Intel Whiskey Lake: Are you kidding me?

[Arya]

As title.

It's become clear that Intel's launch for Q3 2018 will be Whiskey Lake, a "new" 14Nm +++ "generation" and direct follow-on(read: exact the same as) to Coffeelake with only minor design changes.

And that leads me to wonder whether we're seeing the slow demise of Intel as a corporation. Cannonlake(10Nm) is now confirmed three years behind schedule. We don't know why, but insiders say there's a terrible problem with Yields, and the fact Intel hasn't managed to solve this within two years of work implies it's a fundamental design flaw and extremely difficult if not impossible to fix.

More worryingly for investors, Intel now seems to be getting desperate. Their press releases have become more and more vague and they've started deliberately trying to obfuscate the financial health of the company as a whole.

Given that and the fact they're limited to 14Nm for at least another 18 months, given Spectre, Meltdown and the terrible problems caused by Intel's response, I'm forced to question the company's financial future.

Obviously it won't disappear, it's much too big and much to important to the American government for that. But I"m left wondering who might buy a struggling Intel, if my predictions follow through and four-five years from now with 10Nm stillborn and 14Nm overtaken by AMD for gaming and work purposes.

[Mossy Snake]

Depends on how well AMD does really.

If they aren't pushed, they have no reason to move.

[John Doe]

AMD is yet to outperform Intel when it comes to IMC, I haven't seen any significant slowdowns on my setup after the patches for the attacks. As long as they're in front of AMD in IMC / gaming performance, they won't go down at all.

[Arya]

Well, I suppose there's one silver lining.

I need a new PC this year. I don't like what I have now, and with Intel continuing to regurgitate the same 14Nm process year after year with no replacement in sight, my decision of which CPU to build with should be brief and easy.

[John Doe]

It might be the same process size without shrinking, but better performance and more cores will ultimately deliver more. I'm happy with my 7820, granted that I paid quite a bit for it, but it does show its brute force over my old 6800K when it comes to benchmarks.

[Monk]

Problem is as you get smaller and smaller it becomes way harder to actually produce, it's not linear at all, the fixs for meltdown were largely blown out of proportion by people who didn't have the full facts as us usual.
Let's look at it another way, if Intel hasn't been able to crack it, do you really think AMD has the funds to do it? Although their infinity fabric does allow them to recover more from bad yields, hell, were knocking on the door of max speeds for silicon anyway especially under regular cooling, I say give up shrinking silicon let's move to graphene already.

Publicado originalmente por John Doe:

It might be the same process size without shrinking, but better performance and more cores will ultimately deliver more. I'm happy with my 7820, granted that I paid quite a bit for it, but it does show its brute force over my old 6800K when it comes to benchmarks.

Yeah,if Intel start soldering their heat-spreaders again their x299 chips have clearly proven you can run high core count chips at crazy speeds, adding cores is easier and cheaper than shrinking anyway and has much better prospects for added performance once utilised over a die shrink and a tiny bit higher clock speeds.

Once things like does 7820x and my 7900x become mainstream at clocks of 5GHz, well all be better served by 10 core + choosing the of 6 cores at 200MHz increase with a 10% IPC gain.

[Big Boom Boom]

Whiskey lake is for mobile, coffee lake is still on table.

[Arya]

Publicado originalmente por Big Boom Boom:

Whiskey lake is for mobile, coffee lake is still on table.

Coffee...table?

Well, I guess now I just wait for Volta to launch and tape a 2080Ti to a Coffeelake i7K. Clearly not going to be obsolete for a while.

[Rem4rk4ble]

Publicado originalmente por Wolfie:

Publicado originalmente por Big Boom Boom:

Whiskey lake is for mobile, coffee lake is still on table.

Coffee...table?

Well, I guess now I just wait for Volta to launch and tape a 2080Ti to a Coffeelake i7K. Clearly not going to be obsolete for a while.

i beleive the next card will be a 1180 not a 2080.

also cant wait intel we have quantum cpus

[Lord Flashheart]

Intel is definitely in trouble.
Numerous class action lawsuits.
They are struggling to get better performance in upcoming products.
Too expensive compared to AMD anyway.
The hardware has serious security bugs. The fixes were just software band aids.
Also the reputation of screwing over customers who want to upgrade. If you want to go from an i7-7700k to 8700k then its a new motherboard purchase also. The reasons given are dubious.

These are just the things that spring to mind.

[darkkterror]

I would be very interested in a lake filled with whiskey.

[Arya]

Publicado originalmente por TLS1K:

also cant wait intel we have quantum cpus

Funny you say that. It's Australia Day today and one of the nominees for Australian of the Year was a professor from Queensland University of Technology, who are running a very basic Quantum Computer.

It'll be decades before we're using them everyday, maybe more. But the tech is out there, and thanks to QUT we know it's safe and it works. It just needs to get smaller and more powerful.

Between then and now we'll have the Fullerine revolution. Fullerines are a type of elemental Carbon allotrope, which can do all kinds of interesting things. Graphene fibres can be used to make hyper-small CPU components with huge efficiency and power. And because it's extremely flexible you could weave it through clothing, or create a foldable computer.

Fullerines will change everything in our daily life. They're the biggest revolution to general manufacturing since the invention of plastic itself.

[Hare+Guu!]

Publicado originalmente por Monk:

the fixs for meltdown were largely blown out of proportion by people who didn't have the full facts as us usual.

The fix for spectre did more or less brick haswell and older systems. So it's actually worse. Can't run pc = 100% performance decrease.

[Big Boom Boom]

Publicado originalmente por Beavis:

Intel is definitely in trouble.
Numerous class action lawsuits.
They are struggling to get better performance in upcoming products.
Too expensive compared to AMD anyway.
The hardware has serious security bugs. The fixes were just software band aids.
Also the reputation of screwing over customers who want to upgrade. If you want to go from an i7-7700k to 8700k then its a new motherboard purchase also. The reasons given are dubious.

These are just the things that spring to mind.

AMD also has class action lawsuit because they are not immue to Spectre V1. They are "near zero" immune to V2 and no V3 or Meltdown.

[Kaihekoa]

I wouldn't overreact. Intel releases products on an annualized basis because that's how the tech market operates. Consumers want the latest and greatest, even if it's only a 15% performance increase, a couple new features, or a power decrease, so some products aren't going to be revolutionary jumps The delays in process shrink reflect the reality of semiconductor manufacturing at such a small scale; every company is going to hit a wall the smaller they try to go. It's not a matter of design flaws, conspiracies, or an unsolveable problem - it's physics.

I own about $30,000 in tech stocks including Intel, and I'm not worried. I actually cashed out all my AMD stock recently and put that money into Intel instead. AMD has made some big gains recently, but they are just too volatile and too small compared to Nvidia and Intel, who also pays a nice dividend. Desperate is definitely not how I would describe Intel's market position. I've no idea where you're getting the impression they are having financial problems, that they're in bed with the government, or the Cannonlake release specifics (I don't recommend speculating any new tech - wait for release). The security issues are overly dramatized imo. There are potential flaws and exploits in just about every piece of software or hardware, people just don't hear about them 99% of the time.

I recommend you read their financial disclosures and earnings reports before proclaiming their demise. https://www.intc.com/investor-relations/financials-and-filings/earnings-results/default.aspx. $17 billion in revenue in just the last quarter of 2017, which is about what AMD has made in the last 4 years combined.

[hawkeye]

Intel are one of the blue chip IT companies with almost more money than it knows what to do with. Intel is in that much trouble that it's shares have risen 50% in the last four months.

As far as OP's original comments, when the style of writing appeals to the emotions, it's a give-away that the argument lacks merit. The style of writing falls into a category known as "weasel words".

I used to manage IT apps in a large tech corporation. Word from my former colleagues is that no-one is concerned about the recent reported problems with cpus. There is no impact and they have no intention of patching any system.