[The Exiled]

Intel Releases Disappointing Q4 2018 and Full-Year 2018 Financial Results

Despite the strong overall numbers for fiscal 2018, the year closed on a down note for Intel. The chip giant fell short of its revenue targets for the fourth quarter, with modem sales, and revenues in China in particular, a disappointment. In other words, Intel focused on fabricating expensive server chips, protecting that cash cow to the detriment of consumer-grade CPUs, and upped prices of those lower-end parts to compensate for a dip in shipments. Those hoping for big news on the CEO front were disappointed. Swan told analysts that Chipzilla continues its search for a permanent replacement to the departed Brian Krzanich with no big announcements on the horizon.

Similarly, Intel was tight-lipped on the earnings call about its ongoing quest to get anything actually substantial and useful fabricated using its beleaguered 10nm process node. Execs declined to talk about yields for the planned 10nm Ice Lake CPUs, other than to repeat their earlier prediction that desktop and notebook computers using Intel's 10nm chips will hit the market at the end of 2019, and 10nm Xeon server processors will be available in early 2020. This is the 10nm node that was supposed to have been on the market five years ago. After going down a design dead-end – it suffered from hopelessly low yields due to its metalization and multi-patterning choices – Chipzilla has started over with a more viable approach. As tends to happen when a company fails to deliver on its forecast, Intel took a beating on Wall Street, with shares down 7 per cent in after-hours trading.

For reference, Cannon Lake is on what Intel calls its ‘10nm’ process node. Ice Lake, the product destined for consumer devices at the end of 2019 (in 8-10 months from now), is on the ‘10nm+’ process node. This means that the products in December 2019 will still be behind in transistor performance to the products launched in October 2017. The new chips will have some benefits, such as power and new microarchitectures, but this is worth noting what Intel has already stated to the press and investors.

Here’s what we think Cannon Lake looks like.

It’s mostly desktop Skylake at the end of the day – both Cannon Lake and Sunny Cove have the same AVX512 compatibility, just with the Skylake cache structure.

Izvor: [H]ard|OCP, The Register i AnandTech