I would love to see Intel get into contract manufacturing. We need more competition in that space and Intel's position no longer makes sense in the current environment.
They did, It is called Intel Custom Foundry and had customers from Nokia to Ericsson. In the end they failed. And it is no longer a path they want to follow.
For a contract to be mutually profitable it has to somehow be better than off-the-shelf. I got to imagine coordinating custom chip development is expensive for both parties.
One of the funniest stories I heard was about the first copy of the Intel 14nm design rules Altera got from Intel. They were heavily redacted, which is something I had never seen in the foundry business.
Additionally, a contract fab tries to be flexible, easier to design for. They make their libraries & design rules work well with commercial design software. A private fab on the other hand can boost yield & performance by pushing increasingly complex design rules on the design team, and the design team can use customized or internally developed software to make it all work.
So in short, they had the best fab tech in the business but they weren't used to servicing anyone other than themselves.
Surely 'themselves' is a huge enough market, and 'boost[ing] yield & performance' is exactly what they want to do, as the world's largest CPU maker? It sounds perfect. I guess maybe financially the extra perf etc. just wasn't worth it.
There is no reason why you cant optimise for both. To simply put they wasn't ready to be a contract manufacture, and TSMC set the standard of what is expected to be a contract manufacture in the Fabs industry and Intel failed miserably to meet even the pass mark.
Yes, it make perfect sense to optimise for you own yield and performance until TSMC overtake you and you no longer has the volume advantage. In manufacturing volume is everything.
It is also worth pointing out Altera is actually a Subsidiary of Intel. If that is what they were going through you can imagine about the others.
Maybe they do know how to optimize, but not exactly why anymore?
I've seen a tv-documentary about 15 years ago about their fabs. Therein some reporter asked why there was a bend in some bundle of pipes for no apparent reason. They answered that was there because in another factory there was a column there which they had to route around, which didn't exist at this factory. They explained further to not wanting to risk process variation, by building that bundle of pipes straight again. Since then i have been unimpressed by all that high-tech, being so complex, having to cargo-cult around, instead of being able to understand it from first principles and build according to the situation. Not blindly copying something which worked at another place but doesn't apply anymore, because the place and its conditions changed.
I don't think it was cargo-culting in the case of that fab. A fab isn't like your mother's ham, which she cut in half because her mother cut it in half, only to find out that her mother had a small oven. A fab is like that tricky piece of code that has a comment on every line, but instead of one function it's 20,000 lines of that. On top of that, it takes several weeks before you know if your wafer came out okay. So when you duplicate your fab, the last thing you want to do is add more potential problems. Think of it like using a software library; you don't go rebuild the library each time you use it, you just copy it into your project. Sure, there's unnecessary piping, but you don't care. If you cared you'd write your own library in assembly language and it would be a shining example of efficiency and understanding. But maybe you just want to solve your problem and ship.
Yes, that way we got fragile bloat, eliminating all benefits of every new generation of hardware. Since the 70ies. How long will this model of 'value-added' innovation be sustainable, i wonder?
I used to work in R&D for developing the machines used in the fabs. Sometimes the trivial details make a difference in the results and you don't always have to time to isolate and analyze each little thing. If you have a proven recipe, don't change it unless you have a reason.
I think your criticism is cheap and unwarranted. Where you see stupidity I see wisdom, though we can both agree it's ugly, but let's ask a straight question.
If it were your $$$billions being spent on a fab, what would you do?
While sleeping and cuddling with my cats, they whispered into my dreams: Stoopid hooman, alwayz so slooow! If yooo'd got Billionz to burn, yoo'd push forward minimal.fab of Yokogwawa
and BiZEN from Searchforthenext/Wafertrain! Rrrr Rrrr Rrrr!
When I was in school for Microelectronics, we were told very early on that experiments needed to be designed for the least number of runs, because of the sheer cost of taking a production fab down for a short period. That and the design better be flawless or your manager would never allow it
To a first-order approximation, engineering is about minimizing costs, and a large fraction of the cost of creating and running a fab is the cost of the time of the employees able to understand things from first principles. So, just because they decided to avoid that cost doesn't mean they are unable to redesign the pipes from first principles.
The point is that they probably have no idea what else they would have to change/retune in that process to account for the pipes being straight. It makes sense that they would seek to avoid changes to the greatest possible extent, given the costs involved.
> Intel began working on CE! after it had trouble at the 0.5um (500nm) node and refined the process through each successive generation. The green line shows the initial product ramp at its first fab — after an early spike, yields cratered and only recovered over a period of months. Once Intel had Fab 1 working well on 0.5um, it started ramping Fab 2 only to run into new problems. As Copy Exactly! was developed and deployed, the company’s yields synchronized across the various fabs.
Because they don't know enough to predict the process effects of variations in humidity, barometric pressure — or pipe length! — they eliminate those variations instead. Presumably they would learn more if they didn't do that, but they would also take longer to ramp up production. Since they started doing CE! in the 1980s, it's probably not a primary cause of their late-2010s decline.
Well, exactly, they are their own best customer. Contract fab was just a way to fill capacity in a lull period. So there was never a strong motivator to make sacrifices to build a great contract fab program.
I guess the software analog of this is that the quality of code usually goes up when it’s open-sourced. Not just because of the contributions from outsiders, but because the original developers feel apprehensive about putting out low quality code.
“As the world is no longer peaceful, TSMC is gaining vital importance in geostrategic terms,”
-Morris Chang, former chairman and CEO of the world’s largest semiconductor foundry Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) in 2019.
And he said something similar in 2017 as well. Turns out he foresee all sort of problems when TSMC became the leading Fab for the world.
The 2013 piece [1] on Intel is also interesting. That was when Intel were about to launch their delayed 14nm. It is rather unfortunate Intel decide not to follow through their Custom Foundry.
The long interview [1] with Morris Chang is interesting. When asked why he went to Taiwan to found TSMC (at a reduced level of compensation) he replied: it was the newness that appealed to me, the difference from what I had been doing for several decades!
IMO TSMC has been geopolitically significant for at least a decade when they started becoming the dominant supplier in terms of volume for mobile and compute between mediatek, qualcomm, nvidia, ati/amd and others.
I think Intel tried pretty hard for custom foundry but didn't get much business between IP concerns from competitors and their 10nm failures resulting capacity shortages.
I haven’t been following the nanometer rat race, but SMIC just announced it achieved 14-nm. This means they are only 7 years behind Intel, according to your statement.
Now, TSMC is at 7 nm, and while the smaller nanometers are important for energy efficiency, and especially for mobile devices with a battery, it doesn’t really increase the clock cycle. Actually, nobody seems to talk about gigahertz clock cycles anymore. It’s all about multiple cores now.
Then, doesn’t this mean that SMIC is now competitive against Intel on desktop computers and laptop computer CPUs? And to be honest, I don’t even know the specs of the chip in my laptop. I don’t think I even purchased the fastest chip anyways.
The thing is this used to be a well known truism, for a long time. Not sure when we forgot it ... maybe after the USSR collapsed and everyone read "The End of History" and actually believed what Fukuyama wrote.
I assume that multi-chip packages will soon develop as a new source of modularity within chip fabrication itself. There will be common standards for how multiple chiplets can be wired inside of a package, and the OEM will no longer be restricted to having a single supplier like TSMC for the entire "package" component but be free to choose among multiple, freely-competing suppliers ala TSMC, Intel, Samsung, SMIC etc. Then the "geopolitical" need for an advanced, billion-dollar "fab" will essentially be disintermediated away - only a few tiny, perhaps optional components will ever be manufactured at anything like a 7nm or 5nm process. Everything else will simply end up as a basic commodity.
IANoWayAFabExpert but I don't think so. I understand the cost of transferring signals between chiplets is high, so I don't see this as a way forward except for when the cost of such a transfer can be amortised by handing over a smallish packet of work (in terms of data size) that needs a large quantity of CPU, and a smallish amount of data to transfer back. So coarse grained only. Not suitable for general computation anyway.
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding your point, but hasn't AMD proven this wrong at this point? With a correctly architected interconnect you can absolutely do chiplet based general computation processors.
Again, I may be misunderstanding your point...but I think the chiplet future is here on some level.
And I may be wrong, and for sure chiplets are proven (for now) to be a very good way of doing things, but those chiplets in AMD chips are relatively decoupled[0]. They're very large and connected within themselves already. They can be expected to operate substantially independently[0]. While they do have to talk to each other to get memory, probably a lot, DRAM access is so slow that it swamps the overhead of inter-chiplet communication[0]. Shared L3 cache, that's another matter I dunno.
I took it you meant like much smaller components, like ALU from this supplier, DRAM controller from that supplier, cache from another supplier etc, all on separate chiplets, each having to go off-chiplet to speak to the others. I am sure[0] that would cost much power and performance.
[0] serious risk of n00b arse-speak happening here, beware.
It wasn't only Intel making microprocessors in the US. Samsung has one of their largest fabs in Texas. Global Foundries has their best fab in New York. As I understand they're both equipped to make 14nm-class processors. Not that it detracts from the general point of the article.
This article was very disappointing. The author writes like an American neo-con warhawk who fantasizes about the entire world and tech industry choosing US over China thus isolating and containing it.
China trying to move up the value chain so hard-working Chinese citizens aren't stuck working in sweatshops forever is treated as a mortal national security threat that the whole word must unite to stop. Luckily private American tech-firms and non-Anglo countries don't buy this BS and wants to establish a win-win relationship and don't want to pick sides.
The latest Huawei escalation has shown the entire tech industry that US supply chain can't be trusted. If I were TSMC I would be looking hard into how Japanese semiconductor equipment can substitute all American ones.
Amazing read, but I disagree with this simplistic political conclusion:
> Second, at some point every tech company is going to have to make a choice between the U.S. and China. It is tempting to blame the tension between the two countries on Trump, but the truth is that China, particularly under Xi Jinping, has been significantly hardening its rhetoric and actions since before Trump was elected, and has been committed to not just catching but surpassing the U.S. in technology for years. There is a fundamental clash of values between the West and China, and it is clear that China is interested in exporting theirs. At some point everyone will be stuck in the middle, like TSMC, and Switzerland won’t be an option.
If Cold War has taught us anything, it’s that display of force didn’t yield anything. Dialogue and exporting values did.
So yes, absolutely: the escalation is Trump’s fault, because of the insufferable rhetoric of his warmongering hawks.
Xi Jinping is a way more tactical and dialogue oriented leader (not a positive judgement on official PRC values, of course) that is being defeated by the proverbial pigeon shitting on the board during a game of chess.
Decoupling from China is easily sellable as the anti-communist propaganda in the 50s, but the harsh reality is that in today’s world it means recklessly hammering pieces off of the global economy jenga tower, and hoping it will stay up.
Dialogue and severely regulated exchange with the potential enemy is the real weapon that could weaken China. Putting human rights on the table when it comes to trade treaties, for example. Instead, there’s a resurgence of scary nationalism that is exactly what brought the world on the brink of collapse 75 years ago.
If I had to choose two words, right now, I would go with “brace brace”.
> Putting human rights on the table when it comes to trade treaties, for example.
Hasn't this been tried before? What happens if they refuse? We do nothing and just keep talking? The absence of any nationalist impulse is even scarier than your 'scary nationalism'. I would note that China has none of this sort of self doubt.
Trump finally got desperate and launched the nuke.
I’m going to call it. TSMC is now going to be irrelevant. Maybe not for another 10 years, but it will happen.
Why? Because they just lost their biggest customer, China. The very customer that was bringing in all the profits, in order for them to reinvest back into the business, and get better at their craft.
Trump just nuked their profits, and he expects TSMC to just sell to non-Chinese companies. Granted, right now, it’s just Huawei, but gradually, all the other Chinese companies are going to leave, or will be forced out. They now all have a bright red target on their backs.
Good luck making all that profit back from just selling to Apple and nVidia. Apple takes the lion’s share of the iPhone profits, and the CPU contract manufacturer takes a small fraction. Apple only went with TSMC, in order to prevent Samsung, from getting a clue of what they were up to.
Next, I predict that this will have further chain reaction consequences.
Trump will restrict ASML from selling to China, the photolithography equipment, if they haven’t already. So China will step up their R&D to develop it indigenously. SMIC just achieved 14-nm, so they’re not so far behind, maybe 5 to 10 years, but they’re reliant on ASML. So they’re about to get their legs cut off from under them. The Americans just sucker-punched them. So they’re down, but they’re not out. Not yet. They’ll eventually replace ASML, since this is now an existential crisis for them.
The next domino to fall, will be Android. When China comes back online with their own competitive CPUs, then Android will be made irrelevant, because Huawei will move forward with their Harmony OS.
They are using it now, inside their smart TVs, and this is like a Trojan Horse tactic for them. Use the OS to learn of a non-competitive ecosystem, TVs, and get it ready for the main event, mobile devices and computer systems.
With the fall of Android, then Google takes a hit. Their search engine will no longer be as relevant to mobile users. This leads to a possibly massive reduction of ad revenue, and so forth.
Then, as we were all probably expecting, mobile OS and desktop OS are converging. The Harmony OS might also compete against Apple MacOS, and Microsoft Windows. Thus, in one swoop, Huawei might just knock out 3 American tech giants: Google, Microsoft, and Apple. Of course, these companies will forever be relevant in America, and other rich western countries, but they’re about to be made irrelevant in China, and likely, in the global south (Africa, Southeast Asia, India, and South America). These poorer countries were never going to buy a pointless $1200 iPhone 14 anyways. Thus, the cheaper product, will drive more sales, more revenue and profits, and eventually, more technological advancements for Huawei and for China tech companies.
50 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 111 ms ] threadOne of the funniest stories I heard was about the first copy of the Intel 14nm design rules Altera got from Intel. They were heavily redacted, which is something I had never seen in the foundry business.
https://semiwiki.com/semiconductor-manufacturers/intel/7912-...
Additionally, a contract fab tries to be flexible, easier to design for. They make their libraries & design rules work well with commercial design software. A private fab on the other hand can boost yield & performance by pushing increasingly complex design rules on the design team, and the design team can use customized or internally developed software to make it all work.
So in short, they had the best fab tech in the business but they weren't used to servicing anyone other than themselves.
(thanks for answer though)
Yes, it make perfect sense to optimise for you own yield and performance until TSMC overtake you and you no longer has the volume advantage. In manufacturing volume is everything.
It is also worth pointing out Altera is actually a Subsidiary of Intel. If that is what they were going through you can imagine about the others.
I've seen a tv-documentary about 15 years ago about their fabs. Therein some reporter asked why there was a bend in some bundle of pipes for no apparent reason. They answered that was there because in another factory there was a column there which they had to route around, which didn't exist at this factory. They explained further to not wanting to risk process variation, by building that bundle of pipes straight again. Since then i have been unimpressed by all that high-tech, being so complex, having to cargo-cult around, instead of being able to understand it from first principles and build according to the situation. Not blindly copying something which worked at another place but doesn't apply anymore, because the place and its conditions changed.
But see where it got them?
If it were your $$$billions being spent on a fab, what would you do?
/me lifts hat and bows.
Courtesy of Lilly, Mieze, and Mimi.
I'm actually surprised they didn't go and put a column there, too, just in case.
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/127987-deliberate-exce...
> Intel began working on CE! after it had trouble at the 0.5um (500nm) node and refined the process through each successive generation. The green line shows the initial product ramp at its first fab — after an early spike, yields cratered and only recovered over a period of months. Once Intel had Fab 1 working well on 0.5um, it started ramping Fab 2 only to run into new problems. As Copy Exactly! was developed and deployed, the company’s yields synchronized across the various fabs.
Because they don't know enough to predict the process effects of variations in humidity, barometric pressure — or pipe length! — they eliminate those variations instead. Presumably they would learn more if they didn't do that, but they would also take longer to ramp up production. Since they started doing CE! in the 1980s, it's probably not a primary cause of their late-2010s decline.
-Morris Chang, former chairman and CEO of the world’s largest semiconductor foundry Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) in 2019.
And he said something similar in 2017 as well. Turns out he foresee all sort of problems when TSMC became the leading Fab for the world.
The 2013 piece [1] on Intel is also interesting. That was when Intel were about to launch their delayed 14nm. It is rather unfortunate Intel decide not to follow through their Custom Foundry.
[1] https://stratechery.com/2013/the-intel-opportunity/
[1] https://www.semi.org/en/Oral-History-Interview-Morris-Chang
I think Intel tried pretty hard for custom foundry but didn't get much business between IP concerns from competitors and their 10nm failures resulting capacity shortages.
Now, TSMC is at 7 nm, and while the smaller nanometers are important for energy efficiency, and especially for mobile devices with a battery, it doesn’t really increase the clock cycle. Actually, nobody seems to talk about gigahertz clock cycles anymore. It’s all about multiple cores now.
Then, doesn’t this mean that SMIC is now competitive against Intel on desktop computers and laptop computer CPUs? And to be honest, I don’t even know the specs of the chip in my laptop. I don’t think I even purchased the fastest chip anyways.
I cannot agree more. If we learn one thing this year this is it.
IMO only. Not my area. Pinch of salt etc.
Again, I may be misunderstanding your point...but I think the chiplet future is here on some level.
I took it you meant like much smaller components, like ALU from this supplier, DRAM controller from that supplier, cache from another supplier etc, all on separate chiplets, each having to go off-chiplet to speak to the others. I am sure[0] that would cost much power and performance.
[0] serious risk of n00b arse-speak happening here, beware.
China trying to move up the value chain so hard-working Chinese citizens aren't stuck working in sweatshops forever is treated as a mortal national security threat that the whole word must unite to stop. Luckily private American tech-firms and non-Anglo countries don't buy this BS and wants to establish a win-win relationship and don't want to pick sides.
The latest Huawei escalation has shown the entire tech industry that US supply chain can't be trusted. If I were TSMC I would be looking hard into how Japanese semiconductor equipment can substitute all American ones.
> Second, at some point every tech company is going to have to make a choice between the U.S. and China. It is tempting to blame the tension between the two countries on Trump, but the truth is that China, particularly under Xi Jinping, has been significantly hardening its rhetoric and actions since before Trump was elected, and has been committed to not just catching but surpassing the U.S. in technology for years. There is a fundamental clash of values between the West and China, and it is clear that China is interested in exporting theirs. At some point everyone will be stuck in the middle, like TSMC, and Switzerland won’t be an option.
If Cold War has taught us anything, it’s that display of force didn’t yield anything. Dialogue and exporting values did. So yes, absolutely: the escalation is Trump’s fault, because of the insufferable rhetoric of his warmongering hawks. Xi Jinping is a way more tactical and dialogue oriented leader (not a positive judgement on official PRC values, of course) that is being defeated by the proverbial pigeon shitting on the board during a game of chess. Decoupling from China is easily sellable as the anti-communist propaganda in the 50s, but the harsh reality is that in today’s world it means recklessly hammering pieces off of the global economy jenga tower, and hoping it will stay up. Dialogue and severely regulated exchange with the potential enemy is the real weapon that could weaken China. Putting human rights on the table when it comes to trade treaties, for example. Instead, there’s a resurgence of scary nationalism that is exactly what brought the world on the brink of collapse 75 years ago. If I had to choose two words, right now, I would go with “brace brace”.
Hasn't this been tried before? What happens if they refuse? We do nothing and just keep talking? The absence of any nationalist impulse is even scarier than your 'scary nationalism'. I would note that China has none of this sort of self doubt.
I’m going to call it. TSMC is now going to be irrelevant. Maybe not for another 10 years, but it will happen.
Why? Because they just lost their biggest customer, China. The very customer that was bringing in all the profits, in order for them to reinvest back into the business, and get better at their craft.
Trump just nuked their profits, and he expects TSMC to just sell to non-Chinese companies. Granted, right now, it’s just Huawei, but gradually, all the other Chinese companies are going to leave, or will be forced out. They now all have a bright red target on their backs.
Good luck making all that profit back from just selling to Apple and nVidia. Apple takes the lion’s share of the iPhone profits, and the CPU contract manufacturer takes a small fraction. Apple only went with TSMC, in order to prevent Samsung, from getting a clue of what they were up to.
Next, I predict that this will have further chain reaction consequences.
Trump will restrict ASML from selling to China, the photolithography equipment, if they haven’t already. So China will step up their R&D to develop it indigenously. SMIC just achieved 14-nm, so they’re not so far behind, maybe 5 to 10 years, but they’re reliant on ASML. So they’re about to get their legs cut off from under them. The Americans just sucker-punched them. So they’re down, but they’re not out. Not yet. They’ll eventually replace ASML, since this is now an existential crisis for them.
The next domino to fall, will be Android. When China comes back online with their own competitive CPUs, then Android will be made irrelevant, because Huawei will move forward with their Harmony OS.
They are using it now, inside their smart TVs, and this is like a Trojan Horse tactic for them. Use the OS to learn of a non-competitive ecosystem, TVs, and get it ready for the main event, mobile devices and computer systems.
With the fall of Android, then Google takes a hit. Their search engine will no longer be as relevant to mobile users. This leads to a possibly massive reduction of ad revenue, and so forth.
Then, as we were all probably expecting, mobile OS and desktop OS are converging. The Harmony OS might also compete against Apple MacOS, and Microsoft Windows. Thus, in one swoop, Huawei might just knock out 3 American tech giants: Google, Microsoft, and Apple. Of course, these companies will forever be relevant in America, and other rich western countries, but they’re about to be made irrelevant in China, and likely, in the global south (Africa, Southeast Asia, India, and South America). These poorer countries were never going to buy a pointless $1200 iPhone 14 anyways. Thus, the cheaper product, will drive more sales, more revenue and profits, and eventually, more technological advancements for Huawei and for China tech companies.
Thus..
Begun it has, The Tech War.