About a decade ago, Intel announced the famous (Tick - Tock) "Tick" strategic pattern. As a cycle of the pendulum "tick", "di" on behalf of the chip technology to improve and smaller transistors, and "click" on behalf of the process remains the same, upgrading of core chip architecture. Represents a "tick" complete chip development cycle, spent two years.

But Intel recently abolished in company document chip development cycle "tick", the third generation Skylake architecture processor "Kaby Lake" CPU will be released in the third quarter of this year, completely broke the clock "process - architecture". Starting from the next generation of 10 nm process CPU, Intel will adopt "process - architecture - optimization" (PAO) of the three-step strategy.

Due to the CPU thread shrinking, Intel from 22 to 14 nano adopts two-step, known as the "tick" strategy. In this step, "click" is limited by technology development slow, Intel is not narrow line width, but upgrade CPU core architecture.

But in the development to the 14 nm process, Intel has "puff", Skylake release time half a year later than expected. When entering 10 nm process, the original has been unable to adapt to the annual generation of CPU chip cycle, Intel has to prolong the lifecycle of the each generation process, that is to say, every generation process will continue for 3 years, released a total of three generation of CPU.

Intel had the strategy of "two-step" future slowed to "three steps"

10 nm process will also face the problem of chip making, because 10 nanometers equivalent of only 20 width of silicon atoms. Microsoft said in a document and optimize the chip process and architecture will maintain annual generation of CPU market demand.

Compared with rivals samsung and TSMC, Intel on 10 nm chip technology an edge. Intel believes that the future chip manufacturing will be more and more difficult, compared to the competition will become increasingly obvious advantages. However, TSMC has previously said that plans to launch in 2020 5 nm process of chip.

With the failure of Moore's law, IBM has started the research of carbon nanotubes and graphene materials chip. But Intel CEO Paul otellini CPU chip basic materials in the coming decades will be silicon.