Because they can't actually yield the 10 nm products. Cooper Lake for instance is what will be actually bought versus Icelake Server; and for client Comet Lake and Rocket Lake versus Icelake Client and Tigerlake.
They CAN yield 2c/4t Icelake U and Y. I mean, right, Rocket Lake; Comet Lake; and Cooper Lake make things look bad for them in the desktop/workstation/server market since they wouldn't need any of those things if a full raft of IceLake products were ready for every market segment. But what if . . . eh see below.
Lakefield is in the roadmap as M-series. Lakefield could be thought as a proper Core M. Since a new CPU architecture from inception to being on shelves take 4-5 years, it makes sense.
That is a fascinating development, and it's one worth watching. Foveros, in action, in 2019. Probably the most interesting product Intel has announced for this year, not in terms of what it can do individually, but what it means for the capabilities of Intel's advanced packaging technologies.
Or they could cover < 28 cores with Cooper Lake and 32+ with Ice Lake. I don't think they will do another temporary band-aid solution like Cascade-Lake AP with Cooper Lake.
Seems unlikely unless they do something exotic to get IceLake-SP out the door (see below).
Since they actually started sampling Ice Lake Server parts, we probably get some leaks sooner than later...so we will find out soon.
I certainly hope so. Just remember that in the ODM era of cloud computing, early customers get first crack at (sometimes custom) silicon we won't see for 6 months or longer. Amazon and Google had Skylake-SP before anyone else had seen it, and I do not think there was a single credible leak about it until much later.
c) Ice Lake just isn't going to be available in sufficient quantities to satisfy demand, and Cooper Lake will handle the rest
That's
possible, but when you consider what conditions are forcing Intel to stop at 2c parts for the IceLake products that we know about, the Tiger Lake products that they discussed yesterday, and Cannonlake, it stands to reason that bigger-than-2c IceLake yields might be somewhere in the order of 0%. Or close enough to 0% to make it a complete waste of time. Are you going to spend an entire wafer to get one 32c IceLake-SP die? Under those circumstances I don't see IceLake-SP satisfying anyone.
What about,
d) Ice Lake SP is available for lower end SKUs using dual die MCM to get up to 32 cores while Cooper Lake covers the high end?
Or what if Intel is going to try to string together a bunch of 2c IceLake dice via EMIB or
gasp Foveros and do it that way? Their mesh topology might allow such a monstrosity to work without adding too much to intercore latency. Maybe. For those who can't tolerate the obvious latency problems that would probably result from such a doohickey, there would be Cooper Lake as a backup. And I have a feeling that the yields on the 2c dice are bad enough that Intel won't be able to make too many such beasts anyway (see
@NTMBK 's observation above).
Hence niche products on 10nm and then launch of 7nm in 2021.
The best part of this entire presentation is that Intel seems dead-set serious about pushing 7nm out the door in 2021. Personally I don't see them being able to bring enough IceLake products to market for 10nm to make a dent in what will continue to be a 14nm-dominated product lineup. Intel needs this, and in a way, so does the computing world as a whole.
Without it, it's TSMC vs. Samsung. One less fab on the cutting edge.