Intel pushes back 10nm CPU release to 2019

If you were holding off on upgrading your CPU to Intel's new Coffee Lake refresh chips because you wanted to see what the upcoming 10nm Cannon Lake processors were like, you're going to have to wait a little longer. Intel has announced that it will be another year at least before we get a look at what the 10nm hardware can do.

10nm has proven to be a tricky die shrink for Intel and a number of other global manufacturers. As they cram more and more transistors onto chips, the manufacturing process has become increasingly complicated and fraught with difficulty. 10nm though has proven the toughest barrier yet, with real problems with yield -- it's why Cannon Lake was originally pushed as a mobile-only chip line.

However, now it's not going to be available to a wider audience until 2019. Originally slated for a 2016 release, this shows just how far the 10nm die shrink has slipped and it's the main reason that we've seen refreshes of Intel's 14nm chips in the meantime.

Cannon Lake represents the next upgrade of Intel hardware and will bring with it full support for the AVX-512 instruction set, which should have some neat performance enhancements of its own, as well as the usual clock speed and efficiency improvements that come with die shrinking.

However, Cannon Lake will not have the much-requested hardware fixes for the Spectre exploits that have plagued existing CPUs of all generations. For that we'll need to wait for the follow-on 10nm+ release -- now likely not to arrive until 2020 -- called Ice Lake.

Image Source: intel