Eight-gen Intel 'Coffee Lake' CPUs will be 14nm, not 10nm

Intel admits further delay in shift to 10nm process manufacturing

Intel's eight generation of Core microprocessors, dubbed 'Coffee Lake', won't be the first manufactured to the company's 10-nanometre process technology. Instead, it will be manufactured on existing 14nm processes, limiting the performance gains that the new architecture will provide. It will be manufactured on what Intel describes as a "refinement" of the 14nm process.

The move is not entirely surprising, given the manufacturing challenges that Intel has faced in its shift to 14nm processes, and the even greater challenges of refining 10nm yields.

Intel had made a lot of noise over its plans to move to 10nm technology but this will be the fourth consecutive generation to be manufactured to 14nm processes, with Broadwell, SkyLake and, most recently, Kaby Lake going all the way back to 2014.

In February of last year, Intel denied that there would be a further delay to its introduction of 10nm microprocessors beyond 2017, and just last month promised that 10nm CPUs would be coming this year.

Despite this, Intel is still promising that Coffee Lake will provide a 15 per cent performance boost over its predecessor, but that depends on whether developers can make the most of the features built in.

With 10nm off the table for this round, at least, it's worth noting that even when it does come Intel plans to roll out products (codenamed Cannon Lake) primarily for the higher-profit-margin data centre market before providing rolling out PC parts.

This is most likely the type of chip that will be produced at "Fab 42", the new facility in Arizona that has recently been released from mothballs.

It's still not entirely clear what is behind this decision but we do know that several mobile phones that were expected to have 10nm chips won't as it appears that Samsung is hogging most of the supply for its forthcoming Galaxy S8.