12nm AMD Ryzen 'Pinnacle' CPUs to arrive in February

[Peter Parker]

Intel, AMD, IBM, and other major chip makers are all talking of 10nm to 5nm, but what will happen after 5nm?

This question comes up repeatedly here and elsewhere. Common replies :

* Marketing names for process nodes are already fairly different to reality. Intel's 10nm process has various dimensions between 34-54nm
* Extreme Ultraviolet is supposed to kick the can down the road a bit longer - perhaps as low as 10-20nm 'half-pitch', regardless of what marketing call it. But it's been coming "real soon now" for 5-10 years.
* New materials (copper interconnects, or even carbon nanotubes?) might allow lower voltages, less leakage, less migration problems
* Below a real 10nm minimum feature size, quantum tunnelling problems are unavoidable. Might need a real alternative to silicon wafers.

By 2025 you could probably get a 16 core 4+GHz CPU in your mobile device, similar to Ryzen but with some nasty thermal throttling. Looks like dedicated "AI processors" are the next step, because we can't really think what to do with 16 ordinary cores in a mobile phone anyway, but could do with clever speech recognition and realtime image recognition.

[The Hand]

So with Ryzen 2 coming in February and Coffee Lake out in a week, the likelihood of a Ryzen 1 range price cut in the near-term increases imo. A 12nm Ryzen 2 in just 5 months time though, does sound appealing with it's higher IPC etc.

[DanceswithUnix]

A 12nm Ryzen 2 in just 5 months time though, does sound appealing with it's higher IPC etc.

Pinnacle isn't a full Ryzen 2, more of a shrink so should just have higher clocks.

[LyntonB]

Yes, same socket and the reason why investing in AM4 now isn't a terrible idea when you can keep upgrading e.g. overtake 8700k again in Feb with a Ryzen 7 (and you get your value for money)