“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).”
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MacDailyNews Take: Intel makes the incompetents in charge of updating Apple’s desktop Macs look slightly less glacial.