Intel Launches B365 Chipset, Welcomes 22nm Back to Production

Intel is once again launching chipsets on its 22nm process node, freeing up 14nm production to be used with other parts. The B365 is part of the 300-series of chipsets, so it supports the latest Intel CPUs — but it’s also officially part of the Kaby Lake family since it’s built on 22nm, not 14nm. The chart below from Anandtech highlights the differences.

B360 has two USB 3.1 G2 ports, while B365 doesn’t. B365 has support for 20 PCIe 3.0 lanes (B360 has 12). The B365 lacks integrated 802.11ac (B360 has it), but the 22nm chipset supports hardware RAID across both PCIe and SATA, (0,1,5 and 0,1,5,10, respectively). As in the past, motherboard manufacturers that want to support certain top-end capabilities off B365 chipsets will have to add support logic to do it. Power consumption from using these 22nm chipsets will be slightly higher compared with the 14nm variants, but the impact should honestly be fairly small.

This transition is one of several steps Intel is taking to ease 14nm pressure. In addition to investing $1.5B in shifting lines intended for 10nm back to 14nm, there are rumors that Intel may build chipsets or low-end hardware with TSMC as a means of freeing up some of its fab capacity to focus on its largest and most profitable chips. It’s unusual for Intel to contract with another fab, but it isn’t unheard of, and the two companies have collaborated together in the past. The advantages of building Intel’s chipsets on 14nm are much smaller than the advantage of building chips on the same node, which explains the company’s eagerness to prioritize how it deploys its node capacity.

Intel has stated that its long-delayed 10nm node will be in full production by the end of 2019, with 7nm supposedly still on track. EUV will also be introduced on 7nm. We recently attended Intel’s Architecture Day, where the company covered its plans for 3D chip-stacking manufacturing, updated GPU architectures, and its new Sunny Cove CPU architecture, and we wrapped up our coverage with a review of the entire event. If you’ve been curious about what Intel is planning in 2019 and how it will respond to AMD, the above will get you started.

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