back to article Intel's Foveros tech hits a speedbump as Lakefield gets canned – one year after launch

Intel has officially discontinued Lakefield, its first Foveros-based "Hybrid Technology" processor, citing shifting demand – but is keeping mum on what that means for the Foveros concept in general. Intel first unveiled Lakefield, though without mentioning the name, and its underlying Foveros tech in late 2018 as an answer to …

  1. elsergiovolador Silver badge

    Two littles

    It looks like Intel was missing the "big" in "big.LITTLE". They are still struggling to make any meaningful improvement in their CPU line in terms of performance.

    How did they manage to sit on their hands for so many years without nobody raising concerns?

    1. Peter2 Silver badge

      Re: Two littles

      Because they'd locked AMD out of the market back back when via the anti competitive shenanigans that I still don't think they've paid the fines for, and didn't expect their only competition to produce a competitive CPU again.

      That AMD produced a genuinely competitive chip despite having a total net worth of something like 1.5 billion in 2015 compared to Intel being worth a quarter trillion or so is to be fair pretty amazing.

      That this chip happened to come around shortly before Intel got caught with their dodgy speculative execution code was doubly unfortunate for Intel, since AMD hadn't been doing dodgy process execution the intel parts losing ~20% of their performance made AMD's chips suddenly gain this much performance.

    2. Wade Burchette

      Re: Two littles

      Intel's anti-competitive nature allowed them to get lazy. There was a huge brain drain that the new CEO is just now starting to fix. And, I read some reports the working environment was a bureaucratic disaster.

      I just hope the new CEO does not follow the old Intel practice of using illegal dirty tricks to lock out competition. Dell still lacks proper AMD computers for their business line. When there is healthy competition, everyone wins.

  2. Mishak Silver badge

    They don't do themselves any favours

    Who is going to design in a chip that may get dropped at short notice?

    The "real" embedded players offer 10+ year buy times so a platform has some stability.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: They don't do themselves any favours

      Intel have done this several times before, the 80186 and 80376 both bit me when dropped

  3. Pascal Monett Silver badge
    FAIL

    10nm ?

    Hey Intel, in ccase you haven't noticed, 7nm is all the rage these days.

    You need to pull your finger out and get on the ball if you don't want to end like the dinosaurs.

    1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

      Re: 10nm ?

      Intel 10nm == TSMC 7nm

      Except Intel 10nm never really worked and TSMC is now on 5, heading for 3

  4. Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge

    "the Surface Neo is still officially positioned as a work in progress, with no word yet on whether Intel's move will change anything on that front."

    Have you got this the wrong way around? Has the Neo been cancelled, behind the scenes, and that's why Intel has pulled the plug on the chip?

    Bonus points: Intel publicly cancelling the chip before Microsoft publicly cancels the Neo means Microsoft can use the public announcement of the cancellation of the chip as the public-facing reason why the Neo has been cancelled even though, privately, the only reason the chip has been cancelled is because Microsoft have pulled their contract without making this private knowledge public and as now, both privately and publicly, the chip has no buyers, Intel have announced the cancellation publicly allowing Microsoft to tell the public the Neo has been cancelled and use their behind-the-scenes private cancellation of the Neo as the justification for it's public cancellation. Simples.

    And if I managed all those "publiclies" without a single "pubicly" I've done well.

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