Published: February 10, 2017 | Source: Anandtech | Author: Mark Campbell

Intel’s Cannonlake CPUs will use the companies 14nm process

At Intel’s annual investors day in California, the company announced that their upcoming Cannonlake CPUs will use the companies 14nm process, breaking their new Process, Architecture, Optimisation model after just one generation of products. Â

In previous years, Intel used a Tick, Tock models for CPU releases, with tock being a CPU generation that features major architectural changes. Last year Intel moved to a new, lengthened release model, which brought an additional step into the mix, changing Tick Tock to Process, Architecture, Optimisation. Â

This new model meant that Intel could release three CPU generations on a single processing node, giving their fabs more time to move to increasingly smaller processing methods. Now it seems that this model is already dead in the water, with Intel announcing that Cannonlake will be a 14nm product, the 4th CPU generation on the same manufacturing process.Â

14nm has already seen theÂ release of Broadwell (Tick/Process), Skylake (Tock/Architecture), Kaby Lake (Optimisation) CPUs, with Cannonlake coming is as a 4th CPU architecture/generation on this single manufacturing process. Â

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During Intel’s annual investors day, the company also announced that their 8th Generation Cannonlake CPUs with have a 15% performance increase over Kaby Lake.

This means that Intel expects their move to Cannonlake to be much more significant than their move from Skylake to Kaby Lake, though at this time it is unknown if this will be due to clock speed improvements or architectural improvements over Skylake/Kaby Lake.Â

In the future, Intel could turn around and state that Cannonlake is their “optimisation” stage, with Kaby Lake being an improved version, or extension of their existing Skylake architecture, similar to how Devil’s Canyon was a merely an improved version of Haswell. Even so, it is hard to argue with the reality of the situation, as Kaby Lake was advertised to consumers as a new architecture and Cannonlake will be the 4th CPU generation on Intel’s 14nm process. Â Â

With Intel using their 14nm process for four CPU generations, companies like Samsung, Global Foundries and TSMC have a huge opportunity to catch up with Intel, who for many years has had a significant lead over their competitors. Is this the end of Intel’s dominance in the foundry world?

You can join the discussion on Cannonlake being Intel’s 4th 14nm architecture on the OC3D Forums.Â