Intel has stopped production of 14nm Comet Lake 10. What's next?
Intel Corporation announced the end of production of processors manufactured using the 14 nm process technology. We are talking about Comet Lake 10, which first went on sale in 2019. The company will no longer produce chips using outdated technologies, only 10 nm and below (however, Intel does not yet have processes more modern than 10 nm). Details are under the cut.
What are these processors and why are they being discontinued?
The corporation has been producing processors using the 14 nm process technology for the last 10 years. The model we are talking about now is the most modern for the line. It also includes CPU Core i3-10100F/10105/10300/10305, Core i5-10400F/10500/10600, entry-level Pentium Gold and Celeron chips. We should not forget about solutions such as the Xeon W-1250.
Comet Lake is the codename for the 10th generation Intel Core processor family. This line uses an optimized 14 nm process technology and is an evolution of the Skylake microarchitecture following Kaby Lake Refresh, Coffee Lake, and Whiskey Lake. The availability of this generation of mobile processors was announced on August 21, 2019.
Comet Lake Features:
max. up to 10 cores/20 threads;
max. up to 5.3 GHz;
max. up to 20 MB L3 cache;
max. up to 125W;
DDR4-2933 support (for i7 and i9 processors); Support for LPDDR4-2933 memory by i5 and i7 U-series mobile processors;
Integrated Intel Wi-Fi 6 AX201 wireless network controller with data transfer rates of over 1 Gbps.
Intel Core 10 has a version with the letter “K” in the marking, and it was discontinued last year. It was only a matter of time before other models stopped being released. According to Intel representatives, the stage associated with the 14 nm process technology has now been completed.
What about 10 nm?
Intel has had difficulties with the rapid transition to 10-nm technology. Initially, everything went well with 14-nm chips – they began to be mass-produced back in 2015.
When something newer was needed (at least because competitors had already started using this new thing), Intel mastered the new 10-nm standards. This happened by August 2019. Experts have repeatedly noted that the transition was not easy for the company, it took a lot of time and resources.
While Intel was doing all this, it suddenly fell behind AMD and some other competitors. AMD quickly mastered the 7 nm process technology, and Intel had to urgently increase its activity so as not to fall too far behind. By the way, the company even began to use new rules for marking process technologies. For example, the 10 nm Enhanced SuperFin technology was renamed Intel 7. It is still used, by the way, including for the production of the 14th generation Core (Raptor Lake).
What else?
Intel did not stop production of the mentioned chips. It also decided to stop production of the fairly new and productive Core i9-12900KS.
Core i9-12900KS —improved a variation of the Core i9-12900K with the same core composition (8 productive Golden Cove cores and 8 energy-efficient Gracemont cores), but with slightly higher frequencies: the P-cores of the new product can take 5.2-5.5 GHz, and the E-cores – 4.0 GHz. The Core i9-12900KS has returned the widest possible set of tools for automatically increasing frequencies, which was already used in previous generations of Intel processors, but was absent in Alder Lake.
There should be no shortage after Intel stops production. The corporation has accumulated a large stock of processors, they will be supplied to partners until the end of 2024. The company noted this separately, so as not to displease customers who still need the chip.
Intel will stop accepting new orders early next year, and sales of the chip will cease in July 2025. The 14-nm Comet Lake 10 processor is currently the most powerful representative of the Alder Lake desktop model range. It has 16 cores with a frequency of up to 5.5 GHz.
The processor went on sale at the very beginning of 2022. But already at the end of the same year, the company released a new Raptor Lake line (13th generation), which later included the i7-13700K and i9-13900K models. The first chip was almost no different from the i9-12900KS, but it was sold at a not very high price – $ 409, while the cost of the 12900KS was $ 739 at the start.
After these two chips (i7-13700K and i9-13900K), even more advanced models appeared – i9-12900KS – i9-13900KS, also with 24 cores and an even higher clock frequency – 6 GHz. In such an environment, the expensive and not the most productive 12900KS turned out to be simply unnecessary, so it is quite logical that the corporation decided to abandon it.
Overall, if you want this model, now is the time to stock up!
