue here...

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Meh.

    This has a whiff of 'we were going for 4 core but nearly all the dies failed QA'

    I used to work in the semiconductor industry so I know that this stuff is hard, but this sounds like something rushed out just to keep the banksters and other Wall St. vultures happy.

    Whether it succeeds is another matter antirely ..

  5. mark l 2 Silver badge
    FAIL

    I am assuming apart from the move to 10nm it still has the same Meltdown/Spectre vulnerabilities present that are only fixed with performance reducing software patches.

  6. FrancisKing

    Bleeding edge vs cutting edge

    "Which places the 10nm Core i3-8121U a fair way from the bleeding edge."

    This is not difficult to get right. The cutting edge is the leading edge. The bleeding edge is the exact opposite.

    I'd say that the new processor is very close to the bleeding edge.

    1. Andy The Hat Silver badge

      Re: Bleeding edge vs cutting edge

      Not sure ... if you give a kid has a knife in the kitchen, and you don't want tainted food, in you tell them to keep their fingers away from the bleedin' edge - which is the cutting edge*

      * Unless it's my mum's knife in which case you can't tell the sharp edge from the not sharp without asking ... :-(

  7. James 51

    With AMD shipping 12nm CPUs and APUs* it lets Intel keep the bragging rights on size. The i3 is not that impressive but I am guessing they're still developing the technology and they want to make sure if they make a mistake it's in a market with a product that will do them the least harm.

    *I know they're not calling them APU any more but that's what they are.

  8. steelpillow Silver badge

    Yield

    "This has a whiff of 'we were going for 4 core but nearly all the dies failed QA'"

    Indeed. Too often bleeding-edge fab has been launched with a bleeding-edge chip so full of manufacturing flaws that the business suffered badly. 10 nm is probably still experiencing more than its fair share of quality issues and yields will be very low. A more challenging chip is asking for trouble, while this little dullard can easily be swapped out for an older device if yields fail to meet orders. Meantime it serves to help shake down the fab line.

  9. IanDs

    If you have yield problems with your process like Intel do with 10nm, a big chip is a route to disaster, so you do a small one first (yield drops very rapidly above a critical chip size).

    But a two-core CPU with no GPU in Intel's 10nm process (at least 2x density of their 14nm) is going to be tiny, around 8x smaller chip area than a 6-core CPU with GPU like i7-8770K which is the top of their current consumer range.

    This suggests their yield problems are *really* bad, since even a quad-core CPU + GPU would still be 3x smaller area than an 8770 and they haven't even gone for this...

  10. jzl

    Tiny, really tiny

    10nm is 50 silicon atoms end-to-end.

    That's absolutely ludicrously tiny and, when you think about it, a monumental achievement for a bunch of jumped-up monkeys in clothes.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Tiny, really tiny

      There isn't anything in Intel's or anyone else's 10nm process that is actually 10nm in size. Minimum gate length (which used to be how processes were named) is 18nm.

      1. Grikath

        Re: Tiny, really tiny

        Doug, besides the pedantism..

        The fact remains that when you're designing something as complicated as a modern microprocessor at that particular size, you're inviting Murphy for a couple of pints at your bachelor bash. This is still stuff we read as kids as science *fiction* , now we're actually attempting it. Not bad for bald monkeys..

  11. Greg 38

    This suggest performance problems rather than yield issues

    I used to work at Intel's development fab. This middling chip release reminds me of the problems they had when transitioning to the Pentium-4 90nm (Willamette chip) process that was the first to used EPI for strained PMOS performance. In that case, the PMOS leaked current like a sieve and they couldn't keep the chip in the spec'd power envelope. They had to back off the poly gate CD to drop the power consumption but that hurt performance and made the chips only usable for the entry level devices.

    With the cost of developing a new process, it is certainly desired to have the new chip come in for the performance segment where the profit is the highest. These i3 chips are commodities and not terribly profitable.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: This suggest performance problems rather than yield issues

      Using this only on a dual core chip with no GPU to get a die size as small as possible doesn't scream yield issues to you?

      Here's a question for you, since you obviously know the fab end of this. If Intel continues to have problems with 10nm, does there come a point where they might abandon 10nm entirely and use those resources (people/money) to try to speed up the introduction of 7nm? Or is it not feasible to skip a generation, even if they get 10nm working so late they have mass production for less than a year before 7nm mass production is ready? (and thus will never fully amortize 10nm development costs)

      Of course, the delays with 14nm, and the longer delays with 10nm, wouldn't inspire confidence that 7nm will stay on schedule so even if technically possible it may still be a stupid idea.

      1. Greg 38

        Re: This suggest performance problems rather than yield issues

        Looking at the CPU lineup, it looks like the 2-core Cannon Lake line of chips is essentially a shrink of the 2-core Kaby Lake line. They would be designed as a dual-core chip only with the 4-core version using a completely different mask set and be a completely separate product.

        Intel scraps wafers or lots with excessively high defect levels because it is likely the "good" die that didn't fail are actually marginal and will fail at a much higher rate. Basic Q&R. The die testing hasn't been functional for 15 years and is based on test patterns.

        I suspect they will continue to resolve the manufacturing issues. Intel runs with 2 concurrent development teams, one that works on the current node (10nm) and the other working on the next (7nm). Process improvements developed under the 7nm node could certainly be ported backwards if it makes sense.

  12. glussier

    "Wake us up when things get more interesting than a 2.2GHz 4MB cache laptop chip, please".

    Here you go, this I3 i3-8121U as an AMD RX540 imbedded in the same cpu package: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-Core-i3-8121U-SoC-Benchmarks-and-Specs.303400.0.html

  13. Randy Hudson

    "Intel’s"

    Article's used "Intel’s" to mean possession (as expected), but then "Intel has", and then "Intel is". Are you trying to make reading unpleasant? Reading's easier without so many contractions.

  14. 0laf
    Meh

    I had an old i3 that did stalwart service in a self built desktop. Killed off only my MS useless update service on W10.

    So a new i3 might not be Max Power worthy news but for a normal user it could well be a decent workhorse processor.

  15. JeffyPoooh
    Pint

    What have they been up to?

    My 2-year-old cheap and cheerful smartphone has a 14nm 8-core 2.2 GHz CPU.

    Intel seems to have misplaced their Tick-Tock strategy.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Intel seems to have misplaced their Tick-Tock strategy.

      "My 2-year-old cheap and cheerful smartphone has a 14nm 8-core 2.2 GHz CPU."

      Given your description, is it safe to assume that it's not got Intel Inside ?

      "Mislaid" tick-tock? Given up on it after a string of delays, with a public announcement initially hidden in SEC filings (initially reported in the investment journal Motley Fool) that started getting slightly wider coverage from tech rags at least two years ago. See e,g,

      https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/03/intel-retires-tick-tock-development-model-extending-the-life-of-each-process/

  16. conscience

    I am surprised Intel have even bothered with this

    If this is the best that Intel can currently do on the new process then I really don't see the point of it, unless of course this is a shareholder appeasement move or PR strategy. This chip is never going to impress anyone and is far from the usual high-end showcase a new chip or process traditionally receive, it just serves to highlight the big problems that they are having.

    It is definitely very revealing as to what a dire state Intel's 10nm process must be in right now. I'm sure I read somewhere that Intel won't be skipping 10nm because of all the money they have invested in it so far and they want a return on their investment. If that is true then this could be a huge mistake as it could leave them at a real disadvantage. They simply have to make 10nm work and fast, meanwhile their rivals move onto 7nm and beyond leaving them far behind.

    When you also take into account the up to 30% slowdown from the Meltdown patches, it's no wonder that they hired Jim Keller! For the first time in a long time, maybe even since the Athlon days, Intel look decidedly second best and they're vulnerable, not only from AMD but also they have the ARM crowd to contend with.

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