Intel has admitted that its upcoming slate of products is nothing to get excited about.
Speaking at Morgan Stanley’s Tech, Media & Telecom 2020 conference yesterday, CFO George Davis told investors to temper their expectations for Intel’s 10 nm products because they’re going to be “less productive” than previous generations. The company won’t be able to impress until it gets its 7 nm node worked out – which won’t happen until late 2021.
“Look, this isn’t just going to be the best node that Intel has ever had,” Davis bluntly stated. “It’s gonna be less productive than 14 nm, less productive than 22 nm, but we’re excited about the improvements that we’re seeing and we expect to start the 7 nm period with a much better profile of performance over that starting at the end of 2021.”
Worse, it sounds as if Intel is treating 10 nm like a chore that it’s trying to finish and forget as quickly as possible. That’s a disappointing mentality, but it isn’t too surprising, as its competitors have already made the successful jump to 7 nm.
“It’s sort of built today, you’ve got to get through that product cycle and the node. We’re excited about the products, but the node isn’t going to be quite the performer that historically we’ve had,” Davis said about 10 nm.
What’s especially scary for Intel fans is that it doesn’t believe it will regain leadership until 5 nm. Again, 7 nm isn’t expected to be squared away until the end of 2021 – so who knows when Intel will get 5 nm up and running.
“So we bring a lot of capability to the table for our customers, in addition to the CPU, and we feel like we’re starting to see the acceleration on the process side that we have been talking about to get back to parity in the 7 nm generation and regain leadership in the 5 nm generation,” Davis explained.