Intel officially kills "Tick Tock"?

Intel officially kills

| Source: PCPER Author: Mark Campbell

Intel officially kills "Tick Tock"?

For a very long time Intel has been using a Tick-Tock model for releasing processors, with two generations releasing on a single processing node where the Tick moves to a new processing node, heightens efficiency and makes minor architecture changes/ improvements and the Tock makes some major architectural changes to the CPU.

This process node generation seems to be the first where Intel moves away from their traditional Tick Tock model towards a new Process, Architecture, Optimization (PAO) model, where each processing node will be used for 3 generations of CPUs.

This seems to be primarily due to the difficulties in continuing to make their manufacturing technology smaller every two years, as we are quickly approaching the limitations of Silicon based manufacturing processes.

Intel wants to release their upcoming Cannonlake CPUs in 2017, bringing their first 10nm CPU to market, though before then Intel will be releasing their Kaby Lake CPUs, which are expected to come later this year.

Below is a quote from Intel's most recent K-10 filing;

We expect to lengthen the amount of time we will utilize our 14 [nanometer] and our next-generation 10 [nanometer] process technologies, further optimizing our products and process technologies while meeting the yearly market cadence for product introductions.

Intel has already made 2 processor architectures on the 14nm processing node, Broadwell and Skylake, with Kaby Lake making up the 3rd CPU generation on this processing node. This will mean that Intel will be breaking their Tick Tock cycle, unless Kaby lake is merely a re-release of Skylake with higher clock speeds like Devils Canyon was for Haswell.

Looking at leaked slides from Benchlife.info revealing some interesting new information regarding Kaby lake like increased core performance, enhanced BCLK overclocking and updated GPU features and codec support. These changes make Kaby lake look like a little more than a mere re-release of Skylake, which hopefully means that there will be some noteworthy performance increases.

With even Intel struggling to move forward with their advanced processing technologies it is expected that the future performance improvements in both CPU and GPU technologies will depend much more on architectural improvements and less advancing process technologies.

You can join the discussion on Intel's move away from their Tick Tock CPU release model on the OC3D Forums.

It seems Intel's clock has broken. Say goodbye to tick-tock CPU releases.https://t.co/k0FecFcWam pic.twitter.com/WUaPPCfPpx — OC3D (@OC3D) March 23, 2016

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