Intel will release some 10nm in mid 2018 but these would be the Core M ultra low power parts.
AMD isn't going for 7nm in 2018 just yet, the Ryzen refresh slated for March of 2018 is going to be on 12nm which is a rebrand of GF14 NM process rather than a true node shrink.
I'm not entirely sure if GF or any other foundry would actually come out with large power hungry dies on 7nm any time soon.
TSMC seems not to be able to produce them even on 10nm, which is why they introduced their 12nm process which is back of the line node improvement of their 16nm node primarily so NVIDIA could produce their GPUs on it.
So far the only parts which are made on 10nm are mobile SoCs.
Also Samsung's first 7nm node will use EUV lithography, which may be a bit too costly for most chip makers, and that may have played a role in developing the stop-gap 10nm process, too. We'll likely see most of the 7nm users switch to GloFo and TSMC until Samsung lowers costs/increases yield for its 7nm process.
GF is skipping EUV for the initial 7nm process and based on the issues they and Intel have been having with masks and patterning under EUV I’m not sure if they’ll be on track for EUV in 2019.
In either case it would be very interesting to see what Intel is going to end up releasing it might be in lithography hell with 10nm or it might be overblown.
Intel’s 14nm++ and +++ processes atm do not have competition and it’s not clear just how much it would matter if GF moves to 7nm before Intel atm.
Intel’s biggest problem is less with their process and more with their roadmap as it seems that they want to launch 14nm+++, 10nm and 10nm+ products all within a similar time window with a huge overlap. If I was an OEM atm it would be rather confused.
That is why they have made a node specially for Custom Foundry.
https://fuse.wikichip.org/news/567/iedm-2017-intel-details-2...
And better yields. Intel used to get outrageously better yields versus everybody else in the world.
> And overall the general slowdown in Moore's law means that Intel's technology lead has less of a performance/price ramification.
This. Memory fell off Moore's law many moons ago, and a modern processor is mostly a lot of memory.
There is a reason everybody is finally putting real effort into concurrency. And, it's not because it somehow magically got easier in the last 30 years ...
My impression of Intel's process compared to most foundries is that they tend to have higher drive currents at a given node leading to faster switching speeds but also more restrictive design rules leading to lower practical densities then the standard cell size would predict. And making it hard for them to act as a foundry, though it's still possible. But my understanding at this level is tenuous and don't place too much weight on it.
And overall the general slowdown in Moore's law means that Intel's technology lead has less of a performance/price ramification.