[wtallis]

You can't accurately describe Intel's 10nm disaster without mentioning that they were making a huge bet that EUV wasn't going to be ready anytime soon so they were trying everything they could to keep up with Moore's Law except using EUV. But some of the things Intel planned for 10nm turned out to be harder to get working correctly than EUV.

It wasn't simply the engineers going nuts trying to make a huge jump all at once. They were taking a bunch of unique risks in order to follow a different path from the rest of the industry. If Intel had planned to follow a similar EUV timeline to the rest of the industry, they would have been subject to the same risks as everyone else regarding EUV and probably could have maintained a moderate lead throughout that transition, with a worst-case outcome being that they would be part of an industry-wide failure to keep up with Moore's Law if EUV didn't work out. Instead, they ended up years behind.

[formerly_proven]

> But some of the things Intel planned for 10nm turned out to be harder to get working correctly than EUV.

Is that actually true? The direct competitor to Intel 10nm is TSMC N7, which is an overall similar process - DUV, multiple patterning etc. -, achieves similar performance and power efficiency, and had a similar timeline to how the Intel process played out (as opposed to how it was originally scheduled). TSMC also only began using EUV for processes following N7.

[wtallis]

Don't indulge Intel's attempts to erase Cannon Lake from history. The 10nm that Intel shipped in 2019 was significantly scaled back from what they originally planned for their 10nm node, but was still a year later to the market than TSMC N7 and was never good enough to be competitive for desktop CPUs. By the time they had iterated enough to have a new process that could be used to offer faster desktop CPUs than their mature 14nm process, they decided to rename it to "Intel 7" and shipped it at the same time as TSMC N5 products (though still before AMD's N5 products).

[ryukoposting]

The Wikipedia article for Cannon Lake is a riot. Click the "Products" list to open it and... a table with one row.

[bgnn]

This. Intel 10nm and TSMC N7 aren't comparable in their development. Intel didn't simply scale down their 14nm but took a different parth. TSMC N7 is basically a scaling of their N16. These two processes are 90% comparable. Only base layers are slightly different. N5 is quite different compared to N7 due to new litho though.