Intel’s reportedly working in a 10-core 14nm desktop processor called “Comet Lake”

Intel’s 10nm progress has been slow, allowing competing foundries like TSMC stand at the front of the leading edge lithography market with “7nm” nodes. In many ways, Intel’s 10nm nodes are considered equivalent to competing 7nm technologies, with modern “nm” making schemes acting more like marketing names than physical aspects of the node itself. 

Anyway, Intel’s 10nm process has been delayed time and time again, forcing the company to abandon their tick-tock release schedule, which typically saw their CPUs release on a new process node every two generations.

This shift has forced the company’s 14nm node to feature in their Broadwell, Skylake, Kaby Lake, Coffee Lake and Coffee Lake Refresh series processors, covering their 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th and 9th generations of desktop processors. While 14nm has evolved over this time, the node is now likely to have reached its peak efficiency, both in terms of its performance and manufacturing yields.

Intel is rumoured to be working on a 10-core 14nm desktop processor called Comet Lake, CML-S, a processor that was reportedly mentioned at a recent partner meeting.       

At this time little is known about this processor. Is it a new microarchitecture, is it 10-core Coffee-Lake? We can only guess at this time. It is also possible that this processor is a backup design, in case 10nm isn’t ready in time for the release of their 10th Generation core processors. Intel’s 10nm roadmaps have proven themselves to be highly untrustworthy in the past, so there is no reason why we should be certain that Intel will be ready in mid-late 2019.