![]() It wouldn’t launch until mid-2018, and only then in a handful of low-end systems with integrated graphics disabled. Originally slated for a 2016 launch, by early that year Intel said that its first 10nm would be “Cannon Lake” in the second half of 2017, a die-shrink of the optimized Kaby Lake architecture. Tick-tock’s demise obviously delayed 10nm’s arrival. Considering that Intel still has yet to release 10nm desktop processors, it comes at no surprise that neither tick-tock nor tick-tock-optimization has been mentioned since. In early 2016, Intel confirmed that tick-tock was dead, adding a third leg to the process dubbed “optimization.” Intel’s 7th-gen “Kaby Lake” processors were flagged as the first “optimization” architecture in 2017, another 14nm chip following the releases of Broadwell and then Skylake. The relentless innovation must have sounded like the doomsday clock to then-floundering AMD. For years, Intel’s processors followed the tick-tock cadence, releasing upgraded CPUs with a smaller manufacturing process one generation, then a new microarchitecture built on the smaller process the following year. The death of Intel’s vaunted “tick-tock” manufacturing process served as the canary in the coal mine. Intel’s original roadmaps expected 10nm chips to launch in 2016, with more advanced 7nm chips coming in 2018. How did Intel get here? Let's look at how the company lost its way, starting with the death of tick-tock. And if Apple's flight from Nvidia GPUs after “Bumpgate” in 2009 is any indication, it won’t be coming back. AMD’s Ryzen chips have snatched the computing crown, and Apple’s doing the unthinkable: switching Macs away from x86 CPUs onto its own custom Arm silicon. Intel’s 10th-gen Core processors remain on an (upgraded) 14nm process. Nearly six years later, the tables have turned. A mere month later, the Apple iPad Air 2 launched with a custom A8X chip that couldn’t quite hang with Intel’s older Haswell CPUs in Geekbench- but it was getting close. AMD remained stuck on the 28nm process with its abysmal Bulldozer architecture. Despite some manufacturing woes that pushed Broadwell back from its expected 2013 release, Intel’s offering served as the vanguard of processor technology. That’s the day Intel introduced 5th-gen Core M chips based on “Broadwell,” the company’s first processors built using the 14-nanometer manufacturing process. The first step was to launch a new engraving on a mastered architecture, the next year a new architecture was introduced to take advantage of this improved thinness and, finally, the third year was used to optimize all this.Intel’s endless 10nm nightmare has cost it so, so much. ![]() Intel was talking about a new strategy in three steps, over three years: process / architecture / optimization. In reality, a tick could also be accompanied by some new features, but this was not the main element.Ī strategy that Intel maintained for a decade, but then abandoned when it seemed unable to keep up. ![]() In the first year (tock), Intel launched a new architecture based on a previously tested chip, while the following year, the tick was an opportunity to introduce a new chip while keeping the previous architecture. It was an alternation between two technical evolutions. The scheme was then called tick-tock and the idea was quite simple. More ambitious and enthusiastic than ever, Intel is talking about a return to shorter cycles for its future processors.įrom 2006 to 2016, Intel had implemented a two-year evolution cycle for its processors. ![]()
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