As an expected follow-up to a story we posted earlier this week, Intel CEO, Brian Krzanich has announced that while Broadwell chips will begin production in Q1 of 2014, they won't be available until a bit later next year. As we mentioned in our previous story, the delay has been caused by a "defect density issue," or in layman's terms, too many defective chips per circuit print.
Intel is confident that it has remedied the problem, and that its follow-ups to the Haswell line will be available in a year's time. Even so, the shift in production deadlines leaves a lot of unanswered questions, not the least of which is whether or not these CPU generations are going to start getting longer and longer.
Before too much longer, Intel and AMD and pretty much everyone else in the fab business is going to hit one barrier they can’t break – the laws of physics. As these chips get smaller and smaller, those manufacturing challenges increase, and while those chips mean tons of improvements for the consumer including lower cost, more efficiency, and better performance, after 3 nanometers quantum tunneling becomes a huge problem, and we won't be able to get any smaller.
After the 14 nm process that the current chips use, we'll have the 10 nm, the 7 nm and then finally the 5 nm.
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