Intel management likes to repeat that with the transition to 7nm technology, it will return the usual frequency of changing technical processes - once every two or two and a half years. The first 7nm product will be released at the end of 2021, but in 2022 the company will be ready to offer a full range of 7nm products.
Statements about it at one of the events in China with the participation of the leadership of the local representative office of Intel. Telling the participants of the event about the success in the development of new lithographic technologies, the company did not forget to mention the growth in the yield of suitable 10-nm products, the increase in production volumes and the expansion of the range. Let's not forget that Intel will introduce nine new 10nm products this year, and so far only five new products from this list are explicitly mentioned: cost-effective Jasper Lake processors, Ice Lake-SP server processors, Tiger Lake mobile processors, entry-level discrete graphics solution DG1 and components for base stations of the Snow Ridge family.
The part of the slide from the Chinese event dedicated to the 7nm process technology contains already known theses. The first 7nm product at the end of 2021 should be Ponte Vecchio, a GPU-based computing accelerator. It will bring a multi-chip layout using EMIB and Foveros, support for HBM2 type memory and a CXL interface. Last year, Intel representatives promised that the second in line would be a central 7-nm processor for server applications.
Apparently, Granite Rapids server processors will be released as early as 2022. They will share the Eagle Stream platform and LGA 4677 socket with 10nm Sapphire Rapids processors, which will be released a year earlier. The latter will provide support not only for DDR5 and HBM2, but also for the PCI Express 5.0 interface, as well as CXL. Therefore, all these features will be available to 7nm Granite Rapids processors.
Intel desktop processors will move to 7nm technology not so soon: 2022 seems to be an optimistic date in this sense. Not much is known about their possible characteristics, except for the design of the LGA 1700 and the code name Meteor Lake. These processors should use the Golden Cove architecture, the development of which will focus on improving performance in single-threaded applications. New commands should also appear to speed up the work of artificial intelligence systems.
Perhaps, these three products are now limited to our understanding of the range of 7-nm Intel solutions. Of course, consumer-grade GPUs will also join them in 2022, as attempts will be made to return to the discrete graphics segment this year with the entry-level product DG1. Economical Atom-class processors also remained behind the scenes - by 2023 they will switch to a yet-unnamed new architecture, and they will also probably master the 7-nm process technology.
Source: 3dnews.ru