“Intel’s transition to building processors on a 10nm manufacturing process has been delayed repeatedly. Once upon a time, the company said that it’d go into mass production at the end of 2015; with its most recent financial results, the company pushed that back, again, to 2019,” Peter Bright reports for Ars Technica. “But Intel has also said that, although the yields aren’t good enough for large-scale production, it has been shipping 10nm processors, codenamed Cannon Lake, to an unspecified customer.”
“That customer is Lenovo: the IdeaPad 330 has been listed by Chinese retailers, and it includes a mysterious processor, the Core i3-8121U,” Bright reports. “The name tells us the market positioning (it’s an i3, so it’s low-end), the power envelope (the ‘U’ at the end means that it’s a 15W chip), and the branding (the number starts with an 8, so it’s going to be another ‘8th-generation’ chip, just like the Kaby Lake-R, Kaby Lake-G, and Coffee Lake processors).”
Bright reports, “This means that ‘8th generation’ is a rather vague label that describes several different processor variants, built on several different manufacturing processes (two 14nm variants and now 10nm).”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Intel makes the incompetents in charge of updating Apple’s desktop Macs look slightly less glacial.
“MacDailyNews Take: Intel makes the incompetents in charge of updating Apple’s desktop Macs look slightly less glacial.”
In all fairness, Intel is actually one main reason Apple hasn’t been able to put out new machines in a more timely fashion. Apple always seems to be waiting for some new chip from Intel. That is a big reason they want to make their own chips.
Stop listening to the endless anti-Intel tirade from Wrong Again and the MDN peanut gallery.
Intel remains the best value in chips, which are evaluated on MANY more parameters than simply the over-ballyhooed minimum die size.
Head on over to https://buyersguide.macrumors.com/#Mac and you will see that Apple is several generations of chips obsolete on most of its Macs.
There was a time when Apple was first in line for a chip, now it is Lenovo who is making the effort to give customers the latest chips as soon as they become available.
So why again is stale Apple hardware so overpriced? Oh, that’s right. To subsidize the free buggy software that isn’t as good as independent software anymore.
Apple is mismanaging the Mac badly. The reasons to stick with the platform are not nearly as compelling today as they were in the Snow Leopard era. Thanks for nothing Cook.
I stopped reading after the blah, blah, blah. Oh well amusing to see there is at least one Intel delusional fanboy still taking the coollaid around to defend the indefensible.
Ignore process nodes, INTEL IS SHIPPING A MOBILE PROCESSOR THAT CAN USE 32G OF LDDPR4 MEMORY!!! Oh, wait, it’s only on their LOWEST end i3 chips? Only in tiny amounts? Well, I guess that’s fine seeing as the performance of i3 means they wouldn’t even be suitable in a LOW end MacBook Pro. Intel apologists are going to have to keep on apologizing for at LEAST another year 🙂
This exactly. Whenever Inte comes out with a new processor line, the first question to ask is “When will the ones suitable for Macs ship?” Apple doesn’t mess around with the low end tripe that makes up the majority of the PC market, and that usually means that Apple uses 3 or 4 configurations of of the high performance chips. Since Intel’s mass market wants cheap chips and server chips, they don’t focus on solutions for Apple… which means they arrive months or YEARS after they’re announced… IF they are released at all.
Apple is ABSOLUTELY killing the Mac, that’s their desire, no question. However, the fact still remains that Intel has dropped the ball on delivering mobile chips Apple could even use.
Perhaps Intel isn’t prioritizing a new mobile chip for Apple because Apple is so slow to adopt them.
I said “solutions for Apple”. I of course meant “solutions that Apple could possibly use in high end mobile devices”. Intel makes their money on big hot gamer/server chips and cheapo mass market chips… one is markup and one is quantity. PC makers have suffered the same fate and have been forced to use desktop processors OR desktop RAM because PC makers don’t care, they will sell you anything. 🙂 Those that DO want to use a truly high end mobile CPU, mobile RAM combo are out of luck if they want more than 16 gigs. (No PC manufacturer is shipping a high end mobile processor that uses 32G of mobile RAM, NO one)
I wish Apple would switch to Ryzen 2 and Ryzen Threadripper processors. This is getting stupid already with Intel. :/
Or Apple could just buy AMD and let Intel shit themselves over losing Apple’s business