Venkata (Murthy) Renduchintala, president of Intel’s Technology, Systems Architecture and Client Group, said that the yields were tracking roughly in line with what the company experienced at the 14nm node when it prepared to make that transition.
“We’re still very much reinforcing and reaffirming our previous guidance that we believe that we’ll have 10nm shipping by holiday of 2019,” said Renduchintala. “I feel more confident about that at this call than I did on the call a quarter ago. So we’re making good progress, and I think we’re making the quarter-on-quarter progress that’s consistent with prior generations having reset the progress curve.”
Intel has been struggling with yield issues at the 10-nm node, and in April announced that it was postponing the launch of any product until next year,
The announcement came as the company reported a very strong third quarter with sales of $19.2billion, up 19% on last year. The company reported a net income for the quarter of $6.4billion, up 42% from the third quarter of 2017.
While the company said that all segments were ahead this strong performance was driven by its data centre business segment which is growing at nearly twice the rate that Intel expected when the year began.
Its Data Center Group sales grew 26% for the quarter to top $6billion for the first time, reaching $6.1billion. Intel said that the strong sales were driven by demand from cloud and communications service providers.