A new report is claiming that Intel will delay its 10nm Cannonlake introduction and substitute in new chips derived from Skylake instead. This new family, dubbed Kaby Lake, would essentially be refresh of Skylake. Details are scarce in the single-page document but historical trends would suggest a handful of modest clock bumps and improved TDPs. There’s also mention of a new H-processor with up to 256MB of cache onboard, and more desktop chips with 64MB of L4 cache and a Skylake-derived GPU.

If true, this could mark the first miss for Intel’s vaunted Tick-Tock business model since the company introduced it back in 2007. Tick-Tock was developed and introduced after Intel’s 90nm Prescott debacle in 2004. Back then, Intel attempted to simultaneously debut a new architecture and a cutting-edge CPU node. While it had pulled off this combination in the past, the increased complexity and manufacturing challenges of 90nm stacked on top of the problematic Prescott architecture. The end result was a chip that ran at much lower clock speeds than previously anticipated, had dramatically reduced IPC compared to its predecessor, and kicked out a tremendous amount of heat.

By 2007, Intel had an a different plan in place. Going forward, die shrinks would be “ticks” and focus on the transition to a new process node, while new architectures would be “tocks” and would debut as the follow-up product on a now-mature process. For the past seven years, Intel has held that cadence steady, though one could argue that Broadwell’s delay turned the “tick” into an abnormally long beat. What would change if the company misses a cycle?

Marketing and manufacturing

There’s two distinct facets to this situation — how it plays out in Intel’s marketing, and how it plays as far as competitive advantage against the other foundries. From a marketing perspective, Intel would likely insist that nothing had changed. If Kaby Lake is just a modest refresh of Skylake with some tweaked clocks (analogous to Devil’s Canyon for Haswell, or AMD’s Richland/Trinity refresh), then Intel hasn’t actually missed anything — it’s still introducing new process nodes in one set of products and a new architecture in the other.

Pushing Cannonlake out, on the other hand, would likely hit Intel’s manufacturing position hard. For the last few years, Intel has relentlessly beat the drum that its 14nm node would deliver a scaling and performance advantage over its foundry competitors that 10nm would further extend. Even as the company trimmed R&D, it insisted that it could keep to previous product cadences, with aggressive delivery of new mobile and laptop hardware.

At the moment, however, this is one piece of paper, and one I’m not convinced is genuine. It wouldn’t necessarily be surprising if it was true, since node scaling has become incredibly difficult and we already saw Broadwell slip by nearly a year — but this is a far cry from confirmation. One could also argue that even if true, the Cannonlake delay would do nothing besides codify what already happened with Broadwell — Intel might be planning to extend the time it takes to shrink each node without fundamentally changing the tick-tock cycle. We don’t know how TSMC and Samsung will progress in pushing to the 10nm node, but an Intel pause could give AMD time to catch its breath and hopefully shrink the gap between it and Intel from two full process nodes to one.