Intel held personal computing back, and in my view the record is on my side. For years its mainstream processors were the same Skylake design on a 14nm process that Intel kept refining while the 10nm process meant to replace it kept slipping. Meanwhile the flaws arrived, and TSMC moved the industry forward. Below are the dates behind that opinion.
Plus signs instead of progress
Intel’s first 14nm chips were the Broadwell Core M parts, launched on 5 September 2014 after a delay blamed on low yields. Skylake, the 6th generation, followed on 5 August 2015. Then the design stopped moving.
Kaby Lake arrived in January 2017 on a process labelled 14nm+. The CPU architecture was little changed from Skylake, with identical instructions per clock. Coffee Lake came in October 2017 on 14nm++. Comet Lake, the 10th generation, was the third revision of the Skylake process. The press and enthusiasts piled up plus signs to describe it, and the sources do not even agree on which chip earned the third one.
Skylake, Kaby Lake, Coffee Lake, Whiskey Lake and Comet Lake all share one microarchitecture. In my view that is one product, sold as five generations. Even Rocket Lake, the 11th generation of March 2021, stayed on 14nm. It carried a newer core design backported to the old process, and it shipped with fewer cores than the chip it replaced: up to eight, down from ten.
The reason was the 10nm process. In July 2015 Intel said its first 10nm chips, Cannon Lake, would slip to the second half of 2017, and added Kaby Lake to fill the gap. Krzanich said the lithography was getting harder as Intel scaled. Earlier roadmaps had put Cannon Lake in 2015 or 2016. In April 2018 Intel moved volume production of 10nm to 2019.
The one Cannon Lake product, the Core i3-8121U, was a dual-core laptop chip released in very limited quantities in May 2018 with its graphics disabled. Intel announced its discontinuation in October 2019. Desktop users got a 10nm-class process only in November 2021, with Alder Lake on what Intel now calls Intel 7, previously 10nm Enhanced SuperFin.
A generation number that hides a six-year-old core is marketing, not progress.
Four cores until someone else shipped eight
The Core i7-2600K launched in January 2011 with four cores and eight threads. The top mainstream Core i7 was still four cores and eight threads with the 6700K in 2015 and the 7700K in 2017. Intel did sell more cores, but on a separate high-end platform, not on the desktop most people buy.
AMD launched the Ryzen 7 1800X on 2 March 2017 with eight cores and sixteen threads. Intel’s Coffee Lake, launched on 5 October 2017, put six cores into the Core i5 and i7. That is seven months after Ryzen, after six years of four. I have not found Intel saying that Ryzen forced its hand. I think the sequence speaks for itself.
The 9th generation, announced on 8 October 2018, finally put eight cores into a mainstream Intel desktop chip, the Core i9-9900K. AMD had been selling eight cores on the mainstream desktop for nineteen months by then.
Meltdown and the generations
Meltdown and Spectre went public on 3 January 2018. Google’s Project Zero says it reported the first of these issues to Intel, AMD and ARM on 1 June 2017, seven months before the public disclosure. The researchers behind Meltdown wrote that every Intel processor with out-of-order execution is potentially affected, which is effectively every Intel processor since 1995 (Itanium and Atom before 2013 excepted), and they verified it on chips released as early as 2011. They verified Meltdown on Intel processors only.
Many people remember this as a problem of the 1st generation up to the 9th or 10th. The record is wider and more precise, because the exposure reaches back before the 1st generation. Intel said in March 2018 that it had developed hardware fixes for Meltdown and Spectre variant 2 but not variant 1. The 9th generation, announced in October 2018, was the first desktop family with a silicon fix for Meltdown, nine months after disclosure.
Intel’s own table of affected processors lists Meltdown as needing a software mitigation on the Skylake-derived parts that came before late 2018, and as not affected on 10th generation Comet Lake. The older parts relied on software and microcode.
Spectre is different, and I will not pretend otherwise. It has been shown to work on Intel, AMD, ARM and IBM processors. It is industry-wide. Meltdown is the one that was proven on Intel alone.
The bills kept coming
Downfall was found by Daniel Moghimi, who reported it to Intel on 24 August 2022. It was presented at Black Hat on 9 August 2023, a year later. It affects Intel Core processors from the 6th generation Skylake through the 11th generation Tiger Lake. Intel itself says some workloads may experience up to 50 percent overhead. The list starts at Skylake, the core Intel recycled for years.
Then came the 13th and 14th generation desktop chips, the Raptor Lake family. Users reported crashes in February 2024. By April Intel was investigating what it called Vmin shift instability, in which the silicon degrades and needs more voltage to stay stable. Microcode 0x125 came in June, 0x129 in August and 0x12B in late September 2024, each covering one contributing cause.
Intel’s explanation, published in September 2024, was a clock tree circuit inside the core that ages badly under elevated voltage and temperature. Patches only prevent further damage. A chip already damaged has to be replaced. Intel extended the warranty on boxed processors from three to five years on 2 August 2024 and widened it to tray processors three days later. Another microcode update, 0x12F, followed in May 2025 for edge cases.
What TSMC did while this happened
TSMC says it was the first foundry to start 7nm volume production, in 2018. Apple launched the A12 Bionic on TSMC 7nm on 12 September 2018. AMD’s Zen 2 Ryzen 3000 series followed on 7 July 2019 on TSMC 7nm, and the Ryzen 9 3950X brought sixteen cores to the desktop in November 2019.
TSMC says it moved 5nm into volume production in 2020. Apple introduced the M1 on TSMC 5nm on 10 November 2020, with about 16 billion transistors. Four months later, in March 2021, Intel launched Rocket Lake on 14nm.
Node names are marketing and do not line up between companies. Intel’s 10nm is described as dimensionally similar to GlobalFoundries’ 7nm, so it was meant to compete with the 7nm class. The point stands: the process that was supposed to arrive for Intel in 2015 or 2016 reached its desktops in 2021.
What I take from it
I do not read the generation number on the box any more. I read the core design and the process node underneath it. A 10th generation chip and a 6th generation chip share a core, and I treat them as the same product.
Competition did what Intel’s own roadmap would not. AMD’s Ryzen pushed core counts up and TSMC made the nodes that let it happen. Apple Silicon then showed what a new process and a new design could do in one chip. I would rather spend money on those companies.