It’s been a few years that Intel thoroughly presented a roadmap, showing what’s to come when in the foreseeable future. On of the most interesting points on the agenda is certainly Ice Lake, which is supposed to follow the 8th generation Intel Core processor family. Intel notes that the processors are "a" successor to the eighth-gen, not "the" main successor, which leaves a lot of room for speculation.

When it comes to Coffee Lake the rumor mill has been spinning for a while already, which makes sense since Intel is finally going to introduce 6-core parts to the desktop market. This move is expected to be Intel’s answer to AMD’s Ryzen processors, which currently make for some good competition in this market segment.

But let’s finally start talking about the roadmap Intel revealed. Looking at it we see that Coffee Lake is supposed to be based on the company’s current 14nm++ manufacturing process. The successor to Coffee Lake, which will go by the codename Ice Lake, is supposed to become a 10nm+ part. The assumption could now be that Ice Lake would be the first 10nm chip but that is not the case. It looks like before Intel is going to launch Ice Lake, Cannon Lake is going to be introduced.

Moving away from their tick-tock model Intel seems to be putting a three-step approach in place now. With a first step a new process node is introduced. In a second step the manufacturing process as well as the architecture are going to be improve while in a third step the same is going to happen again (with the steps being called 14, 14+ and 14++ for instance).

On top of that Intel is going add more priority to their data center related business, deploying the “Data Center First” strategy. At this point I have to go a little bit off topic, but simply reading “Data Center First” makes an image of Mr. Trump’s head appear before my inner eye, which is really not something I want to have right there when reading about processors and technology in general. Nevertheless, since the focus now appears to shift towards the data center processors, which is where Intel is making most of its money, it could be expected that the first 10nm chip is going to be a Xeon part.



Source: Tom’s Hardware