Given how dependent high end computing is on TSMC (Amd, Apple, Nvidea, + more) it's quite unlikely to be a viable strategy.
But given how messed up & fragmented the EU military is if the US stops military support for Taiwan china will likely directly declare War and Attack. (To be precise there is no EU military, just that of all members which makes it fragmented and in many cases is their military isn't in the best condition. Also China wouldn't declare War as it doesn't recognizance Taiwan, i.e. they would instead "use military force to attack rebels and terrorists" or something like that).
> Given how dependent high end computing is on TSMC (Amd, Apple, Nvidea, + more) it's quite unlikely to be a viable strategy.
That's a temporary advantage for Taiwan, and pretty much their only one.
A silicon atom is only around 0.1nm wide, so the end of scaling is coming up like a brick wall. We've got maybe a half dozen nodes left.
After that, industrial espionage, pumping up SMIC or some other new Chinese domestic equivalent at the time, and literally just leaking info publicly so the EU, US, and ROK are viable replacements once chips become truly a commodity will cut the dependence on Taiwan. At that point it's not worth facing China's nukes to tell them that they can't have Crimea^H^H^H^H^H^H Taiwan.
You also can't make a transistor out of a single atom. The fact that you need doped silicon to have a semiconductor rather than just silicon as an insulator means that we'll be cut off well before then. A ~50x reduction in feature size (so that's 6ish nodes of shrink) is about what I've heard about industry expectations.
That being said the future never ceases to surprise.
> china will likely directly declare War and Attack.
This is the American dream.
But no, China is not that stupid. Sure, they want Taiwan back, but they will not declare war and create global instability right in their backyard. Only stupid people would do this, and the Chinese are not stupid. They are in a marathon. They see the goal in 30, 50, 100 years. They will not give this gift to the American government.
A better idea is to give a US passport to every TSMC employee NOW (exempt them from having to hold a green card and live in USA for 5 years first). And change the law so that US citizens residing overseas with no US-sourced income are exempted from filing and paying taxes.
Other countries that wish to have leading edge commercial fabs, e.g. Germany or Netherlands, should compete with USA and try to get their passports to TSMC employees first. Tell them your country does not tax citizens on overseas income, and like Taiwan, has universal healthcare, high-speed rail, and gun control. Netherlands can also advertise that TSMC employees likely already have some Dutch friends at ASML.
China doesn't need to trample Taiwan, they can simply afford to hire the best engineers out of TSMC at 2.5x pay because Chinese companies are backed directly by the Chinese government and can afford to throw tons of money at this problem.
TSMC's lithography machines come from ASML, which is in the Netherlands. I always find it surprising that people talk about TSMC so much and not mention ASML; people talk about "TSMC's 5nm process", but it's really ASML's tech that powers all of that.
Setting up a new factory to replace TSMC is not trivial of course, as it's operationally hard, but none of the core tech would be "in China's hands".
Feels like Microsoft during the Balmer years. Instead of Linux and Mac ascendant, you have AMD and ARM... it doesn’t seem impossible to think a Satya Nadella could turn things around.
Good observation. The only thing that kept MS going was the massive inertia of Win & Office. It bought them time to pivot to the cloud. And now we have things like VSCode, an ElectronJS app, which is the first microsoft product I've adored in two decades. And TypeScript, which has made the world a better place.
Realistically, Intel only have to get one process node right to either be right back in the game or buy themselves years more time to play with. They are currently somewhere between 3-5 times behind TSMC lithographically, but nowhere near that far behind in raw performance, which suggests that they could at very least knock AMD off their perch in single-threaded work.
Obviously process nodes are much harder than pretty much anything in the cloud, but this is a serious test of (pure and simple) whether their leadership has the (gender-neutral) balls to not back down.
"And also goes some way to explaining why, despite TSMC offering a nominally 7nm process, the general consensus has been that Intel’s 10nm design is pretty much analogous. But what’s 3nm between fabs? At that level, probably quite a lot. But if the 7nm node is more of a branding exercise than genuinely denoting the physical properties of that production process then you can understand why there’s supposedly not a lot in it."
That only lists the number, not what the # actually means in terms of actual lithography or more importantly, transitor performance. It used to be minimum feature size, or just L of the gate, but with finfet it can be an overloaded term. Scaling in x of .75 and y of .7 lead to 10% performance improvement per node at Intel. TSMC hasn't been that clear. And that doesn't even account for increase in metal layers, pitch of layers (or if they use poly lower layers to get even faster gains), or average track density due to above/below electromigration minimums.
EDIT: All of this stuff is usually stated at ISSCC every time a new process is announced, so it isn't NDA. I haven't followed this in years which is why I was asking for a process person to step in.
Every fab plays loose and fast with the terms, including Intel these days.
More or less TSMC 7nm := Intel 10nm, and TSMC 5nm := Intel 7nm. It's more complex than that, one has denser logic while the other has denser SRAM and what have you, but it's a good baseline.
Since Intel is struggling with 10nm but is shipping, that puts TSMC about a node and a half ahead.
Yeah, that's why I counted it as a half node. Shipping, but awful yields. Meanwhile N5 is doing better than N7 at the same time in lifecycle from a yield perspective.
> They are currently somewhere between 3-5 times behind TSMC lithographically
No they aren't. The nanometer names are only kinda comparable within a single company, but they are not comparable beyond that.
It's like saying that Chrome is 6x further ahead than Safari because Chrome is on 87 and Safari is only on 14. Same thing with fabs here, it's just a version number that counts down and has been for a long while.
In this case specifically, Intel's 10nm is more or less the same density as TSMC's 7nm. TSMC's 5nm is then a significant 1.8x the density of their 7nm process, so right now Intel's fabs are ~identical to what AMD is using (7nm), but Apple's use of TSMC's 5nm then puts them a generation ahead. TSMC is leading, but by a single generation not by 3-5x or whatever. Or to put it in year terms TSMC is about 2 years ahead of Intel right now, Intel just now getting "volume" 10nm up & running while TSMC was at a comparable node in volume 2 years ago.
As far as "performance" goes, though, so far TSMC, even their 5nm process, cannot quite match Intel. Remember that as far as the fab goes, performance is just what clock speeds can be hit, and Intel's clocks are the highest - they have the fastest transistors. 14nm+++++ is a meme/joke, but the actual transistor speed of it is still downright impressive. How fast a CPU actually runs depends on the architecture, though, which is influenced by density but in terms of pure single-core performance that's really almost entirely just architecture.
Intel can't make large 10nm dies, or at least isn't, but there's quite a few 10nm mobile parts and they are on their second shipping generation of those parts. Which are shipping in volume, or at least volume-enough for the likes of Dell to put the 10nm CPUs in most of their lineup including the XPS series. Which is about where TSMC's 7nm was 2 years ago, too.
And TSMC's 170MTr/mm^2 is still restricted to a single vendor and hasn't ramped up beyond that yet. You can't simultaneously claim Intel is restricted to what their bulk volume lineup is and then use TSMC's non-volume lineup. The bulk of TSMC is still 7nm which is 100MTr/mm^2.
> Remember that as far as the fab goes, performance is just what clock speeds can be hit, and Intel's clocks are the highest - they have the fastest transistors. 14nm+++++ is a meme/joke, but the actual transistor speed of it is still downright impressive.
My understanding is that Intel's fast transistors come at a cost of not being particularly dense for the process node they are implemented on. So it's a question of design philosophy as well. Intel has fast, but somewhat sparse transistors, they use a lot of hand layout etc. to really optimize their designs so they can clock high.
Other players use a different philosophy. Slower, but denser transistors and more automated layout may not clock as high, but the improved density gives you more cores (e.g. AMD vs Intel) and/or allows a more "brainiac" core design (wider, deeper ROB, better branch prediction, more cache, etc. like Apple M1), and also gets you a better turnaround time.
Intel innovates in process. Everything else is ruled by backwards compatibility and frenetic management scared to stay the course. (The vast majority of projects are killed if they don't tape out in ~2 years.)
Intel will shift to a TSMC model. They have the best fabs on the planet, and the best fab engineers. I believe it is something like a 3 millions dollars lost per minute if they are idle. They have already started doing that a few years ago, I suspect this will be their final form.
IMHO: The only thing holding them back from the transition are the hundreds of small boondoggle-groups staffed by old-timers too scared to retire, and too scared to do something daring, yet still somehow hang on to their hidey-holes. They lost a ton of key architects to Apple a few years ago, which I also suspect was the reason why the M1 is so badass.
...and if you really want to get sentimental, here's an AMD poster we had in our cubes back in ~1991:
Yeah, agreed. The designers / integration will probably get the newest nodes--and the headaches with getting their yields up! I suspect the older high-yield nodes will be filled with tenants pretty quickly. I don't have much knowledge of how this is going, at least from the inside.
"Higher yield nodes" are full, that's why Intel is outsourcing to TSMC. Intel has already sold every 14nm, 22nm, 32nm and 45nm wafer it can make. They have zero capacity, which is an amazing problem for a "dying" company to have.
Even if they axed all process R&D and returned the cash to shareholders, due to the eye watering costs of designing at 10nm and lower I expect there will be a lot of business to keep their fabs turning over for the next decade.
In late 2018, it was rumored they were exiting the business because of low uptake and because of constrained supply of their leading edge process, but it doesn't look like that happened.
I mean their Sunnyvale HQ was a kind of mini mimic of the Whitehouse (at least to me, if you use your imagination a tad) --except for the garish storm fences that surrounded it.
Lately I've started to wonder if Itanium wasn't a good idea badly executed. I wonder if you went back in time and invested more in compilers and ecosystem if it could have succeeded? VLIW could really reduce complexity by dumping a lot of instruction re-ordering stuff and eliminating the need for tons of baroque vector instructions for specific purposes.
The biggest thing Intel didn't do with Itanium was release affordable AT/ATX form factor boards. They priced it way, way too high, chasing early margins in "enterprise" without realizing that market share is everything in CPUs. This is the same mistake that Sun, DEC, and HP made with their server/workstation CPUs in the previous era. With a new architecture you've got to push hard for market share, wide support, and scale.
If I'd been in charge I would have priced the first iterations of Itanium only a little above fab cost and invested a lot more in compiler support and software.
Edit: also whatever happened to the Mill? The idea sounded tenable but I have to admit that I am not a CPU engineer so my armchair take is dubious.
Anyway the ship has sailed. Later research in out of order execution has yielded at least similar performance gains and post-X86 the momentum is behind ARM and RISC-V.
I'm not sure that pushing the complexity to the compiler makes as much sense.
One good side of x86 style instruction sets is that there is a lot you can do in the cpu to optimize existing programs more. While some really advanced compiler optimizations may make some use of the internal details of the implementation to choose what sequence to output, these details are not part of the ISA, and thus you can change them without breaking backwards compatibility. Changing them could slow down certain code optimized with those details in mind, but the code will still function. And I'm not even talking just about things like out of order execution. Some ISA's leak enough details that just moving from multi-cycle in-order execution to pipelined execution was awkward.
This ability of the implementation to abstract away from the ISA is very handy. And some RISC processors that exposed implementation details like branch-delay slots ended up learning this lesson the hard way. Now the Itanium ISA does largely avoid leaking the implementation details like number of scalar execution units or similar, but it's design does make certain kinds of potential chip-side optimizations more complicated.
In the Itanium ISA the compiler can specify groups of instructions that can run in parallel, specify speculative and advanced loads, and set up loop pipelining. But this is still more limited than what x86 cores can do behind the scenes. For an Itanium style design, adding new types of optimizations generally requires new instructions and teaching the compilers how to use them, since many potential optimizations could only be added to the chip if you add back the very circuitry that you were trying to remove by placing the burden on the compiler.
Even some of the types of optimizations Itanium compilers can do that mimic optimizations x86 processors do behind the scenes can result in needing to write additional code, reducing the effectiveness of the instruction cache. This is not surprising. The benefits of static scheduling are that you pre-compute things that are possible to pre-compute like which instructions can run in parallel, and where you can speculate etc. And thus you don't need to compute that stuff on-die, and don't need to compute it each and every time you run a code fragment. But obviously that information still needs to make it to the CPU, so you are trading that runtime computation for additional instruction storage cost. (I won't deny that the result could still end up more I-cache efficient than x86 is, because x86 is not by any means the most efficient instruction encoding, especially since some rarely used anymore opcodes hog some prime encoding real-estate.)
Basically I'm not sold on static scheduling for high performance but general purpose CPUs, and am especially not sold on the sort of peudo-static scheduling used by Itanium where you are scheduling for instructions with unknown latency, that can differ from model to model. The complete static scheduling where you must target the exact CPU you will run on, and thus know all the timings (like the Mill promised) feels better to me. (But I'm not entirely sure about install type specialization like they mention.)
But I'm also no expert on CPU design, a hobbyist at best.
>I believe it is something like a 3 millions dollars lost per minute if they are idle.
I think that's overestimating, although you are right it is damn expensive.
Order of magnitude I would say it's more like: Fab has lifetime of 2-3(?) years, and costs $10B to build and amortize. So every minute of idled factory capital = $6,000 in pure cost of the facility.
(although, if you think of it in potential lost revenue terms, then you may be more correct.)
>> Many Intel fabs are from the early 2000s. Some are from the 90s. What do you mean 2-3 years?
> I think they're referring to each line as a new fab, rather than the complex of buildings they're in, which is pretty fair.
Even so, wouldn't the 2-3 year number only apply to CPUs? Couldn't they keep the lines running making things that don't require top of the line processes, like USB controllers, etc.
Yes, for chips that need leading edge density like CPUs.
Of course the lines stay open after that for cases you've laid out, but there's a lot of financial reasons why that needs to be basically gravy train money at that point with the lines being fully amortized and having paid for themselves many times over.
For those retired lines, don't they sell them off to lower tier manufacturers pretty quickly? Say, within 5 years?
I am no expert but I didn't think the site would be just accumulating its n-1, n-2 generation lines to produce lower grade stuff in the same fab walls. They take up space that they want to continue producing top of line latest output. I thought.
They're not really taking up space per se. For the cost of a fab, a new building (or new wing of a building) is peanuts.
Adding on to that, in a lot of ways the fab is the building, and at a bare minimum you'd be resetting a lot of the yield issues you fixed by moving it to a new space. So then you'd be left with an old node and yield issues, and what's the point of that?
There's also a ton of trade secret style IP still in the old nodes that could help a competitor, so why let it leave your property? Intel for instance is so into preventing trade market theft on the specifics of their nodes that they (at least used to) manually drill out every mobile device camera allowed in their fabs, in addition to the normal "no outside electronics past this point" security stations.
That's correct. A reasonable way to think of it is to calculate the cost of the thing that you're replacing every couple years, and the output it produces in that time. So the CPU producing line at <x>nm process, or whatever unit you choose. The building or site itself ("the fab") isn't the important thing.
I thought the majority of their current problems stemmed from having lost the lead in fabs. You can't have the best chips if you don't have the best fab tech.
This question has raged since the 90's. I worked on the Itanium (Madison and McKinley), and the VLIW architecture was brilliant. This was during the time of the Power4 and the DEC ALPHA, two non-x86 competing architectures that were dominating the "Workstation" market (remember that term?). It looked like the server world was going to have three architectural options (Sun was dying, and Motorola's 68000 line wasn't up to the task.)
Microsoft even had a version of NT3.5 for The Itanic. It seemed we were just about to achieve critical mass in the server world to switch to a new architecture with huge address space, ECC up the wazoo and massive integer performance.
Then the PC revolution took off with Win95, and the second war with AMD happened (and NexGen sorta). This couldn't be solved with legal battles. This put all hands on deck because there was SO much money to be made with x86 compatibility. The presence of x86 "up and down" AMD & Intel's roadmap took over the server market as well: it was x86 all over the place.
And that, chil'ren, is why x86 was reborn in the 90's just as it was close to being wiped out.
Now Apple has proven you can you seamless sneak in a brand-new architecture, get hyooj gainz, and we are none the wiser. This is fantastic news. I think we are truly on the cusp of x86 losing its dominance in the consumer space after almost 35 years of dominance.
Sure, but that's only a cute hack due to Apple bidding to eat up literally all of the TSMC 5nm capacity. I'm sure Nvidia would prefer TSMC 5nm to Samsung 8nm if they could put their hands on it.
Nvidia bit the hand that fed them (TSMC) hence not using TSMC 7nm or 5nm. Turns out complaining publicly about your manufacturing partner year after year causes them to allocate their wafer starts to your competition (AMD, Apple, etc).
Haha, sure, but there's only a node or so difference. 10nm Intel is about 7nm TSMC density wise (with a lot of caveats in either direction, one has denser logic, the other has denser SRAM, etc).
>The fact that they're almost equivalent to those two at 5nm when Intel is at 14nm+++++++++
Only when it comes to single core. And even then Intel has to spend 2x silicon - Zen 3 CCD at 7nm with a die size of 80.7 mm² while Intel's 10th gen 8C die is 170mm2. Of course it isn't silicon itself which is costly, it is the processing of each wafer what is the cost here, and getting 2x less cores per wafer is bound to affect the margin/profit/etc.
And of course Intel has no chances of putting out 16C chip into normal desktop like AMD does with 3950x and 5950x (those chips successfully go into the territory of 2x Xeon workstations costing arm and leg)
I'd reckon per unit area, Intel's cost on 14nm wafers are going to run to less than 25% of TSMC's ask price at 7nm.
Do keep in mind that a fair amount of a desktop chip is pad space, IO hasn't shrunk since 22nm nodes, DUV steppers are dirt cheap, Intel's foundries are fully amortized, and yields at 14nm are going to be approaching 100%.
Intel has really stumbled on fabrication the last 2-3 years, but the idea that they won't correct that ignores decades of precedent.
I'm an AMD fanboy from the K6 days, and I love what Lisa Su has been able to deliver for them, but if it wasn't for Intel's stumbles, they would still be single digits at best in most markets.
Look at their progress from Pentium 4 to Core 2 Duo (makes me feel real old to see that was 15 years ago). We probably won't see quite as dramatic an improvement over the next 3 years, but I'll be stunned if AMD still has the performance lead at that point.
Apple's a wildcard, but they aren't going to sell their chips, and they represent a fairly small part of the PC market. No other non-x86 chips have made even a tiny dent in the PC market, and even in the datacenter, it's still mostly x86.
The absolute worst I can imagine happening to Intel over the next decade is that they no longer define the CPU market. But that's a long, long, way from dying, and will probably be good for the market and good for Intel in the long run.
Curious, why were you a fanboy? Is it like rooting for team red and all the fun that goes into it? Honestly wondering since I have no feelings for any company even if their products are amazing.
I've been a fan for much the same time period yet never owned an AMD powered device, except maybe a game console? AMD has been useful to keep Intel on top of their game, but Intel has been on top for most of the last 15 years give or take.
It was really about them being an underdog, more than anything. Challenging the big dog and occasionally forcing them into more consumer-friendly behaviors.
That said, I still ended up owning mostly Intel CPUs (a lapped Celeron 300a running at ~514mhz in the K6 days).
It's not like 2000, where if you're behind a good run of fab research will rocket you forward with some sweet increases in clock frequency.
We're nearing the end of the road on node shrinks, Intel can best hope to be marginally ahead on process.
What Apple's M1 shows is that a fundamental redesign is needed to get gains. Intel's problems appear to be in design, software, and business execution.
But doing a new ISA or muscling into ARM or other radical things precisely require design/software/business execution or it will utterly fail.
M1 is going to open the floodgates for ARM on PCs. That's what will kill Intel.
AMD can probably pivot, I have faith in their designers.
The Pentium 4 to Core 2 Duo leap was based on architecture, not fab tech. It was a very significant shift in chip design philosophy. Intel being ahead in fab tech didn't hurt, but it's far from their only strength.
There's no reason to believe M1 will open any sort of gates for Arm on PC. It's not like other Arm CPUs will be running Mac OS, or M1s will be running Windows. The whole pre-Intel period for Mac OS didn't do anything to diminish x86 on the desktop.
Now, Chromebooks are something of an argument for ARM on the desktop, as they at least seem to provide identical behavior regardless of ISA, but they aren't putting up the necessary numbers quite yet. x86 still owns PC gaming, and has a pretty solid hold on console gaming. I'm not going to be worried at all for Intel until that shifts too.
Apple did poach a few of Intel's better architects and killed Intel's smartphone ambitions. But the damage occured two decades before that.
Intel is dying because they should have entered the foundry business in the early 90's. Process was always their forte, they were never good at the CPU architecture design anyway as iAPX/i860/Itanium amply demonstrated.
Instead they blew $100B getting into antivirus, network security, mobileye, infineon, and a dozen other failed businesses, $50B in illegal kickbacks keeping AMD out of the unprofitable low end laptop market, and another $50B of "contra revenue" subsidizing their inferior me-too products against mobile SOCs they should have been fabbing in the first place.
I'm curious about how Apple "killed Intel's smartphone ambitions"?
Otellini on the iPhone:
"We ended up not winning it or passing on it, depending on how you want to view it."
"At the end of the day, there was a chip that they were interested in that they wanted to pay a certain price for and not a nickel more and that price was below our forecasted cost. I couldn't see it. It wasn't one of these things you can make up on volume. And in hindsight, the forecasted cost was wrong and the volume was 100x what anyone thought."
While I agree it's easy in hindsight, you're not comparing apples to oranges here: comparing the comment author to a person running a business, with very high expertise in particular subject (chip making) and general subject (technology), having access to information not accessible to others (Apple plans and visions about the product, tech specs required, price asked, etc.) is not even close to being the same thing. I can see how a much better decision could be made very realistically given that expertise and information no one else had and yet the worst possible was made.
The rise of TSMC, or more generally the merchant fab model, is really the big semiconductor story of the past few decades.
Traditional wisdom used to be that if you wanted cutting edge performance, you really needed your own cutting edge in-house fab. The vertical integration advantages of tuning your ASIC design to your process were unassailable. If you couldn't afford your own foundry, tough luck, you suffered a severe penalty in performance and/or cost.
But the merchant foundries, first and foremost TSMC, have really turned that traditional wisdom around. Both in terms of matching, and then surpassing Intel on deploying the latest process nodes, but also in terms of making it possible for 3rd party ASIC developers to use that process as efficiently as an in-house design team would be able to.
I'm out of my league here, but I get the impression that Intel can't take their same design and pass it off to TSMC to print up chips at 5nm. I think it's more than that, but correct me if I'm wrong.
I'd be cautious about the use of "We Can't Save It" in the title of this article. This industry has a history of big players losing steam and then making big comebacks.
That and if you asked 20 years ago what CPUs our desktops will be running, not only would Intel not necessarily have been a popular answer (Many compiler books were written around that time, giving us a guess as to what the academic groupthink was, and they generally treat x86 as a weird ISA soon-to-be obsolete or dead) but Intel's main architectural competitor (ARM) might not've even been mentioned at all.
I would not have guessed SuperH, but I did not use Dreamcast or Jornada. 32-bit CPU with 16-bit instructions seems weird.
VLIW had a lot of hype. DSPs had already proven it, and Itanium, Transmeta, and various embedded processors were using it.
As a mostly Mac-user back then, I liked PowerPC, and POWER3 was leading the way to 64-bit, but I wasn’t expecting PCs to switch to PowerPC. The RISC systems had not all been executed in the face of the not-yet-released threat of Itanium. I was expecting the diversity to continue, for cross-architecture programming to be the rule and not the exception.
Including Intel themselves, who came back from the Pentium 4 Prescott design disaster, late dual-core support, and late x86_64 support. And then promptly ate everyone's lunch with the Core 2 Duo and ruled unchallenged for a decade.
The question is can Intel find a way to be more AMD than Global Foundries? Or can it just find its fabrication mojo again?
It almost seems like take a conspiracy or sabotage for Intel to fumble such a large lead in process. But all it takes it self-sabotage in forced retirements and financial engineering ahead of innovation. America really needs it's CEOs to re-learn the lessons of the global behemoths of manufacturing we used to have- that re-investing in your own future growth is just as or more important than growing your dividends.
On the grant scheme of things nothing truly ever NEED to exist, but that being said, I would rather have more competition than less of it, for the sake of future innovation and consumers' interest.
This is not limited to AMD. Gpu manufacturers are also experiencing supply shortages. The problem is that even if supply normalises, Intel has to work harder than usual to regain both consumer trust and innovation lead
A quick search showed that in 2017, AMD server market share was 1%, and in 2020 is expected to have reached nearly 10%[1] in 2019. This is still not the same as 15 years ago, but the market is also not the same, with cloud computing, and this increase is very expressive.
They are bringing IPC improvement with Epyc Milan and is pushing the same innovations towards the server market.
Enterprise market does not mean servers only. Look at enterprise laptops which make for several dozens of millions every year and AMD is pretty tiny still.
I didn't say it was, I just exemplified with server market share numbers why I thought that it was odd to say that AMD was almost completely absent in the enterprise market.
That'll sort itself out pretty quickly. TSMC is flush with cash from the premium pricing they've been able to charge for their 5nm fabs. Every day TSMC doesn't have enough capacity is a day they funnel easy money straight to their competitors at Samsung and Intel.
Investing into increasing their fab capacity is the easiest business decision they'll ever make. And if they need finance they could get investors lining up around the block throwing money their way.
I see Intel not being dominant, having to take a back seat, shrinking a bit.
But dying??
Nup, I'm not seeing this at all.
I mean AMD for years survived in a situation much worse then Intel currently is.
Intel's productions nodes might be behind TSMC's but they are still quite valuable, not all chips need 5nm processes. Heck we could say most chips don't need it.
Intel is still innovating, just because they currently lack behind doesn't mean that will stay that way.
Even when lacking behind wrt. the production node Intel still manged to produce Chips which are often not much worse then the competition.
Intel is not just about CPU's.
Etc.
So no Intel is not dying at all.
It's taking damage, and lost dominance but it still has a fairly good shot at survival and might even take back dominance (in a 2-3 years). Or it might not but still stay competitive.
And if we look at the world situation TSMC might not be a think anymore in a view years. It would make me supper angry but thinks are heading in that direction (China Taiwan conflict).
Indeed, a similar situation happened in the mid 2000's before Intel moved to the Core architecture. I wouldn't be surprised if something like this happened again.
I’m almost positive Intel have tech ready to deploy to be on top again. They will have been developing it... but not needed to use it until they came under competition pressure.
Jim Keller's apparent rage quit has me questioning that.
I was bullish on Intel until quite recently. I was able to convince myself that they were taking the L on 10nm to focus completely on a full, true EUV transition, in order to be at the top of the game just everyone else was hitting that wall in order to dominate again. That turned out to be overly optimistic.
Yes I agree. Jim Keller was the canary in the coal mine. When he left without finishing his assignment, after a decades long reputation for excellence at multiple companies, that was a clear signal to sell your Intel stock. Intel could be the new Northern Telecom (though I felt the same way about Microsoft ten years ago and ... it didn't turn out as expected)
I agree. From an investment perspective though, there is enormous potential in Mobileye. They're way off in Israel, so they don't get the attention of the valley SDC companies, but they are way ahead of many, many others.
If so I believe this would be the second time that Israel has saved Intel's bacon. The first time being a microprocessor replacement for the power hungry Pentium III in the early 2000's.
The Core Architecture in the mid 2000's was such an incredible shot back to the top. I remember seeing the benchmarks absolutely dominate AMD on every level, power, performance, TDP, Cost, etc. etc. This is almost immediately after Athlon 64 and the Athlon 64X2 started to gain market share, spanking Intel's Pentium 4 at the time. IIRC Intel ended up dropping the Prescott architecture, moving to the Pentium M architecture for development of the Core CPU's. Moving away from chasing max frequencies, and instead looking at IPC. Then Nehalem Dropped, (The first Core i CPU's) making the gap even larger. Q6600, Quad Core, Low power, decent cost. That was the CPU to have at the time. I miss the days reading about all of this.
This just puts into perspective how stagnate cpus have been, ~14 years and we are just starting to move to more than 4 core processors on prosumer systems.
Sad really. I was so passionate about hardware then. I lost interest because the innovation just dropped off a cliff. We were nearly exponential before the Core i series. Interestingly during that period Servers have had many-core CPU's. It just seems that Intel hasn't had a reason to push the envelope on the consumer side.
Before Ryzen even, FX-6300 and -8350 series (6-core and 8-core respectively) were used heavily in cheap pre-builts and beginner PC bulding during early 2010+
Mozilla's Firefox Hardware Report shows that most Firefox users (55%) still have only two cores! Four cores is slowly climbing at 34%. Firefox users surely have older hardware than Steam gamers, but it's another data point showing just how slowly hardware turns over.
> That's one of the few great things about capitalism - competition drives innovation.
Just so long as the aforementioned monopolies don't choke out competition. Sadly, we seem to end up with a lot of pseudo-monopolies in the tech industry.
I wonder how much more competition we could have with strict monopolies regulation on acquisitions and mergers?
If you let companies acquire close to 100% market share then monopolies are guaranteed to happen because one company is always more cost efficient than two but with the obvious problem that monopolies don't act in the interest of consumers. Limits on company size can definitively prevent monopolies.
At that time, Intel had a lead with the Tualatin microarchitecture on the PIII. This was developed into the Pentium M and Core. As far as I can tell, they don’t really have anything of that sort on the market right now that they could “evolve” into something new.
I retired my Q6600 a few weeks ago, because CyberPunk 2077 couldn't run on it (lacking AVX instructions). Worked fine up until then in my gaming rig :)
I still have my Core2 Duo in my HTPC... it's starting to feel doggy though.
> Indeed, a similar situation happened in the mid 2000's before Intel moved to the Core architecture. I wouldn't be surprised if something like this happened again.
Though that may have been a bit easier for them to solve, because the main thing they had to do was scrap NetBurst (Pentium 4) and return to a derivative their old architecture (which they were still using for the notebook market).
Intel has been bleeding engineers to other firms for a while now, and new talent has been skipping them altogether. These are not good developments for a company that depends on brain power to make their products.
But not being hyperbolic doesn't drive clicks. Sort of like all of the headlines about Musk no longer being the richest man because the stock prices fell. Whoopee friggin boohoo. He still has more money than >99% of all humans on the planet.
In sports it's fun to say that 2nd place is just the first loser, but that's all in jest and friendly banter. When making things like this overly dramatic, it serves nobody except those trying to short the stock.
Side note: we, here on HN, all likely have more money than 99% of all humans on this planet [0] (the link is about income; wealth is even more unequally distributed).
Earning more than $60k/year puts you in the 1% already. [1]
Some people on HN in fact have salaries under $60K. Not everyone here is an American or works in the private sector, either.
I would be fairly surprised if $60K is top 1%, even if you have the entire world population in the denominator. But when I checked your link, it's not using the entire population for the denominator, (which is correct, IMO) so I don't think it's even close.
In the US, there are about 110M fulltime wage earners, (out of 330M population) with median being ~$50K and top quartile ~$80K. My very rough estimate based on that might be 45M people >$60K. That is a lot more than 110/330 * 1% * 7.8B = 26M before adding in Europe (lower wages but twice the population) or anywhere else.
Thanks for specifying the numbers and the underlying assumptions!
Median in the US is not clear to me - I saw a figure of 60K and 35K within 2 minutes of searching. I think wage earning gets divided across family size, so those 45M people in your calculation, after dividing by family size, would have a much smaller income.
That sounds like the claim is "if the income per capita within your household is > $60K, then your household is in the top 1% of all households in income per capita".
I think the difference between this convoluted statement and normal measures of inequality could be approximately translated to "most people making > $60K have dependents". It seems like a bad way to talk about inequality, because what goal would it imply to reduce inequality? Prevent people from having dependents, or prevent them from not having dependents?
I think income is a proxy for something like "financial freedom" (which is presumably the eventual goal for why we want higher incomes).
Having an income of $60k while having a dependent is very different than when not having a dependent. I seems correct to say that without a dependent, you're in the top 1% of the world's wage earners (with respect to your financial freedom); while if you have a dependent, your income is no longer fully yours - and you are no longer in the top 1% of the world's wage earners.
Well, they won't even have that EUV capacity in 2-3 years. ASML is almost fully booked at this point.
The way the industry is moving to custom chips won't wait for Intel. And realistically, the trend is already there, next stage of cloud evolution would be application specific chips for cloud native services, like storage/DB/ML, etc. There is zero chance it would scale back.
And I am not sure why everyone here is taking 'dying' so literally. Losing influence is another form of dying. It will take a long time for a company to cease to exist after it becomes irrelevant.
Fast forward a few years. Look at the time it takes to design chips. Look at where the market and tech is going (M1 and AMD especially). Compare with RIM and Nokia. There is a "roadrunner" effect where a colossal company will continue for a few years on pure momentum. There are so many things speaking against Intel. And the facts you bring up as speaking for Intel seams more like short term momentum to me. I would guess at the following conversation in 5-10 years:
Semiconductor demand is so high right now that any company that makes processors is going to print money in the short term. It's a "right place, right time" situation. Intel's long-term problem is loss of market share, but if you're going to lose market share, you're more likely to survive if it happens when the whole market is growing.
There's not much that a company so heavily invested in x86 can do in the face of Apple Silicon, aside from executing well on 7nm and bringing it to market ahead of schedule.
I don't see much of a similarity between Intel CPUs and Blackberry phones, considering that many flagship notebooks (even Apple's) have Intel inside. I for one am heralding the new era of voracious semiconductor demand, and am rooting for Intel to get its game face on and turn things around before the opportunity passes.
The idea here must be that somehow Apple or AMD have figured out the magic sauce to making faster processors, while Intel of all companies is oblivious to it and won't be able to catch up.
In reality, there is nothing that Apple or AMD are doing that Intel could not also do, isn't already doing, or isn't in a hurry to also do.
Consider that at 14nm+++++, Intel still manages to outpace AMD with its 7nm CPUs and latest architecture. AMD competes mainly on price, which is not a great position to be in. Intel's profit margins are massively better.
It's possible that x86 will become less relevant in the future, but in that case Intel will still be one of the be best chip designers in the industry. They will once again produce ARM chips, perhaps borrow one or two insights from Apple's architecture. They will continue to outsource manufacturing to other fabs, perhaps even become fabless.
>In reality, there is nothing that Apple or AMD are doing that Intel could not also do, isn't already doing, or isn't in a hurry to also do.
On the contrary, Intel has refused to do any architectural innovation for nearly 20 years. They are capable, but overly conservative. They should have been in a hurry 10 years ago. It's well documented that they weren't and were resented for it. AMD came up with a winning strategy (multi-die packaging) and Intel still doesn't seem in a hurry to catch up. You could swap "AMD" in that sentence with "Apple" and maintain the meaning.
When superscalar or simultaneous multithreading came out you didn't see competitors mill about waiting for the customers to forget about the advantages.
The question is, are they in a hurry to catch up? What is the market that AMD is actually taking over with its multi-chip packages, and at what cost?
Just because AMD may be winning in Cinebench doesn't mean it's winning in the business side.
Multi-chip packages have downsides that become obvious in certain enterprise workloads, so the question becomes: Is it worth giving up on the monolithic approach, or adding multi-chip products, in order to
completely dominate the market, even when that is not more profitable?
Clearly, the answer for Intel must be "no", otherwise they would being doing it.
I think the reason Intel is not doing multi-die packages is because the R&D to make it work is large and they don't want to take on that risk.
What are the downsides, exactly? Thread-to-thread latency is the key one that comes to mind. It is far cheaper to make a multi-die package because yields are so much higher for any given node. The business advantages are great. The bleak picture for Intel that is being painted is warranted.
> Consider that at 14nm+++++, Intel still manages to outpace AMD with its 7nm CPUs and latest architecture. AMD competes mainly on price, which is not a great position to be in. Intel's profit margins are massively better.
Have you been living under a rock for this past year? This is not true. AMD is beating Intel in performance in every market segment right now.
Intel's "latest" architecture is basically the same Skylake from 2015 except they just pulled a Prescott with it and simply cranked up the power and heat until it reaches a desired x% extra performance over last gen.
Only in cherry-picked benchmarks that already favored Intel on their past-gen chips. If you assume that performance is improved everywhere evenly, and extrapolate from those prerelease benchmarks and existing benchmarks for their older chips, their new chip will end up being ~5% slower than Zen3 overall.
Also, never compare chips that are actually on the market to unreleased ones. Zen3 might well get a small frequency boost when Intel finally releases Rocket Lake.
Am I going to gamble my house on this being true? Of course not. We're having a nerdy discussion on IPC. It doesn't really matter either way.
Perhaps you're right and these chips won't "improve evenly" across all benchmarks, but then again nobody has "even" workloads. Rocket-Lake-S has some machine learning acceleration that's going to be useless for many people, valuable for others. It has a GPU onboard, which can come in handy. I'm personally interested in AVX-512. No, I don't need to know why you think AVX-512 sucks.
> My point is not that Intel is "crushing" AMD or anything, but that they manage to outpace (or at least keep pace with) AMD on a much larger node.
This is an entirely valid position, and I agree that it bodes well for Intel that they are able to do this. However, it is a very different statement from your original:
> Consider that at 14nm+++++, Intel still manages to outpace AMD with its 7nm CPUs and latest architecture. AMD competes mainly on price, which is not a great position to be in. Intel's profit margins are massively better.
AMD is in no way "competing mainly on price". In fact, if you look at prices on the market instead of MSRP, they are generally the more expensive option right now, and are still sold out on most models almost everywhere.
It was a mistake not to make clear that I am talking about CPUs that have not shipped yet.
Otherwise, I do not see any issue with what I said. I am looking at Intel as a company, and there I see massively better profit margins. Street prices may not reflect this during periods of shortages, but it is the dealers who are pocketing that difference, not AMD.
Zen3 ipc is higher than ice lake , and profit margin will be higher too , amd just increased prices and still sell out, 10nmsuperfin perfectly comparable to tsmc 7nm
Intel's chip designs are still fine, though. Tiger Lake's IPC gains are right in line with Zen 3's IPC gains over Zen 2. And Xe looks to be a great iGPU.
Which means Intel is more or less on equal design footing with AMD, they're just having trouble getting it built.
And Intel has multiple huge revenue streams that are not in question at all. All their networking stuff, for example (everyone, even on AMD, still goes for motherboards with Intel LAN instead of anyone else's, and same with wifi). And things like Optane. And all their tooling & software suites. Intel's CPU division is struggling to get wins, but Intel overall as a company isn't.
Throw in power consumption and Intel's stagnation starts to show. Look at their lasted chips having a 250W power limit when turboing -- almost double AMD! That's a pretty hard barrier to overcome without catching up on process technology.
> I mean AMD for years survived in a situation much worse then Intel currently is.
Yeah, a lot of people seem to ignore the fact that AMD was not killing it in the CPU market for a while a few years back. I wouldn't be surprised if Intel makes a comeback eventually. It's not a huge deal to me who's in the lead at any given time, I'm more interested in competitive CPUs.
I'm most interested in the future of x86 as a whole. It's definitely got a while left, but I wonder how much market share will start to be taken by ARM (and hopefully RISCV).
Intel is ABSOLUTELY just about CPUs. I can’t think of a single thing that they produce that I would ever pay them money for other than CPUs, especially if they aren’t relevant in the CPU world anymore. Intel has tried to get into so many other markets over the years, but the company’s culture and the nature of their high margin, high R&D business made it impossible to compete in those other markets.
Intel's productions nodes might be behind TSMC's but they are still quite valuable, not all chips need 5nm processes. Heck we could say most chips don't need it.
That’s a very different market with very different margins. If they shrank so much that they became like Maxim or something, then that’s really not much different than going out of business altogether.
Intel is certainly not dying. They are taking hits. But unlike AMD, Intel has a LOT of enemies over the years. Most large OEMs have been bullied and pushed around by Intel in the past. So I expect there will not be much good will to help a struggling Intel.
We need Intel as a competitor to TSMC and AMD. Also we need Intel from a national security point of view. Intel is definitely facing tough competition but that's not new for them. Intel will definitely have to reimagine the SoC but this is far from over.
At that time, The ratio of excellent to useless people I experienced there was 1:40. That is way out of whack. I am certain it only got worse because all the 1/40’s I knew left.
They are going to have to go and get people who have modern skillsets and mindsets and those people don’t want to live in Hillsboro. And it’s going to be expensive.
And those people don’t tolerate dead weight.
My take is that Bob Swan was only ever a placeholder. The board needed to be put in the worst possible negotiating position: Literally on their knees begging because they are getting their asses kicked in every single competitor category.
A smart guy like Pat wouldn’t take the CEO job until they (a) are crawling on all fours and (b) give him the latitude to clean house as vigorously as he wants and (c) a preposterous paycheck.
No one intelligent would want that job without all three. That’s why Bob got to babysit that role for two years.
Agreed on serious house cleaning. There were rumors the single, absolutely botched CPU in the Cannon Lake family was released because certain Intel managers had bonuses tied to a 10nm launch. All those people need to be fired, that's for sure.
> The ratio of excellent to useless people I experienced there was 1:40
This has to be hyperbole but the rest of your comment makes me think you're being serious.
I have only worked at small companies <50 people, so I don't have first hand experience with how waste can hide in large companies but 1:40 excellent to useless people? I can't believe it'd even be half that.
My guess is you thought those people were useless because you didn't understand the role they played in the company.
However, I'll admin again that I don't have first hand experience. I'd genuinely love to hear from others who have experience with large companies.
Oh it's reality. My experience at Sony was about 1:25, but other big dumb companies I have worked for have met and exceeded the 1:40 rule. It is amazing how process generates dead weight and worthless humans and nobody seems to care.
At one point I posited that Sony USA were merely a political pawn for Sony Japan. Hire a few tens of thousands of Americans, gain political capital -- and care not what they actually do all day. In our case, it was death by scrum and sticky notes.
I worked for a tiny tiny unit of Sony USA that was itself once a startup that Sony had acquired. We were 25 or so engineers with our own little profitable(ish) product in our own office in Madison, WI. I once went to HQ in San Diego and couldn't believe how many people there were doing... well, I never could quite figure out what.
Large companies can hide inefficiencies and incompetence of staggering proportion. Often there's little incentive to really improve things, but tons of bureaucracy that helps maintain the status quo or let it slide ever worse. People can only judge how good something is against their experience, so if you've only ever worked at that bigco and only known incompetence then you might not even realize anything is wrong. Meanwhile the proverbial frog slowly boils...
1:20 is pretty realistic. Seen with my own eyes and ears. I wasn’t the 1, I was part of the 20. Didn’t do shit all day mainly because incentives were not aligned to motivate me. I get the same salary if I put in the extra effort. So why. Knew one guy who had a vision and the stamina to push through with PowerPoint precision. He was the 1.
Well if you think about it, it's not that hard to imagine how it happens.
First, you have Price's Law [0] which states that half the work is done by the square root of the number of people. This in itself already implies a lot of useless people, especially at a company the size of Intel.
You might also have whole orgs/departments where pretty much everyone is phoning it in, so that would drive it up as well.
The way I see it is the more layers there are and the more removed people at the top are from the work, the greater chance the of useless people being able to go under the radar.
Interesting. I am pretty sure that it's not a case of individual failure. It has more to do with organizational structure.
Most of the low hanging fruits can be picked by one individual. Instead of trying to pick more apples from the same tree people should make sure that there are not too many people assigned to the same tree.
The article confirms my idea:
>Look at your current profession. Are you in a position to create substantial value? If the answer is no, move on to a different place where you CAN.
I question if those people are actually bad workers, but I could easily imagine people being assigned to work on useless projects and just going along with it for a steady paycheck instead of leaving or trying to push the boundaries.
I've worked for 100-person, 1000-person, and 100000-person companies, and the biggest companies have so many resources that they barely know what to do with them all. Most startups would kill for a fraction of a percent of the "let's screw around" R&D money that the big corps have.
Calling them useless may be a bit of a stretch. If you said "mediocre", I'd believe it. Also, in my experience there, the ratio is not uniform - you could go to a department with lots of top notch folks, and then to another department with everyone being mediocre.
Some data points:
Asked a person in a SW interview to write a function to calculate the factorial. The candidate was repeatedly told he could use whatever language he wants. He insisted on using a language he had little experience in (C++), and not the one he was experienced in (Python). He was given latitude to use any method he wanted: Recursive, iterative, etc.
He didn't even come close to solving it.
He was still hired.
He is not an outlier when it comes to SW folks at Intel. Yes, Intel definitely has some really good SW engineers, but the 1:40 ratio easily applies in that sphere.
Up till 2014, my department insisted on using cvs for version control. They said they saw no benefit to git (or even SVN).
In another team I was in, we were stuck with SVN. The senior manager wouldn't allow us to use git because he was sure it would be over the heads of many of the employees (sadly, he may have been right). Then in 2017, when IT announced that SVN was being EOL, to avoid git they switched to MS TFS (even though TFS themselves recommend git!) I still hear from folks there about the resistance to switch to git. And the following comment I've heard from multiple folks:
"I don't want to use git because it comes from Microsoft!" (conflating github with git, and upon further discussion realizing they have no idea MS bought Github - they think Git and Github both originated from MS).
BTW, I'm not a git fan boy - I much prefer mercurial.
If you're good at SW and somewhat up to speed with current technology, Intel is a very frustrating place to work.
But then again, their compensation for SW is simply not competitive:
I work at Intel. Maybe my experiences are not representative, but everyone I've worked with is competent at what they do, and most people are helpful and friendly. But the trouble is that isn't enough. The really effective programmers aren't just good at writing code, they're also good at designing elegant interfaces, and at understanding customer problems, and strategic thinking, and so on. Competent programmers aren't useless if they don't have those skills, but you need some people that do if you want to make great products rather than just check off boxes in feature lists.
Intel doesn't have as many of those great programmers as I would like, but I think their bigger problems are organization rather than individual. There just isn't enough high-level coordination and sharing of information. Every group just kind of does their own thing, and if you want to know how something works you have to know who to ask. Too much tribal knowledge (which often has a short expiration date) and too little writing stuff down in one place where it's easy to find.
It's funny you mention git, because I joined Intel from a startup that used SVN and that was the one bright spot about Intel's technical culture that they used git pretty extensively. I don't think I've ever used a non-git source repo at Intel. I assume that there was some major internal struggle to get to that point, but it was before my time.
There are absolutely staggering amounts of waste in large, especially market dominating, companies. Mainly because they can afford it... for a while. The difference with most smaller, and even mid-sized, companies is that if they made even a fraction of the number and size mistakes (and I'm only talking in relative, rather than absolute, terms) that large companies do they would be bankrupt in a year or two. Large companies typically have momentum and either very large (i.e. other large companies and governments) or very large numbers (i.e. many 10's or 100's of millions of consumers) of customers who are slow to change. (Intel has both) It will often be years before catastrophic mistakes will even be acknowledged and even longer before the company is irreversibly impacted by them. As a result, you can pack in people for years who really have no business being there without immediate negative impact.
While people would likely disagree on the exact ratio in a given company, it's far worse than you would ever imagine. The inevitable eventually happens: they cease being able to make (or make very well) the very product(s) they're known for. Occasionally companies will get shocked back to life as they see it all slipping away. More commonly they just wither and die as they are unable or unwilling to change the culture that got them to that point.
Do I believe 1:40? If anything, I think that might be a conservative number at this point. Intel has become tragically/comically incompetent.
It's odd that when people from Intel talk about Intel on the Internet or with me in person it's so frequently about high level strategy and C level/Board of Directors politics. The way they're spoken of exhibits a lot of careful examination.
I can't think of another company like that, maybe Microsoft years ago or GE. Is this something I'm imagining or is that a frequent topic of conversation at all levels of Intel?
Intel has at least 20 more years and probably dozens of real chances to reclaim past market position and maybe even more so.
Intel is a large company with a massive market cap. The bigger they are, the longer they fall. They just have so much runway and market gravity.
For comparison, Apple shot itself in the foot repeatedly for at least 10 years before Steve Jobs rejoined, and it took 10 more years after that before the iPhone came out, which no layman could have predicted.
Intel has a very impressive balance sheet for a failing company, it has almost no debt and is generating double-digit billions in free cash flow from almost state of the art fabs. They are still number three on process technology, and number one on volume.
The fact that Intel's management have chosen to spend two decades flushing that amazing free cashflow down the M&A toilet instead of fixing their workplace culture and getting their design house in order is what Pat Gelsinger needs to fix.
Just an extended +1 here. I think you're exactly on point.
Intel is definitely in a hole (that they watched being dug below them and did nothing...), but they can get out. They have plenty of time to do so. The only real problems to overcome are their own internal culture and the sheer difficulty of single-digit-nanometer manufacturing. And the second one is easier.
Don't count them out yet. (But do laugh at them. Because they definitely deserve it, and it just might motivate them.)
And they're still the dominant CPU vendor in most end-user corporate systems. I'm happy to see some Ryzen laptops finally coming out and breaking that dominance, but let's not kid ourselves that Intel is still in a great position, and that won't change overnight.
Yeah, exactly; if Intel is a "failing business" then I don't know what a successful business looks like. It's still one of the most profitable companies on the planet.
Look at IBM; while Big Blue was once seemingly omnipotent and they've since fallen from that position, it's still a double-digit billion company with over 300k employees. It's not as big (relatively speaking) as it once was, but it sure didn't die either.
Other companies have died, such as Digital Equipment, but that was the result of 1) a massive paradigm shift in computing and computing equipment (introduction of "personal computing"), and 2) some pretty bad business decisions (not just failing to get a hold of the PC market). Thus far, I'm not really seeing 1) happen, and 2) alone probably won't be enough to completely kill intel, just cripple it temporarily.
M&A often pays off in strange and discontinuous ways that extend beyond the growth of an acquired division. My intuition is that the payoffs tend to catalyze when the company is refactored, people get shuffled around, IP becomes accessible across divisions, research from one group gets synthesized into another, burgeoning market landscapes become less competitive, etc.
Personally I think strategic M&A is a far more intelligent use of cash and credit than share buybacks and dividends.
Intel has arguably made at least a few solid acquisitions. AMD is buying Xilinx a few years after Intel bought Altera, which tells us that the Altera acquisition couldn't have been totally misplaced -- AMD has the benefit of hindsight with which to evaluate its own acquisition. Mobileye seems to be well positioned as conventional automakers are beginning to offer mainstream EVs.
Perhaps the problem is that there are certain higher-order functions (M&A, stock buybacks) that should generally be conducted only when the lower-order functions (core business) are firing on all cylinders. Companies have finite resources, and executives have limited time and energy, that shouldn't be starved away from the core business unless absolutely necessary.
I recently read "Innovator'd dilemma', and Intel came to my mind immediately. They are big, so they don't bother with low-margin markets. That allows small companies to start stealing market on the lowest margin products, while Intel keep showing awesome balance sheets as they flee from those markets.
Mobile? No, thanks, those are peanuts. Cheap/home PCs? Nah, either. PC builders very sensitive to prices? The don't want them. And slowly they are being sweetly cornered in the top market of the very expensive servers with very juicy margins, but feeling how the small dogs keep bitting up. Suddenly ARM wants to build for cheap servers, and AMD has a chip that also fights for that top market.
Does AMD really dominate the gaming market? I was still under the impression that AMD is what you buy when you're on a budget and Intel is what you get if you care about gaming performance. I just did a quick search and it looks like most people are still saying single core performance is better on Intel chips?
In addition, NVIDIA is the GPU to get for gaming, not AMD. NVIDIA and AMD trade blows in terms of price for performance throughout the product range, but there are no scenarios where the fastest AMD is decidedly faster than the fastest NVIDIA, and there are many scenarios where the NVIDIA is faster than the AMD. The NVIDIA software is also possibly less aggravating than the AMD software (for Windows games, not necessarily Linux games). If you want to video-stream your game, then NVIDIA beats AMD silly.
But for casuals, the PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One series, and Xbox Series X all use AMD APUs.
AMD has been dominating the gaming market since the Ryzen 3000 series. The Ryzen 3600X was the gaming chip to beat last year.
Also if you were not playing at 4K or competitive e-sports, you probably wanted an 8-core Ryzen chip for multi-threaded tasks even if it was marginally worse at CS:GO with >200 fps.
The fact that these big chip companies keep jockeying for position tells a big-picture-luddite like me that the market must, broadly speaking, be pretty healthy.
Let's all just come to a common agreement: there's no planet on which the US military allows Intel to die. Period. End of story.
Having a US based company with fabrication facilities on US soil is vital to national security and will be for the entirety of my lifetime and likely my grandchildren's lifetime (if I ever have any). For all the bluster of the investors wanting to chop Intel up: they will find a swift and full rejection from the government unless their plan includes selling the assets to another US firm.
TSMC building a fab in the US won't be "good enough" - the US military will not allow the security of our country to be in the hands of a foreign corporation.
Now whether Intel remains a dominant player? Who knows, but they aren't going anywhere. I wouldn't be even a little bit surprised if for instance the 3-letter agencies cloud contracts suddenly included a clause that all of their infrastructure must run on Intel CPUs.
I'm not saying it's right, I'm not saying it's fair, but I don't see any other outcome.
This kind of protectionism will only worsen Intels efficiency and will drain taxpayers pockets. Why can’t people learn from all the instances where a government tried to micromanage and horribly failed in the mid/long run?
Who said anything about micromanaging? I simply said the government both won't let Intel fail, and won't let their assets be sold off to foreign companies.
It's easy to say "that's dumb" - but what's your alternative? If it includes "just buy CPUs from insert foreign entity" - that's a nonstarter for myriad reasons.
> Who said anything about micromanaging? I simply said the government both won't let Intel fail, and won't let their assets be sold off to foreign companies.
Internal information on stuff we don't know about, especially apropos of ring -1 (or even lower if that's even possible), will never leave US soil.
I don't see micromanagement, I see them getting giant R&D grants and contracts to fulfil US army strategic objectives. A fab owned by US nationals, on US soil, with processes that aren't obsolete.
I think that's an important objective. I'm not sure what other way there is to fulfil it, other than spend even more taxpayer money funding greenfield US chip industry
If you maintain that infrastructure for the sake of national security you are willing to pay a premium. The problem isn't government intervention because that can be done properly.
The bigger problem is that Intel is a company that both designs CPUs and manufactures them. The government isn't actually interested in Intel's CPUs specifically, only the domestic manufacturing capability. Intel has to be split up before the government can get what it wants.
>Why can’t people learn from all the instances where a government tried to micromanage and horribly failed in the mid/long run?
Counter example: Central banks are making lots of money available but the governments are not using it to employ people (either directly or indirectly) so it just fuels a long term asset bubble without achieving the desired economic growth.
I agree with your assessment of Intel's role in US national security, though Texas Instruments also owns and operates chip fabs in the US [1]. They most likely aren't as sophisticated as Intel or able to create similar chips, but Intel most likely isn't the only source of chips in the US.
If they're propping Intel up as their last bastion of chip superiority they've already lost. The US knows they need to defend Taiwan with the full weight of their military resources. This means war in the event of an invasion or takeover.
If the US loses influence over Taiwan and subsequently TSMC, they've lost. In this phase of global geopolitics, whoever controls the chips has the influence. You can't do anything without compute resources.
I'm not sure that I've personally bought in to the AI revolution, but it sounds like it's generally agreed to be the future.
At the same time, there is so much room for basic improvement in the defense space. I have a hard time believing 5nm vs 10nm is a serious problem when half the vetronics system is analog.
But yes, in a big picture strategic sense, AI capabilities seems like the area most likely to pose a serious risk by not leading the world in chip technology.
I'd agree with you, but this has already happened when IBM sold its Fab [1] to Global-Foundries which is owned by Mubadala Investment Company from the U.A.E
IBM's Fab was on the DoD trusted foundry list [2] Slide 13, Intel's is not.
There's an article that already rang this alarm around national-security when IBM divested itself of its Fab. [3]
There are already fabrication facilities in the US and I highly doubt that Intel's fabs would ever be decommissioned. They are far too valuable even if intel doesn't own them anymore.
Now, the US may lag behind top of the line fabrication tech (It already does). But it will never lose it's ability to fabricate chips.
For military applications, unless they start getting really into artificial intelligence (maybe they already are?) they don't need super advanced chips for most of their equipment. Simple micro-controllers are enough for most military applications.
This is very US-centric view. Most countries in the world don't have chip fabrication facilities in their country and they do just fine. Sure, US is currently a superpower whose influence is felt across the world so having chip manufacturing locally is very important, but in a scenario where US would lose some influence that would no longer be an issue, same as it is not an issue for Canada, Germany or Russia.
> Most countries in the world don't have chip fabrication facilities in their country and they do just fine.
I don't think that Huawei is doing is doing just fine.
You have to think about scenarios where countries are opposed to the US for one reason or another.
The Patriot Act being renewed for 6 months and thus putting Cuba in the embargoed countries even more than they already were should be a good second example.
Canada and Germany aren't bothered about it because they have allies that ARE worried about it.
Taiwan isn't under Chinese control, but if there was an escalating situation, you would assume that it would fall under Chinese control VERY quickly.
Up here in Canada, there is no need for fabs as long as the US has them. Canada has no real choice but friendly relations with the US (geography forces this), the upside is that many of the strategic resources belonging to the US are available to Canada.
> As such, China began an initiative to build its own processors back in the early 80's that eventually evolved into the "Made in China 2025" campaign that has the goal of producing 70% of the chips used in China by 2025.
TSMC doesn't design chips, which is the stated goal. China wants China-designed chips, not just "China" manufactured chips.
(ignoring that TSMC is Taiwanese and not currently under PRC rule but is instead de-facto independent and mostly internationally recognized as being independent...)
The military doesn't need cutting edge foundries. They are a liability when you need robust ICs that can operate in extreme temperatures and radiation exposure.
Honest question: don't we (the world, I am a brit) rely on China for rare earth metals for a lot of electronics (presumably including US Military applications)?
I know rare-earth metals aren't that rare and we could ultimately supply them locally but the lack of any open mines or refining setups is just as big a strategic hole as losing domestic Fab isn't it?
267 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 84.1 ms ] threadWell, no one other than Taiwan I guess.
But given how messed up & fragmented the EU military is if the US stops military support for Taiwan china will likely directly declare War and Attack. (To be precise there is no EU military, just that of all members which makes it fragmented and in many cases is their military isn't in the best condition. Also China wouldn't declare War as it doesn't recognizance Taiwan, i.e. they would instead "use military force to attack rebels and terrorists" or something like that).
That's a temporary advantage for Taiwan, and pretty much their only one.
A silicon atom is only around 0.1nm wide, so the end of scaling is coming up like a brick wall. We've got maybe a half dozen nodes left.
After that, industrial espionage, pumping up SMIC or some other new Chinese domestic equivalent at the time, and literally just leaking info publicly so the EU, US, and ROK are viable replacements once chips become truly a commodity will cut the dependence on Taiwan. At that point it's not worth facing China's nukes to tell them that they can't have Crimea^H^H^H^H^H^H Taiwan.
That's still something like a hundred thousand to a million times smaller that what we can actually fabricate, right?
That being said the future never ceases to surprise.
This is the American dream.
But no, China is not that stupid. Sure, they want Taiwan back, but they will not declare war and create global instability right in their backyard. Only stupid people would do this, and the Chinese are not stupid. They are in a marathon. They see the goal in 30, 50, 100 years. They will not give this gift to the American government.
Never underestimate emotional motivations.
P.S., not saying that China will attack Taiwan, just not ruling it out.
Removes the option of a painless transfer of power so that the US is still geopolitically interested in a independent Taiwan.
A better idea is to give a US passport to every TSMC employee NOW (exempt them from having to hold a green card and live in USA for 5 years first). And change the law so that US citizens residing overseas with no US-sourced income are exempted from filing and paying taxes.
Other countries that wish to have leading edge commercial fabs, e.g. Germany or Netherlands, should compete with USA and try to get their passports to TSMC employees first. Tell them your country does not tax citizens on overseas income, and like Taiwan, has universal healthcare, high-speed rail, and gun control. Netherlands can also advertise that TSMC employees likely already have some Dutch friends at ASML.
https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/China-tech/China-hires-over...
I'm sure not all engineers at TSMC are willing to relocate from Taiwan to China but pretty much everything is for sale if the price is high enough.
Setting up a new factory to replace TSMC is not trivial of course, as it's operationally hard, but none of the core tech would be "in China's hands".
Obviously process nodes are much harder than pretty much anything in the cloud, but this is a serious test of (pure and simple) whether their leadership has the (gender-neutral) balls to not back down.
I'm not entirely sure that is true. TSMC plays fast and loose with their definition of node. Any fab folks want to speak up?
What I mean by that:
https://www.pcgamesn.com/amd/tsmc-7nm-5nm-and-3nm-are-just-n...
"And also goes some way to explaining why, despite TSMC offering a nominally 7nm process, the general consensus has been that Intel’s 10nm design is pretty much analogous. But what’s 3nm between fabs? At that level, probably quite a lot. But if the 7nm node is more of a branding exercise than genuinely denoting the physical properties of that production process then you can understand why there’s supposedly not a lot in it."
Look it up yourself. Intel being on 14nm vs (say) 5nm is actually quite flattering to Intel.
EDIT: All of this stuff is usually stated at ISSCC every time a new process is announced, so it isn't NDA. I haven't followed this in years which is why I was asking for a process person to step in.
3nm, sure, good luck.
Tsmc 5nm is 27/54/36 with a 6T and 7.T option. More open design rules. HD SRAM cell is about 0.025um2.
This is almost exactly what you expect for 1 node of litho scaling.
The more difficult part is that the designs and related process optimizations for intel are different.
More or less TSMC 7nm := Intel 10nm, and TSMC 5nm := Intel 7nm. It's more complex than that, one has denser logic while the other has denser SRAM and what have you, but it's a good baseline.
Since Intel is struggling with 10nm but is shipping, that puts TSMC about a node and a half ahead.
If you want to dig in deeper, wikichip has most of the public specifics on the process nodes (which are heavily shrouded in secrecy). For instance: https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/7_nm_lithography_process
No they aren't. The nanometer names are only kinda comparable within a single company, but they are not comparable beyond that.
It's like saying that Chrome is 6x further ahead than Safari because Chrome is on 87 and Safari is only on 14. Same thing with fabs here, it's just a version number that counts down and has been for a long while.
In this case specifically, Intel's 10nm is more or less the same density as TSMC's 7nm. TSMC's 5nm is then a significant 1.8x the density of their 7nm process, so right now Intel's fabs are ~identical to what AMD is using (7nm), but Apple's use of TSMC's 5nm then puts them a generation ahead. TSMC is leading, but by a single generation not by 3-5x or whatever. Or to put it in year terms TSMC is about 2 years ahead of Intel right now, Intel just now getting "volume" 10nm up & running while TSMC was at a comparable node in volume 2 years ago.
As far as "performance" goes, though, so far TSMC, even their 5nm process, cannot quite match Intel. Remember that as far as the fab goes, performance is just what clock speeds can be hit, and Intel's clocks are the highest - they have the fastest transistors. 14nm+++++ is a meme/joke, but the actual transistor speed of it is still downright impressive. How fast a CPU actually runs depends on the architecture, though, which is influenced by density but in terms of pure single-core performance that's really almost entirely just architecture.
TSMC are shipping chips at something like 170MTr/mm^2, the bulk of Intel's production (even their new chips) are still closer to 40-50MTr/mm^2
And TSMC's 170MTr/mm^2 is still restricted to a single vendor and hasn't ramped up beyond that yet. You can't simultaneously claim Intel is restricted to what their bulk volume lineup is and then use TSMC's non-volume lineup. The bulk of TSMC is still 7nm which is 100MTr/mm^2.
My understanding is that Intel's fast transistors come at a cost of not being particularly dense for the process node they are implemented on. So it's a question of design philosophy as well. Intel has fast, but somewhat sparse transistors, they use a lot of hand layout etc. to really optimize their designs so they can clock high.
Other players use a different philosophy. Slower, but denser transistors and more automated layout may not clock as high, but the improved density gives you more cores (e.g. AMD vs Intel) and/or allows a more "brainiac" core design (wider, deeper ROB, better branch prediction, more cache, etc. like Apple M1), and also gets you a better turnaround time.
Intel will shift to a TSMC model. They have the best fabs on the planet, and the best fab engineers. I believe it is something like a 3 millions dollars lost per minute if they are idle. They have already started doing that a few years ago, I suspect this will be their final form.
IMHO: The only thing holding them back from the transition are the hundreds of small boondoggle-groups staffed by old-timers too scared to retire, and too scared to do something daring, yet still somehow hang on to their hidey-holes. They lost a ton of key architects to Apple a few years ago, which I also suspect was the reason why the M1 is so badass.
...and if you really want to get sentimental, here's an AMD poster we had in our cubes back in ~1991:
https://linustechtips.com/uploads/monthly_2016_03/Szg2Ppo.jp...
The Sanders-as-Indiana was both funny and infuriating....
(The Farrah Fawcett looking woman was Sander's bombshell wife, compared to Grove at the time, who drove a beat up old car.)
I think fabbing for outsiders would probably be a good idea, but splitting the fabs out from the designers seems like a bad idea.
Even if they axed all process R&D and returned the cash to shareholders, due to the eye watering costs of designing at 10nm and lower I expect there will be a lot of business to keep their fabs turning over for the next decade.
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/foundry/overview.htm...
In late 2018, it was rumored they were exiting the business because of low uptake and because of constrained supply of their leading edge process, but it doesn't look like that happened.
The biggest thing Intel didn't do with Itanium was release affordable AT/ATX form factor boards. They priced it way, way too high, chasing early margins in "enterprise" without realizing that market share is everything in CPUs. This is the same mistake that Sun, DEC, and HP made with their server/workstation CPUs in the previous era. With a new architecture you've got to push hard for market share, wide support, and scale.
If I'd been in charge I would have priced the first iterations of Itanium only a little above fab cost and invested a lot more in compiler support and software.
Edit: also whatever happened to the Mill? The idea sounded tenable but I have to admit that I am not a CPU engineer so my armchair take is dubious.
Anyway the ship has sailed. Later research in out of order execution has yielded at least similar performance gains and post-X86 the momentum is behind ARM and RISC-V.
One good side of x86 style instruction sets is that there is a lot you can do in the cpu to optimize existing programs more. While some really advanced compiler optimizations may make some use of the internal details of the implementation to choose what sequence to output, these details are not part of the ISA, and thus you can change them without breaking backwards compatibility. Changing them could slow down certain code optimized with those details in mind, but the code will still function. And I'm not even talking just about things like out of order execution. Some ISA's leak enough details that just moving from multi-cycle in-order execution to pipelined execution was awkward.
This ability of the implementation to abstract away from the ISA is very handy. And some RISC processors that exposed implementation details like branch-delay slots ended up learning this lesson the hard way. Now the Itanium ISA does largely avoid leaking the implementation details like number of scalar execution units or similar, but it's design does make certain kinds of potential chip-side optimizations more complicated.
In the Itanium ISA the compiler can specify groups of instructions that can run in parallel, specify speculative and advanced loads, and set up loop pipelining. But this is still more limited than what x86 cores can do behind the scenes. For an Itanium style design, adding new types of optimizations generally requires new instructions and teaching the compilers how to use them, since many potential optimizations could only be added to the chip if you add back the very circuitry that you were trying to remove by placing the burden on the compiler.
Even some of the types of optimizations Itanium compilers can do that mimic optimizations x86 processors do behind the scenes can result in needing to write additional code, reducing the effectiveness of the instruction cache. This is not surprising. The benefits of static scheduling are that you pre-compute things that are possible to pre-compute like which instructions can run in parallel, and where you can speculate etc. And thus you don't need to compute that stuff on-die, and don't need to compute it each and every time you run a code fragment. But obviously that information still needs to make it to the CPU, so you are trading that runtime computation for additional instruction storage cost. (I won't deny that the result could still end up more I-cache efficient than x86 is, because x86 is not by any means the most efficient instruction encoding, especially since some rarely used anymore opcodes hog some prime encoding real-estate.)
Basically I'm not sold on static scheduling for high performance but general purpose CPUs, and am especially not sold on the sort of peudo-static scheduling used by Itanium where you are scheduling for instructions with unknown latency, that can differ from model to model. The complete static scheduling where you must target the exact CPU you will run on, and thus know all the timings (like the Mill promised) feels better to me. (But I'm not entirely sure about install type specialization like they mention.)
But I'm also no expert on CPU design, a hobbyist at best.
I think that's overestimating, although you are right it is damn expensive.
Order of magnitude I would say it's more like: Fab has lifetime of 2-3(?) years, and costs $10B to build and amortize. So every minute of idled factory capital = $6,000 in pure cost of the facility.
(although, if you think of it in potential lost revenue terms, then you may be more correct.)
(Actually we can also do that arithmetic, according to https://www.forbes.com/sites/willyshih/2020/05/15/tsmcs-anno...
240,000 wafers per year * 500 chips per wafer * $100? = $12B per year revenue. Also is something like $22k per minute)
Many Intel fabs are from the early 2000s. Some are from the 90s. What do you mean 2-3 years?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_manufacturing_...
>> Many Intel fabs are from the early 2000s. Some are from the 90s. What do you mean 2-3 years?
> I think they're referring to each line as a new fab, rather than the complex of buildings they're in, which is pretty fair.
Even so, wouldn't the 2-3 year number only apply to CPUs? Couldn't they keep the lines running making things that don't require top of the line processes, like USB controllers, etc.
Of course the lines stay open after that for cases you've laid out, but there's a lot of financial reasons why that needs to be basically gravy train money at that point with the lines being fully amortized and having paid for themselves many times over.
I am no expert but I didn't think the site would be just accumulating its n-1, n-2 generation lines to produce lower grade stuff in the same fab walls. They take up space that they want to continue producing top of line latest output. I thought.
Adding on to that, in a lot of ways the fab is the building, and at a bare minimum you'd be resetting a lot of the yield issues you fixed by moving it to a new space. So then you'd be left with an old node and yield issues, and what's the point of that?
There's also a ton of trade secret style IP still in the old nodes that could help a competitor, so why let it leave your property? Intel for instance is so into preventing trade market theft on the specifics of their nodes that they (at least used to) manually drill out every mobile device camera allowed in their fabs, in addition to the normal "no outside electronics past this point" security stations.
That's one of the biggest reasons to choose them. If Intel's "x86" stops being x86, they'll lose one of their biggest competitive advantages.
See the first comment here, for example: http://www.os2museum.com/wp/vme-broken-on-amd-ryzen/
Microsoft even had a version of NT3.5 for The Itanic. It seemed we were just about to achieve critical mass in the server world to switch to a new architecture with huge address space, ECC up the wazoo and massive integer performance.
Then the PC revolution took off with Win95, and the second war with AMD happened (and NexGen sorta). This couldn't be solved with legal battles. This put all hands on deck because there was SO much money to be made with x86 compatibility. The presence of x86 "up and down" AMD & Intel's roadmap took over the server market as well: it was x86 all over the place.
And that, chil'ren, is why x86 was reborn in the 90's just as it was close to being wiped out.
Now Apple has proven you can you seamless sneak in a brand-new architecture, get hyooj gainz, and we are none the wiser. This is fantastic news. I think we are truly on the cusp of x86 losing its dominance in the consumer space after almost 35 years of dominance.
Lmao, never heard that one before
The fact that they're almost equivalent to those two at 5nm when Intel is at 14nm+++++++++ shows how killer the RTL and tape out folk are at Intel.
The real fight has always been at the fab layer.
Only when it comes to single core. And even then Intel has to spend 2x silicon - Zen 3 CCD at 7nm with a die size of 80.7 mm² while Intel's 10th gen 8C die is 170mm2. Of course it isn't silicon itself which is costly, it is the processing of each wafer what is the cost here, and getting 2x less cores per wafer is bound to affect the margin/profit/etc.
And of course Intel has no chances of putting out 16C chip into normal desktop like AMD does with 3950x and 5950x (those chips successfully go into the territory of 2x Xeon workstations costing arm and leg)
Do keep in mind that a fair amount of a desktop chip is pad space, IO hasn't shrunk since 22nm nodes, DUV steppers are dirt cheap, Intel's foundries are fully amortized, and yields at 14nm are going to be approaching 100%.
Intel has really stumbled on fabrication the last 2-3 years, but the idea that they won't correct that ignores decades of precedent.
I'm an AMD fanboy from the K6 days, and I love what Lisa Su has been able to deliver for them, but if it wasn't for Intel's stumbles, they would still be single digits at best in most markets.
Look at their progress from Pentium 4 to Core 2 Duo (makes me feel real old to see that was 15 years ago). We probably won't see quite as dramatic an improvement over the next 3 years, but I'll be stunned if AMD still has the performance lead at that point.
Apple's a wildcard, but they aren't going to sell their chips, and they represent a fairly small part of the PC market. No other non-x86 chips have made even a tiny dent in the PC market, and even in the datacenter, it's still mostly x86.
The absolute worst I can imagine happening to Intel over the next decade is that they no longer define the CPU market. But that's a long, long, way from dying, and will probably be good for the market and good for Intel in the long run.
You guys remember the blue man group? Good days.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tH0PYQl65LU
We're nearing the end of the road on node shrinks, Intel can best hope to be marginally ahead on process.
What Apple's M1 shows is that a fundamental redesign is needed to get gains. Intel's problems appear to be in design, software, and business execution.
But doing a new ISA or muscling into ARM or other radical things precisely require design/software/business execution or it will utterly fail.
M1 is going to open the floodgates for ARM on PCs. That's what will kill Intel.
AMD can probably pivot, I have faith in their designers.
Now, Chromebooks are something of an argument for ARM on the desktop, as they at least seem to provide identical behavior regardless of ISA, but they aren't putting up the necessary numbers quite yet. x86 still owns PC gaming, and has a pretty solid hold on console gaming. I'm not going to be worried at all for Intel until that shifts too.
Intel is dying because they should have entered the foundry business in the early 90's. Process was always their forte, they were never good at the CPU architecture design anyway as iAPX/i860/Itanium amply demonstrated.
Instead they blew $100B getting into antivirus, network security, mobileye, infineon, and a dozen other failed businesses, $50B in illegal kickbacks keeping AMD out of the unprofitable low end laptop market, and another $50B of "contra revenue" subsidizing their inferior me-too products against mobile SOCs they should have been fabbing in the first place.
Otellini on the iPhone:
"We ended up not winning it or passing on it, depending on how you want to view it."
"At the end of the day, there was a chip that they were interested in that they wanted to pay a certain price for and not a nickel more and that price was below our forecasted cost. I couldn't see it. It wasn't one of these things you can make up on volume. And in hindsight, the forecasted cost was wrong and the volume was 100x what anyone thought."
And in hindsight, he was a moron, unqualified to lead an engineering company.
When people point to MBAs ruining Intel. Point to that statement.
You could invest in emerging markets.
Or rearrange financial statements deck chairs to hit your stock options and roll your eyes at the nerds.
Traditional wisdom used to be that if you wanted cutting edge performance, you really needed your own cutting edge in-house fab. The vertical integration advantages of tuning your ASIC design to your process were unassailable. If you couldn't afford your own foundry, tough luck, you suffered a severe penalty in performance and/or cost.
But the merchant foundries, first and foremost TSMC, have really turned that traditional wisdom around. Both in terms of matching, and then surpassing Intel on deploying the latest process nodes, but also in terms of making it possible for 3rd party ASIC developers to use that process as efficiently as an in-house design team would be able to.
Things change fast.
VLIW had a lot of hype. DSPs had already proven it, and Itanium, Transmeta, and various embedded processors were using it.
As a mostly Mac-user back then, I liked PowerPC, and POWER3 was leading the way to 64-bit, but I wasn’t expecting PCs to switch to PowerPC. The RISC systems had not all been executed in the face of the not-yet-released threat of Itanium. I was expecting the diversity to continue, for cross-architecture programming to be the rule and not the exception.
It almost seems like take a conspiracy or sabotage for Intel to fumble such a large lead in process. But all it takes it self-sabotage in forced retirements and financial engineering ahead of innovation. America really needs it's CEOs to re-learn the lessons of the global behemoths of manufacturing we used to have- that re-investing in your own future growth is just as or more important than growing your dividends.
Not in the enterprise market where AMD is almost completely absent so far.
A quick search showed that in 2017, AMD server market share was 1%, and in 2020 is expected to have reached nearly 10%[1] in 2019. This is still not the same as 15 years ago, but the market is also not the same, with cloud computing, and this increase is very expressive.
They are bringing IPC improvement with Epyc Milan and is pushing the same innovations towards the server market.
[1] https://www.hardwaretimes.com/amd-server-market-share-grows-...
Investing into increasing their fab capacity is the easiest business decision they'll ever make. And if they need finance they could get investors lining up around the block throwing money their way.
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-chip-shortage-packagin...
But dying??
Nup, I'm not seeing this at all.
I mean AMD for years survived in a situation much worse then Intel currently is.
Intel's productions nodes might be behind TSMC's but they are still quite valuable, not all chips need 5nm processes. Heck we could say most chips don't need it.
Intel is still innovating, just because they currently lack behind doesn't mean that will stay that way.
Even when lacking behind wrt. the production node Intel still manged to produce Chips which are often not much worse then the competition.
Intel is not just about CPU's.
Etc.
So no Intel is not dying at all.
It's taking damage, and lost dominance but it still has a fairly good shot at survival and might even take back dominance (in a 2-3 years). Or it might not but still stay competitive.
And if we look at the world situation TSMC might not be a think anymore in a view years. It would make me supper angry but thinks are heading in that direction (China Taiwan conflict).
I was bullish on Intel until quite recently. I was able to convince myself that they were taking the L on 10nm to focus completely on a full, true EUV transition, in order to be at the top of the game just everyone else was hitting that wall in order to dominate again. That turned out to be overly optimistic.
For instance, Steam's hardware report indicates that 1/3 of their install base already has 6 cores or more [1].
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/cpus/
https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/hardware#goto-os-and-arch...
That's one of the few great things about capitalism - competition drives innovation.
Just so long as the aforementioned monopolies don't choke out competition. Sadly, we seem to end up with a lot of pseudo-monopolies in the tech industry.
I wonder how much more competition we could have with strict monopolies regulation on acquisitions and mergers?
I still have my Core2 Duo in my HTPC... it's starting to feel doggy though.
Though that may have been a bit easier for them to solve, because the main thing they had to do was scrap NetBurst (Pentium 4) and return to a derivative their old architecture (which they were still using for the notebook market).
I'd be interested in hearing more about this. Are new graduates actually not applying?
In sports it's fun to say that 2nd place is just the first loser, but that's all in jest and friendly banter. When making things like this overly dramatic, it serves nobody except those trying to short the stock.
Earning more than $60k/year puts you in the 1% already. [1]
[0] https://income-inequality.info/
[1] https://howrichami.givingwhatwecan.org/how-rich-am-i
I would be fairly surprised if $60K is top 1%, even if you have the entire world population in the denominator. But when I checked your link, it's not using the entire population for the denominator, (which is correct, IMO) so I don't think it's even close.
In the US, there are about 110M fulltime wage earners, (out of 330M population) with median being ~$50K and top quartile ~$80K. My very rough estimate based on that might be 45M people >$60K. That is a lot more than 110/330 * 1% * 7.8B = 26M before adding in Europe (lower wages but twice the population) or anywhere else.
Source: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/wkyeng.pdf
Median in the US is not clear to me - I saw a figure of 60K and 35K within 2 minutes of searching. I think wage earning gets divided across family size, so those 45M people in your calculation, after dividing by family size, would have a much smaller income.
I think the difference between this convoluted statement and normal measures of inequality could be approximately translated to "most people making > $60K have dependents". It seems like a bad way to talk about inequality, because what goal would it imply to reduce inequality? Prevent people from having dependents, or prevent them from not having dependents?
Having an income of $60k while having a dependent is very different than when not having a dependent. I seems correct to say that without a dependent, you're in the top 1% of the world's wage earners (with respect to your financial freedom); while if you have a dependent, your income is no longer fully yours - and you are no longer in the top 1% of the world's wage earners.
Understatement much? You could also say Elon has more money than 50% of humans on the planet.
Well, they won't even have that EUV capacity in 2-3 years. ASML is almost fully booked at this point.
The way the industry is moving to custom chips won't wait for Intel. And realistically, the trend is already there, next stage of cloud evolution would be application specific chips for cloud native services, like storage/DB/ML, etc. There is zero chance it would scale back.
And I am not sure why everyone here is taking 'dying' so literally. Losing influence is another form of dying. It will take a long time for a company to cease to exist after it becomes irrelevant.
- "How did Intel die?"
- "Well, first slowly. Then quickly."
There's not much that a company so heavily invested in x86 can do in the face of Apple Silicon, aside from executing well on 7nm and bringing it to market ahead of schedule.
I don't see much of a similarity between Intel CPUs and Blackberry phones, considering that many flagship notebooks (even Apple's) have Intel inside. I for one am heralding the new era of voracious semiconductor demand, and am rooting for Intel to get its game face on and turn things around before the opportunity passes.
In reality, there is nothing that Apple or AMD are doing that Intel could not also do, isn't already doing, or isn't in a hurry to also do.
Consider that at 14nm+++++, Intel still manages to outpace AMD with its 7nm CPUs and latest architecture. AMD competes mainly on price, which is not a great position to be in. Intel's profit margins are massively better.
It's possible that x86 will become less relevant in the future, but in that case Intel will still be one of the be best chip designers in the industry. They will once again produce ARM chips, perhaps borrow one or two insights from Apple's architecture. They will continue to outsource manufacturing to other fabs, perhaps even become fabless.
On the contrary, Intel has refused to do any architectural innovation for nearly 20 years. They are capable, but overly conservative. They should have been in a hurry 10 years ago. It's well documented that they weren't and were resented for it. AMD came up with a winning strategy (multi-die packaging) and Intel still doesn't seem in a hurry to catch up. You could swap "AMD" in that sentence with "Apple" and maintain the meaning.
When superscalar or simultaneous multithreading came out you didn't see competitors mill about waiting for the customers to forget about the advantages.
Just because AMD may be winning in Cinebench doesn't mean it's winning in the business side.
Multi-chip packages have downsides that become obvious in certain enterprise workloads, so the question becomes: Is it worth giving up on the monolithic approach, or adding multi-chip products, in order to completely dominate the market, even when that is not more profitable?
Clearly, the answer for Intel must be "no", otherwise they would being doing it.
What are the downsides, exactly? Thread-to-thread latency is the key one that comes to mind. It is far cheaper to make a multi-die package because yields are so much higher for any given node. The business advantages are great. The bleak picture for Intel that is being painted is warranted.
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AMD?p=AMD&.tsrc=fin-srch
Have you been living under a rock for this past year? This is not true. AMD is beating Intel in performance in every market segment right now.
If you look at the mobile chips that did ship on 10nm, Intel is ahead as well.
Also, never compare chips that are actually on the market to unreleased ones. Zen3 might well get a small frequency boost when Intel finally releases Rocket Lake.
> Also, never compare chips that are actually on the market to unreleased ones.
Watch me do it:
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Rocket-Lake-S-vs-Zen-3-Geekben...
Am I going to gamble my house on this being true? Of course not. We're having a nerdy discussion on IPC. It doesn't really matter either way.
Perhaps you're right and these chips won't "improve evenly" across all benchmarks, but then again nobody has "even" workloads. Rocket-Lake-S has some machine learning acceleration that's going to be useless for many people, valuable for others. It has a GPU onboard, which can come in handy. I'm personally interested in AVX-512. No, I don't need to know why you think AVX-512 sucks.
This is an entirely valid position, and I agree that it bodes well for Intel that they are able to do this. However, it is a very different statement from your original:
> Consider that at 14nm+++++, Intel still manages to outpace AMD with its 7nm CPUs and latest architecture. AMD competes mainly on price, which is not a great position to be in. Intel's profit margins are massively better.
AMD is in no way "competing mainly on price". In fact, if you look at prices on the market instead of MSRP, they are generally the more expensive option right now, and are still sold out on most models almost everywhere.
Otherwise, I do not see any issue with what I said. I am looking at Intel as a company, and there I see massively better profit margins. Street prices may not reflect this during periods of shortages, but it is the dealers who are pocketing that difference, not AMD.
Which means Intel is more or less on equal design footing with AMD, they're just having trouble getting it built.
And Intel has multiple huge revenue streams that are not in question at all. All their networking stuff, for example (everyone, even on AMD, still goes for motherboards with Intel LAN instead of anyone else's, and same with wifi). And things like Optane. And all their tooling & software suites. Intel's CPU division is struggling to get wins, but Intel overall as a company isn't.
Yeah, a lot of people seem to ignore the fact that AMD was not killing it in the CPU market for a while a few years back. I wouldn't be surprised if Intel makes a comeback eventually. It's not a huge deal to me who's in the lead at any given time, I'm more interested in competitive CPUs.
I'm most interested in the future of x86 as a whole. It's definitely got a while left, but I wonder how much market share will start to be taken by ARM (and hopefully RISCV).
Intel is ABSOLUTELY just about CPUs. I can’t think of a single thing that they produce that I would ever pay them money for other than CPUs, especially if they aren’t relevant in the CPU world anymore. Intel has tried to get into so many other markets over the years, but the company’s culture and the nature of their high margin, high R&D business made it impossible to compete in those other markets.
Intel's productions nodes might be behind TSMC's but they are still quite valuable, not all chips need 5nm processes. Heck we could say most chips don't need it.
That’s a very different market with very different margins. If they shrank so much that they became like Maxim or something, then that’s really not much different than going out of business altogether.
If the author would have put this at the beginning instead of the end, I wouldn't have read it. Kudos. Still, not sure it's worth reading...
Could they collaborate with Dell or Lenovo and make RISC-V based SoCs to go into laptops to compete with the macs?
as RISC-V CPUs are rolling out in hundred PCs now
At that time, The ratio of excellent to useless people I experienced there was 1:40. That is way out of whack. I am certain it only got worse because all the 1/40’s I knew left.
They are going to have to go and get people who have modern skillsets and mindsets and those people don’t want to live in Hillsboro. And it’s going to be expensive.
And those people don’t tolerate dead weight.
My take is that Bob Swan was only ever a placeholder. The board needed to be put in the worst possible negotiating position: Literally on their knees begging because they are getting their asses kicked in every single competitor category.
A smart guy like Pat wouldn’t take the CEO job until they (a) are crawling on all fours and (b) give him the latitude to clean house as vigorously as he wants and (c) a preposterous paycheck.
No one intelligent would want that job without all three. That’s why Bob got to babysit that role for two years.
This has to be hyperbole but the rest of your comment makes me think you're being serious.
I have only worked at small companies <50 people, so I don't have first hand experience with how waste can hide in large companies but 1:40 excellent to useless people? I can't believe it'd even be half that.
My guess is you thought those people were useless because you didn't understand the role they played in the company.
However, I'll admin again that I don't have first hand experience. I'd genuinely love to hear from others who have experience with large companies.
At one point I posited that Sony USA were merely a political pawn for Sony Japan. Hire a few tens of thousands of Americans, gain political capital -- and care not what they actually do all day. In our case, it was death by scrum and sticky notes.
aw come on, I'm sure you'll meet somebody, find happiness and forget all about him
First, you have Price's Law [0] which states that half the work is done by the square root of the number of people. This in itself already implies a lot of useless people, especially at a company the size of Intel.
You might also have whole orgs/departments where pretty much everyone is phoning it in, so that would drive it up as well.
The way I see it is the more layers there are and the more removed people at the top are from the work, the greater chance the of useless people being able to go under the radar.
[0] https://dariusforoux.com/prices-law/
Most of the low hanging fruits can be picked by one individual. Instead of trying to pick more apples from the same tree people should make sure that there are not too many people assigned to the same tree.
The article confirms my idea:
>Look at your current profession. Are you in a position to create substantial value? If the answer is no, move on to a different place where you CAN.
I've worked for 100-person, 1000-person, and 100000-person companies, and the biggest companies have so many resources that they barely know what to do with them all. Most startups would kill for a fraction of a percent of the "let's screw around" R&D money that the big corps have.
Calling them useless may be a bit of a stretch. If you said "mediocre", I'd believe it. Also, in my experience there, the ratio is not uniform - you could go to a department with lots of top notch folks, and then to another department with everyone being mediocre.
Some data points:
Asked a person in a SW interview to write a function to calculate the factorial. The candidate was repeatedly told he could use whatever language he wants. He insisted on using a language he had little experience in (C++), and not the one he was experienced in (Python). He was given latitude to use any method he wanted: Recursive, iterative, etc.
He didn't even come close to solving it.
He was still hired.
He is not an outlier when it comes to SW folks at Intel. Yes, Intel definitely has some really good SW engineers, but the 1:40 ratio easily applies in that sphere.
Up till 2014, my department insisted on using cvs for version control. They said they saw no benefit to git (or even SVN).
In another team I was in, we were stuck with SVN. The senior manager wouldn't allow us to use git because he was sure it would be over the heads of many of the employees (sadly, he may have been right). Then in 2017, when IT announced that SVN was being EOL, to avoid git they switched to MS TFS (even though TFS themselves recommend git!) I still hear from folks there about the resistance to switch to git. And the following comment I've heard from multiple folks:
"I don't want to use git because it comes from Microsoft!" (conflating github with git, and upon further discussion realizing they have no idea MS bought Github - they think Git and Github both originated from MS).
BTW, I'm not a git fan boy - I much prefer mercurial.
If you're good at SW and somewhat up to speed with current technology, Intel is a very frustrating place to work.
But then again, their compensation for SW is simply not competitive:
https://www.levels.fyi/company/Intel/salaries/Software-Engin...
Intel doesn't have as many of those great programmers as I would like, but I think their bigger problems are organization rather than individual. There just isn't enough high-level coordination and sharing of information. Every group just kind of does their own thing, and if you want to know how something works you have to know who to ask. Too much tribal knowledge (which often has a short expiration date) and too little writing stuff down in one place where it's easy to find.
It's funny you mention git, because I joined Intel from a startup that used SVN and that was the one bright spot about Intel's technical culture that they used git pretty extensively. I don't think I've ever used a non-git source repo at Intel. I assume that there was some major internal struggle to get to that point, but it was before my time.
While people would likely disagree on the exact ratio in a given company, it's far worse than you would ever imagine. The inevitable eventually happens: they cease being able to make (or make very well) the very product(s) they're known for. Occasionally companies will get shocked back to life as they see it all slipping away. More commonly they just wither and die as they are unable or unwilling to change the culture that got them to that point.
Do I believe 1:40? If anything, I think that might be a conservative number at this point. Intel has become tragically/comically incompetent.
I can't think of another company like that, maybe Microsoft years ago or GE. Is this something I'm imagining or is that a frequent topic of conversation at all levels of Intel?
This feels like (repeat popular opinion) retreading.
Intel is a large company with a massive market cap. The bigger they are, the longer they fall. They just have so much runway and market gravity.
For comparison, Apple shot itself in the foot repeatedly for at least 10 years before Steve Jobs rejoined, and it took 10 more years after that before the iPhone came out, which no layman could have predicted.
The fact that Intel's management have chosen to spend two decades flushing that amazing free cashflow down the M&A toilet instead of fixing their workplace culture and getting their design house in order is what Pat Gelsinger needs to fix.
Intel is definitely in a hole (that they watched being dug below them and did nothing...), but they can get out. They have plenty of time to do so. The only real problems to overcome are their own internal culture and the sheer difficulty of single-digit-nanometer manufacturing. And the second one is easier.
Don't count them out yet. (But do laugh at them. Because they definitely deserve it, and it just might motivate them.)
Look at IBM; while Big Blue was once seemingly omnipotent and they've since fallen from that position, it's still a double-digit billion company with over 300k employees. It's not as big (relatively speaking) as it once was, but it sure didn't die either.
Other companies have died, such as Digital Equipment, but that was the result of 1) a massive paradigm shift in computing and computing equipment (introduction of "personal computing"), and 2) some pretty bad business decisions (not just failing to get a hold of the PC market). Thus far, I'm not really seeing 1) happen, and 2) alone probably won't be enough to completely kill intel, just cripple it temporarily.
Personally I think strategic M&A is a far more intelligent use of cash and credit than share buybacks and dividends.
Intel has arguably made at least a few solid acquisitions. AMD is buying Xilinx a few years after Intel bought Altera, which tells us that the Altera acquisition couldn't have been totally misplaced -- AMD has the benefit of hindsight with which to evaluate its own acquisition. Mobileye seems to be well positioned as conventional automakers are beginning to offer mainstream EVs.
Perhaps the problem is that there are certain higher-order functions (M&A, stock buybacks) that should generally be conducted only when the lower-order functions (core business) are firing on all cylinders. Companies have finite resources, and executives have limited time and energy, that shouldn't be starved away from the core business unless absolutely necessary.
Mobile? No, thanks, those are peanuts. Cheap/home PCs? Nah, either. PC builders very sensitive to prices? The don't want them. And slowly they are being sweetly cornered in the top market of the very expensive servers with very juicy margins, but feeling how the small dogs keep bitting up. Suddenly ARM wants to build for cheap servers, and AMD has a chip that also fights for that top market.
But for casuals, the PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One series, and Xbox Series X all use AMD APUs.
Also if you were not playing at 4K or competitive e-sports, you probably wanted an 8-core Ryzen chip for multi-threaded tasks even if it was marginally worse at CS:GO with >200 fps.
Having a US based company with fabrication facilities on US soil is vital to national security and will be for the entirety of my lifetime and likely my grandchildren's lifetime (if I ever have any). For all the bluster of the investors wanting to chop Intel up: they will find a swift and full rejection from the government unless their plan includes selling the assets to another US firm.
TSMC building a fab in the US won't be "good enough" - the US military will not allow the security of our country to be in the hands of a foreign corporation.
Now whether Intel remains a dominant player? Who knows, but they aren't going anywhere. I wouldn't be even a little bit surprised if for instance the 3-letter agencies cloud contracts suddenly included a clause that all of their infrastructure must run on Intel CPUs.
I'm not saying it's right, I'm not saying it's fair, but I don't see any other outcome.
It's easy to say "that's dumb" - but what's your alternative? If it includes "just buy CPUs from insert foreign entity" - that's a nonstarter for myriad reasons.
There is no way the USG will let Intel fail.
Internal information on stuff we don't know about, especially apropos of ring -1 (or even lower if that's even possible), will never leave US soil.
I think that's an important objective. I'm not sure what other way there is to fulfil it, other than spend even more taxpayer money funding greenfield US chip industry
The bigger problem is that Intel is a company that both designs CPUs and manufactures them. The government isn't actually interested in Intel's CPUs specifically, only the domestic manufacturing capability. Intel has to be split up before the government can get what it wants.
>Why can’t people learn from all the instances where a government tried to micromanage and horribly failed in the mid/long run?
Counter example: Central banks are making lots of money available but the governments are not using it to employ people (either directly or indirectly) so it just fuels a long term asset bubble without achieving the desired economic growth.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricat...
If the US loses influence over Taiwan and subsequently TSMC, they've lost. In this phase of global geopolitics, whoever controls the chips has the influence. You can't do anything without compute resources.
I'm not sure that I've personally bought in to the AI revolution, but it sounds like it's generally agreed to be the future.
At the same time, there is so much room for basic improvement in the defense space. I have a hard time believing 5nm vs 10nm is a serious problem when half the vetronics system is analog.
But yes, in a big picture strategic sense, AI capabilities seems like the area most likely to pose a serious risk by not leading the world in chip technology.
IBM's Fab was on the DoD trusted foundry list [2] Slide 13, Intel's is not.
There's an article that already rang this alarm around national-security when IBM divested itself of its Fab. [3]
1. https://www.computerworld.com/article/2837426/ibms-chip-busi...
2. http://jteg.ncms.org/wp-content/files/documents/DoD%20Truste...
3. https://semiengineering.com/a-crisis-in-dods-trusted-foundry...
1. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-intel-manufacturing/intel...
2. https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-and-chip-makers-including...
Now, the US may lag behind top of the line fabrication tech (It already does). But it will never lose it's ability to fabricate chips.
For military applications, unless they start getting really into artificial intelligence (maybe they already are?) they don't need super advanced chips for most of their equipment. Simple micro-controllers are enough for most military applications.
I don't think that Huawei is doing is doing just fine.
You have to think about scenarios where countries are opposed to the US for one reason or another.
The Patriot Act being renewed for 6 months and thus putting Cuba in the embargoed countries even more than they already were should be a good second example.
Taiwan isn't under Chinese control, but if there was an escalating situation, you would assume that it would fall under Chinese control VERY quickly.
Up here in Canada, there is no need for fabs as long as the US has them. Canada has no real choice but friendly relations with the US (geography forces this), the upside is that many of the strategic resources belonging to the US are available to Canada.
https://www.eetimes.eu/eu-signs-e145bn-declaration-to-develo...
> As such, China began an initiative to build its own processors back in the early 80's that eventually evolved into the "Made in China 2025" campaign that has the goal of producing 70% of the chips used in China by 2025.
(ignoring that TSMC is Taiwanese and not currently under PRC rule but is instead de-facto independent and mostly internationally recognized as being independent...)
I know rare-earth metals aren't that rare and we could ultimately supply them locally but the lack of any open mines or refining setups is just as big a strategic hole as losing domestic Fab isn't it?
I am happy to be corrected.
This is all the result of Intel fab failings. They have the talent to compete, dunno if the leadership wants to take to it.
The CPU design business is just a tiny part, most of the investment goes into fabs and process.