Intel says that it has delayed the rollout of its 7nm CPUs by six months, now 12 months behind the company's internal targets
Intel announced today in its Q2 2020 earnings release that it has now delayed the rollout of its 7nm CPUs by six months relative to its previously-planned release date …
Today's Q2 2020 disclosure breaks that roadmap — six months added on top of an already-12-month gap versus internal targets — and it lands while Intel is also thinning its adjacent product bets, having moved data center GPUs to a two-year cadence with Falcon Shores pushed to 2025.
First-order effects
Intel's own published timeline is invalidated: the first 7nm product promised for 2021 in its 2019 roadmap slips roughly a year, so server and PC customers planning refresh cycles around that date must re-plan or buy current-generation parts longer.
The delay hands rival chipmakers a wider window to sell against Intel on process advantage at the leading edge, right as Intel's product cadence elsewhere is also slowing.
Second-order effects
Following the 14nm playbook, Intel will likely extend 10nm-derived silicon across more product generations and price tiers to cover the gap, stretching amortization of existing fabs instead of ramping new nodes.
Each slipped node compounds the next: with 7nm arriving late, Intel's subsequent transition targets inherit less manufacturing learning time, which is how a six-month slip becomes the multi-year lag seen between its 2015 and 2018 announcements.
Third-order effects
If the pattern holds — 14nm stretched, 10nm delayed repeatedly, 7nm now a year behind internal targets — Intel's integrated-manufacturer model faces a structural question: whether owning fabs still confers a lead when node execution keeps ceding process advantage to fabless competitors using external foundries.
The cumulative record also hardens the case that Moore's Law cadence is no longer a reliable planning assumption for the industry, pushing buyers toward architecture and packaging gains rather than waiting on transistor shrinks.
The trend: Intel is turning repeated process-node execution risk into a defining feature of its roadmap, with each slipped transition widening the window for foundry-backed rivals and eroding the assumption that in-house manufacturing guarantees leadership.
The problem with falling further behind a fast-moving target (TSMC) when you're already behind is that it increases the odds that you'll *never* catch up. Or that by the time you do, the world has changed (more ARM, ASICs, GPUs, and AMD in datacenters) https://www.tomshardware.co…
For a long period of time, Intel was the most advanced chip manufacturing company on the planet. Those days are over, after the company announced Thursday that it won't be able to ship chips using state-of-the-art technology until late next year. https://www.protocol.com/...
RE: Ongoing Intel issues and delays, I turn back to one takeaway from this year's WWDC. It will be difficult to believe that there was even a debate regarding whether or not the Mac would be transitioned to Apple Silicon. https://www.aboveavalon.com/ ... https://twitter.com/...
If and when Intel catches up to 7nm CPUs (2022-2023), Apple/TSMC will be on 3nm chips and Apple will have completely transitioned its entire Mac product line to Silicon. Timing is everything. (Can $AAPL survive this?) https://www.tomshardware.com/ ...
TSMC's management talked about 4nm in H122 and 3nm in H222, which raises the possibility that Apple will use 4nm in its 2022 products and 3nm in 2023 https://twitter.com/...
Very sound quarter for Intel with Top and Bottom line beats. Guidance soft and delays on 7nm making investors pause. Encouraging but room for improvement. @Intel offers disappointing Q3 earnings guidance as it delays next-generation chips https://www.cnbc.com/... #Earnings $INTC …