At the BMO Virtual Technology Summit, Intel VP for Global Marketing, Michelle Johnston Holthaus reassured that there won’t be any further delays with the 10nm based production. Talking to the host, Holthaus said that she has reassured OEMs and ODM partners that the 10nm roadmap of the company won’t be affected by the 6-month delay affecting the 7nm products.
She reaffirmed that the Tiger Lake-U and Ice Lake-SP will indeed be launched later this year, in September and November/December, respectively. Furthermore, Sapphire Rapids which will migrate to the PCIe 5 standard along with DDR5 memory as well as CXL 1.1 will land in the second half of 2021. Unlike Ice Lake-SP which will be limited to 2S platforms, Sapphire Rapids will cover the entire server market, ranging from 1S to 4S configurations.
She further explained that the Alder Lake desktop CPUs (client) will be launched in the second half of 2021 with a hybrid core architecture, featuring a mix of Gracemont and Golden Cove cores. These will be the first 10nm based chips from Intel in the desktop market.
The Xe-HPC compute accelerators and Xe-HPG gaming graphics cards are also slated to arrive in the last months of 2021. While Alder Lake, Sapphire Rapids and Xe-HPC will leverage Intel’s 10nm++ (SuperFin) transistors, the HPG GPUs will be outsourced to TSMC. It’s unclear whether the latter will make sure of the N6 or N5, but considering that the 6nm EUV node is closer to Intel’s 10nm process that would make the most sense.
