I'm bullish on Intel. Having an engineer at the top will fix all sorts of subtle problems quite quickly. Their manufacturing process for both 10nm and 7nm are now supposedly back on track, and yet they have a large backlog of designs waiting for the new processes to ramp up. We may see rapid performance increases from them now their pipeline is unblocked.
Additionally, US politics is now aligning across the aisle against China, and relying too heavily on TSMC looks like a potential future geopolitical problem. Intel is the only firm that can realistically keep up or out-fab TSMC and thus the USG will be loathe to let it even look like it might fail. Simply having fabs physically within your territory but managed by a remote firm, is clearly no substitute for having fabs actually managed by a domestic company (consider how many ways there must be to do the equivalent of SSH-ing into a fab, or otherwise subtly sabotage it from HQ).
> Intel is the only firm that can realistically keep up or out-fab TSMC
Samsung?
Realistically, Intel needs a route to actually playing at TSMC's game, currently they are instead working on paying TSMC to make them chips.
Also, nitpick here, but the TSMC problem is that China might roll in tanks, not that China controls it. Realistically speaking, it's a reasonable cause for US millitary involvement if China did. Lol, there's my World War III Shark-jump Theory: TSMC.
Intel's new GPU's need the all the advantages they can get to survive market entry. When Intel's process is ready, shipping, and better then they can switch.
Through don't forget that due to TSCM being overloaded with requests and Intel having their own fabs they can still sell chips for (for them) good prices even if they are worse.
In the end getting a CPU is normally more important then getting the best CPU.
From a product perspective, totally agree, but from a strategy perspective, Intel getting to a level of beating TSMC is very very far off. Currently they are funding the development of the next chip that will beat them elsewhere.
Personally, if Xe production funds TSMC's 3nm node that will be bought out by Apple and AMD then Intel probably should realize that the limited money they will make from GPUs will be dwarfed by the losses from improving their competition.
the latest tech is probably going to stay in Taiwan but judging from all the recent moves by TSMC. it look like they are spreading their wings to reduce the risk.
Not just the US. 8% of the manufacturing is done in EU when like 90% of the global supply is made with European ASML machines... I don't think it was a coincidence that Gelsinger mentioned national security, EU, and ASML in his speech.
Keep in mind, a semiconductor fab has hundreds of other machines and equipment involved, and US companies are some of the biggest suppliers (Applied Materials, Lam Research, KLA-Tencor--all multi-billion dollar companies).
Lithography is definitely key, but all the equipment and process must work together.
Same here. This looks like the exactly the right move Intel needed.
I don't think enough people fully appreciate that just about the entire world's leading edge supply is located within cruise missile range of China. The CCP could cripple the global economy in under an hour. Having supply chains out of their reach is not a nice to have, it is a must.
> Their manufacturing process for both 10nm and 7nm are now supposedly back on track, and yet they have a large backlog of designs waiting for the new processes to ramp up
From what (little) I know of the industry this isn't a good sign. Engineers working on the fab processes and packaging have to work closely with designers throughout the product design cycle, repeatedly taping out variations to fit onto the process as it is built out.
That's part of why Intel historically used the tick/tock design cycle, designing a new thing to be built on a new process has a multiplicative effect on the time to market because of the way the unknown-unknowns of both sides impact each other, and the large amount of specialized labor to mitigate everything.
It doesn't help that they lost a ton of institutional knowledge over the last decade to their competitors through layoffs disproportionately hitting senior staff.
The way I've heard it is that the layoffs were strategically/discriminatorily targeting senior staff, because of course they are the ones with the most institutional knowledge and therefore paid the most.
Seems like the biggest news here is Intel committing strongly to its fab business. Walling that division off from Intel's own chip design business is critical to giving it a chance to succeed. Having a third fab with competitive tech (along with TSMC and Samsung) is great for the world!
This is pretty bad for Taiwan geopolitically though... once US chipmakers have a plausible local manufacturing alternative, the US is less likely to risk WW3 by standing up to China if/when it tries to annex Taiwan.
To double click on that: TSMC has been playing the geostrategic game for a while. Taiwan wasn't simply a good choice because it had labor, transport access, and a supportive government: it played to certain Cold War issues.
Then as the mainland market developed they increased their mainland footprint as a hedge (makes it harder for the Chinese government to attack TSMC, though as we've seen from Alibaba, Xi appears happy to "move fast and break things"). That did in fact forestall investment in a competitor until recently.
They have also been expanding outside China-Taiwan, distributing their capacity and developing support in the USA and Europe. Worst case (actual shooting war between China and Taiwan) they would have a lot to fall back on.
Hon Hai has followed the same geostrategy (to even greater extreme) with its Foxconn subsidiary.
> They have also been expanding outside China-Taiwan, distributing their capacity and developing support in the USA and Europe. Worst case (actual shooting war between China and Taiwan) they would have a lot to fall back on.
Very unlikely. In case of a shooting war, the industry will run out of consumables sooner, or later. As a fact, 90%+ of them come from the Taiwan/Japan/Korea triangle, and just any military move in the region will be effectively shutting the industry down globally.
Another way of looking at TSMC's Arizona fab is similar FAB 68 in Dalian, which still seems to have largely been built for strategic relationship building purposes.
They are. The last few years have caused a fairly major change in American's attitude towards China and Taiwan. In the past the US gave Taiwan half hearted support, some tech here, old destroyers there etc. Their military was a mix of obsolete hand me downs and domestically developed solutions. But we just sold them the latest and greatest F-16 variant. Just the other day a deal was signed to share technology to help Taiwan develop modern submarines. And there's a lot more going on behind the scenes no doubt.
Trump's policies towards communist china were so bad that rex tilerson is on record as saying that at the end of his time working for trump we were farther behind with china than we were when he took office.
Biden has to repair our US hegemony. Trump sure hurt it a lot in spite of his anti-china rehtoric.
Selling weapons to taiwan doesn't contain china. We will send our own guns if a hot war is brewing there.
Taiwan recognition is not the same thing as meaningfully containing china. The TPP and asia pivot from obama was the last time that america seriously tried to restrain the rise of china.
Original step to help with manufacturing of the subs came when US brokered a deal with MHI 3 years ago. The somehow magically "retired" MHI engineers appeared in Taiwan to help in development
US does not have expertise to make modern non-nuclear subs. China can intimidate anyone in Europe not to sell. It was fortunate for Taiwan that Chinese pissed off Japan enough. Half a dozen of Soryu knockoffs can shut down PRC maritime trade if needed.
Realpolitik is what it is, but in this case standing up for the cause of Taiwanese freedom against (mainland) Chinese aggression aligns fairly well with the current political climate in the US. I'm willing to accidentally do the right thing if we have to.
We should also be realistic about the strategic risks of having such a heavy dependency on semiconductor fabrication that's within easy reach of the PLA. Mitigating that risk is critical, and orthogonal to resisting the PRC's aggression towards the RoC.
judging from all the recent moves by TSMC with a fab in AZ and opening a Japan subsidiary. i believe the TSMC leadership have the same concern as you. the latest tech is probably going to stay in Taiwan but TSMC is spreading out to reduce the risk.
It is unlikely that Nvidia and AMD will want to use Intel as their foundry. It is unlikely that Intel would be willing to offer pricing compelling enough to entice those two to use their foundries.
So long as TSMC and Samsung remain competitive (note, this doesn't mean better, just close enough -- better is also fine), I expect the vast majority of AMD and Nvidia chips to be manufactured by those two.
If the foundry business can create a competitive product that saves Nvidia/AMD manufacturing costs, they'll pay. Business allegiances change all the time when it impacts the bottom line.
If the Intel foundry business creates supply, even for people who are not Nvidia/AMD/Apple, they still win via increased competition on TSMC and Samsung.
Yes. I didn't say that this wouldn't happen. I just observed that none of the three players among AMD, Nvidia, and Intel have an active interest in working together. Practicality will trump, but I suspect that given a choice among Intel and another closely-priced, competitive foundry, both AMD and Nvidia will choose the latter.
Unlike Intel, Samsung is first and foremost a component maker. Almost every phone makers use their commodified displays, batteries, memory/storage chips -- Samsung's phone division is just a side business.
It helps of course that the PLA’s primary objective is war fighting whereas outside of special operations the US military’s priorities are more diversified.
> Seems like the biggest news here is Intel committing strongly to its fab business. Walling that division off from Intel's own chip design business is critical to giving it a chance to succeed. Having a third fab with competitive tech (along with TSMC and Samsung) is great for the world!
Yes and no. This is also a possible signal that Intel is getting ready to go fabless. AMD made similar moves with Globalfoundries before parting ways.
Intel already signalled that under their last CEO. Then they signalled something else. Now there's a "best keynote ever" with their latest signalling....
I don't think a keynote is bad for Taiwan geopolitically. Intel have a ton of cash on their balance sheet, but they still need to execute on this strategy. It astounds me what people take at face value here, considering the incredible momentum Intel needs to turn its ship around. It reminds me of Elon promising coast to coast FSD.
I also think China/TSMC is more of an economic than an existential risk. The US military doesn't need 2nm semiconductors. US manufacturers are more than capable of supplying essential US supply chains. They're just not cutting edge like the East Asian fabs are.
>It reminds me of Elon promising coast to coast FSD.
I don't know why you are surprised as lots of HN users keep saying that we either already have FSD as promised or that it will be here soon (in the Tesla beta?). People believe the most crazy things, especially if they have already bought into the ecosystem somehow (see also Apple Vs. Android discussions).
> This is pretty bad for Taiwan geopolitically though... once US chipmakers have a plausible local manufacturing alternative, the US is less likely to risk WW3 by standing up to China if/when it tries to annex Taiwan.
I doubt it changes much to the demise of modern world. The industry will still go down given that you have many, many, many more things in the semiconductor supply chain that is run by some single vendor in the world from Taiwan, and that includes consumables too.
US may get a modern fab, or two, but it will still eventually run out of many know-how intensive inputs for those fabs.
I had always wondered why intel hadn't been actively fabbing chips for other customers - it's not like they destroy a fab completely when a new process comes on line (if you live in the Portland area, you can see the rapid and constant build outs of fab space), why not sell that process to others? there does happen to be a global chip shortage after all.
nice to see someone addressing that. I welcome technical leadership back to intel.
Is that for IntelFoundaries giving newer process node capacity preferentially to Intel, or corporate IP theft reasons? Or something else I hadn't considered.
Did they? I see reports at the time claiming that would be the case, but more recent sources indicate it never happened, that TSMC has been Apple's sole supplier since 2015.
That was around the time when Apple has started to look at their SoC as a competitive advantage. Before then TSMC wasn't even a name Mainstream Media would report or use. But moving foundry takes a very long time and planning. You are talking about ~150M unit of leading edge node( excluding Intel ). TSMC also had to bet and build a new Fab just for Apple. And the rest is history.
Samsung talked about Firewall between Samsung Electronics and Foundry, but knowing the Korean culture and Samsung, that wouldn't be much of a good idea. I would even bet Foxconn CEO Terry Gou had a few word of advance to his friend Tim Cook.
I think it was largely due to their historically bleeding edge fabrication tech/node and market share. Until the recent resurgence of AMD and rise of ARM, Intel was able to sell out their inventory and keep their fabs at 100% capacity.
But given the combination of losing the node advantage to TSMC and performance advantage to AMD & ARM, I'm guessing Intel has accumulated inventory and this poses a business risk. Opening up their fabs in the future is a way to mitigate this risk; essentially becoming both a chip seller and external manufacturer.
The other reason is probably textbook monopolistic behavior: vertical integration means if you want top tier chips, there was no other option but Intel. Often overlooked is how closely correlated fabrication node is to chip performance, e.g. if Apple's M1 is fabbed at TSMC 7nm instead of 5nm, the performance wouldn't be so widely lauded.
There is huge demand for for 14nm, 22 nm and 45nm processes.
When fab is 4-5 years old, they start to manufacture other products. Different CPU's, chipsets, SoCs, microcontrollers, NICs, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chipsets, vechicle SoC's for Intel and Intel customers.
Lower margin parts. A good business, but when you have a high margin high volume product, Wall Street considers anything else is to be subtractive from earnings.
This is the microeconomic equivalent of the "dutch disease"
My take is kinda the opposite. It is like a WWII movie where the ship is rudderless and the enemy submarine is circling around and they're wondering if they need one or two torpedoes to finish it off and the captain is on the bridge shouting that the king is still on the throne and the pound is still worth a pound.
Intel becoming the best foundry in the world might be the only way they can sell vastly more chips, but it's not easy; and it's not being headed by a turnaround king, but rather the master of harvesting (why is there still vmware around since virtualization became a feature of chips and operating systems?)
> why is there still vmware around since virtualization became a feature of chips and operating systems?
I'd have to say - if you think VMware is delivering only virtualization to their customers then you probably haven't looked at their portfolio as of recent.
They have over 60 unique products that target many different areas of compute in the enterprise. Gelsinger is generally attributed for keeping VMware relevant. Not everybody is a consumer of a hyperscaler and some customers want extended enterprise functionality for virtualized (VM and containers) environments.
> why is there still vmware around since virtualization became a feature of chips and operating systems?
If you take a look at https://www.vmware.com/products.html you'll note the majority of VMware's products are NOT related to compute virtualization (and a very significant entry from that category, vSphere Hypervisor, is given away for free).
Geslinger was smart to reference Grove: I think people at all levels of Intel finally realize that their ship is on fire and are willing to change. I believe the M1, though costing them a very small amount of sales, was the true wake up call, despite being just the most recent arrow from a flock of arrows that has been piercing Intel for decades.
If Intel can pull this off it will be one of the most impressive recoveries in history, up there with Watson at IBM, Gerstner at IBM, and Jobs' return to Apple.
And if Intel can pull this off I wonder if someone will be able to do the same for GE.
First time I've felt cautiously optimistic about 'Intel the company' in 10+ years. I think it's possible Intel makes a comeback, but it'll be several years. Hope the new IBM research partnership becomes more integrated as well, I can only imagine positive outcomes from trying to consolidate fundamental semi research there.
Compared to GE... there's been more structural changes to GE over the years which would hurt its ability to regain a useful position in vertical integration from where they're at - they need multiple decades of long term planning to get around this, especially as their industrial side becomes increasingly costly. This is unlike Intel, who is still in a "good" position to pivot on the reality that x86 is a lot less valuable compared to 2009 into a more up-to-date vertical monopoly.
I'm sorry, I was totally on board and in full agreement with your comment until you mentioned IBM. Am I correct in understanding you're calling Watson a successful recovery for IBM? Jobs returning to Apple, sure. But I don't think I know anyone that would describe IBM as anything other than a flagging behemoth. Please, feel free to convince me otherwise, maybe I missed something.
I mean Thomas J. Watson Sr (turned CTR into IBM) and Thomas J Watson Jr (turned IBM into a computer company), not the dumb software platform that the sad, current IBM is overselling. Perhaps you didn't realize why the program bears that name.
Gerstner was astonishing too. I just thought of him as the "cookie guy" when he showed up. But he saved a company that was spiraling towards the ground...he didn't restore it to its former glory but did bring it back to a successful life. An achievement subsequently squandered.
> IDM = Internet Download Manager , in most people's mind
IDM in most people's minds is Intelligent Dance Music.
But, in Tech I am familiar with many people using IDM for IDentity Management. When I was associated with a different Tech vertical than I am now, people used IDM as an acronym for Integrated Document Mangement.
Great keynote and clearly it's a massive improvement to have a former silicon veteran at the helm again at Intel. For all the major announcements made, I think looking at them in context of the industry and other competitors reveals some interesting nuances:
1. This is Intel's proverbial hailmary rather than "unleashed". The industry is moving on from x86 and with its other bets (e.g. radio modem, mobileeye) not paid/paying off, the revenue will quickly nosedive within the next few years.
2. IDM 2.0 is an involuntary move due to Intel's loss of both performance leadership (to AMD/ARM) and fabrication node leadership (to TSMC). Clearly their factories are becoming liabilities and opening up to outside business cushions the freefall.
3. 2023 is a long time away in the silicon industry. As pointed out in Stratechery, 7nm is actually further delayed than what Bob Swan previously announced. Apple is rumored to be on TSMC 3nm this year and AMD will likely move down to 5nm by next year. Unless Meteor Lake is a massive performance uplift, then it may not change the overall trajectory. Intel's saving grace at this point is the capacity constraints at both TSMC and Samsung.
Looks like you got downvoted for this, but honestly, I wonder how much INTC gets dinged in the stock market because of this.
No idea how to measure the impact, but I'm sure it's in the tens of billions.
It doesn't even matter if it's right or wrong - it matters because the headline of 7nm vs 5nm sucks for INTC stock.
I think Intel could easily put some marketing language about shifting to an "industry standard measurement practice" or something similar (remember, it's not for techies, but the people who buy INTC stock).
While I agree 100%, I feel compelled to point out that it was Intel who for years embraced and encouraged the bullshit use of clock speed as the metric of performance.
Entirely precise yet only partially meaningful, which is just as true of the chase for node bragging rights.
So there's some karmic justice in Intel being pilloried for being behind in this way.
Not quite. Node numbers don't actually correspond to transistor gate length. So it would be like one company saying "we run at 3GHz" and the other saying "we run at 4GHz" when both run at 4GHz.
Separately, what you are saying is true -- size is not the be-all-end-all of processor performance. But GP is referring to the dislocation between nomenclature and geometry.
That's because Intel was on the single-threaded performance bandwagon for at least one beat too long. (Which was at the time of AMD's first renaissance with Opteron and multi-core.) Which a certain Intel exec--I was an analyst at the time--told me was because Microsoft had such a lack of confidence in their ability to pivot to multi-core architectures. And I have no reason to especially disbelieve that.
Interestingly, the shift to multi-core on the desktop hasn't been the big problem that a lot of people feared it would be. I remember hobbling on crutches cross-country to SF for an Intel quad core (?) launch and there was a lot of hand-wringing on the topic but mostly things worked out.
Even considering only single core machines, so much affects workload throughput: thermals, IO system, IO devices...punters were paying a premium for "high speed" laptops that were slower than a desktop with the same clock speed.
This bit Apple too when they boasted of their PPC clock speed, only to fall behind in both clock speed and performance. (I'm a Mac user: this is bipartisan criticism).
I'd say I'm glad those days are over, but of course the deceptive metrics have merely been replaced with different deceptive metrics.
Not sure where that rumour are from. But TSMC 3nm is next year.
If Gelsinger didn't lie, and the original 7nm schedule and spec were unchanged, the 100% increase in EUV usage would actually put it close to if not on par with TSMC 3nm. Although they will still be a year and a half behind TSMC.
And technically 7nm are taping out this year. The only reason why volume product wont come until 2023 is because Intel has a SuperComputer contract to fill with the US DOE.
Both Intel 5nm and TSMC 2nm will transition to GAAFET. But I guess Intel ( Pat ) want us to focus on the strategic changes rather than the detail of future roadmap.
It depends on how Apple maneuvers. Mobile chips (A15) are high volume so very unlikely to get moved but it's certainly possible for the lower-volume Mac products, e.g. M2/M1X for Macbook/iMac, to switch onto leading-node 3nm if yields are good.
Apple is certainly incentivized as it'd allow them to continue the narrative that their own SOCs are superior to anything else on the market.
Apple M1 is on TSMC 5nm; Ryzen 3 is on TSMC 7nm and Intel is famously still on an (advanced) 14nm process.
A big chunk of Apple's power advantage (which can translate to better perf as well, since the key limits are thermal) can be attributed to the process node, though we won't know how much for sure until we get an apples to apples comparison. I agree with Gap, retaining the process node advantage will help sustain and entrench the perception that Apple's chips are better, easing the transition.
Risk production is when you start testing wafers and design for performance, yield, other tuning and bugs. Those are rarely if ever sold on the market ( Unless they are called CannonLake ). So realistically it is still 2H22 for 3nm.
And generally speaking leading edge node rarely if ever go to large die size SKUs first ( That is MBP and iMac ) simply due to yield and cost. ( Unless your customer is US DOE buying chips for their SuperComputer called Aurora. )
EDIT: I am incorrect, and was mis-remembering something I had read, in a completely backwards manner!
PREVIOUS (incorrect): You can buy them (the "Rocket Lake S" platform) beginning March 30th, I believe. One issue they are having with 10nm (though not intently a fatal one) is that it doesn't seem to achieve market-leading single-thread performance without being ridiculously power-inefficient. In lower-power environments, e.g. in laptops, the 10nm chips seem to be "fine", in that they are improvements over 14nm+++. They're still not market-leading, but they are an improvement and not at the cost of power (relative to previous generation).
You are right, and I stand corrected. I was completely mis-remembering something I read, analyzing the reasons behind expectations of Rocket Lake power consumption.
Yes it does. But Amazon built it for it's own use as well, to run the amazon website and systems. They had an initial datacentre but then built AWS with the idea to serve themselves and also sell hosting to the world.
Which is what Intels move looks like to me. Go hard on Fabs, and sell production to others as well.
I question whether the move away from x86 is actually that much of a problem for Intel; ultimately, its just an instruction architecture, and at the end of the day the fabrication capacity is far more valuable than some old & busted IP. There's no reason to believe Intel couldn't adapt to an ARM-based future; they would just need the leadership to step in and make that investment. They haven't made it thus far, but I also legitimately believe its a fair decision not to; its not obvious to me, just some guy with nothing to lose, that my next server, or gaming desktop, or laptop, will or should run an ARM chip. Windows hasn't moved that way, not more than the nanometer Surface Pro X moved it, Linux hasn't outside of Android, really the only company that has said "yeah we're all in on ARM" is Apple. Well, they have their sandbox they play in, and it certainly influences the rest of the industry, but ultimately it is separate.
At what point does a chip stop being ARM and become AMD?
Cortex series are pretty potent for commodity chips. Now Apple does have their completely different cores that just happen to use ARM instruction set, but I think most fabless are not focused on the cores themselves.
I see the "geopolitical" angle again and it's still not vindicated by this announcement. Nothing that Gelsinger said indicated he came to those decisions by seeing what was cookin' on the threat board:
> We are committed to ensuring this capacity will support commercial customers, as well as address unique government and security requirements in the U.S.
Geographic distribution makes a certain amount of business sense and getting those nice DoD contracts makes even more.
What doesn't make sense is China having Wing Attack Plan R ready to go against TSMC and Samsung.
I'm curious to see if Gelsinger can fix Intel's 127x fiascos (there are multiple). It's not like the process engineers are sitting around scratching their butts, they are on call nonstop and I know two that have quit due to pressure. He can't drive the engineers any harder, so how is he going to fix it?
For those not in the know, the 127x processes include Intel's 10nm, 7nm, and 5nm manufacturing. I had to look it up.
I'm under the impression 10nm is largely working by now, it just took a long time to become competitive with Intel's ultra optimized 14nm process. Supposedly they have already shipped 100K+ units of Ice Lake Xeon Scalable CPUs: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16539/intel-ice-lake-xeon-sca...
That statement is cliche for a reason: because there's no way to make the distinction and is entirely subjective. I want to hear his concrete actions from my friends that are still fighting the good fight and haven't quit.
I wonder if Intel is also going to increase compensation across the board to be able to execute on this bold plan. Historically, Intel's salaries were among the lowest and it has been losing talent left and right to its chip-making competitors (Apple, Nvidia, etc).
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[ 5.6 ms ] story [ 202 ms ] threadAdditionally, US politics is now aligning across the aisle against China, and relying too heavily on TSMC looks like a potential future geopolitical problem. Intel is the only firm that can realistically keep up or out-fab TSMC and thus the USG will be loathe to let it even look like it might fail. Simply having fabs physically within your territory but managed by a remote firm, is clearly no substitute for having fabs actually managed by a domestic company (consider how many ways there must be to do the equivalent of SSH-ing into a fab, or otherwise subtly sabotage it from HQ).
Samsung?
Realistically, Intel needs a route to actually playing at TSMC's game, currently they are instead working on paying TSMC to make them chips.
Also, nitpick here, but the TSMC problem is that China might roll in tanks, not that China controls it. Realistically speaking, it's a reasonable cause for US millitary involvement if China did. Lol, there's my World War III Shark-jump Theory: TSMC.
In the end getting a CPU is normally more important then getting the best CPU.
Personally, if Xe production funds TSMC's 3nm node that will be bought out by Apple and AMD then Intel probably should realize that the limited money they will make from GPUs will be dwarfed by the losses from improving their competition.
TSMC have fab in China and currently building one in the US. TSMC is also opening an expansion in Japan. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-taiwan-tsmc/tsmc-to-raise...
the latest tech is probably going to stay in Taiwan but judging from all the recent moves by TSMC. it look like they are spreading their wings to reduce the risk.
Lithography is definitely key, but all the equipment and process must work together.
I don't think enough people fully appreciate that just about the entire world's leading edge supply is located within cruise missile range of China. The CCP could cripple the global economy in under an hour. Having supply chains out of their reach is not a nice to have, it is a must.
From what (little) I know of the industry this isn't a good sign. Engineers working on the fab processes and packaging have to work closely with designers throughout the product design cycle, repeatedly taping out variations to fit onto the process as it is built out.
That's part of why Intel historically used the tick/tock design cycle, designing a new thing to be built on a new process has a multiplicative effect on the time to market because of the way the unknown-unknowns of both sides impact each other, and the large amount of specialized labor to mitigate everything.
It doesn't help that they lost a ton of institutional knowledge over the last decade to their competitors through layoffs disproportionately hitting senior staff.
Conversely, if he were to say "it's worse than I feared," he won't personally be blamed because the problem preceded his return to Intel.
So I think the claim can be viewed with a greater sense of honesty than before.
Note that Intel's current fab problems were well underway when there was an engineer on top, and that engineer was a fab person. Pat is not.
This is pretty bad for Taiwan geopolitically though... once US chipmakers have a plausible local manufacturing alternative, the US is less likely to risk WW3 by standing up to China if/when it tries to annex Taiwan.
Then as the mainland market developed they increased their mainland footprint as a hedge (makes it harder for the Chinese government to attack TSMC, though as we've seen from Alibaba, Xi appears happy to "move fast and break things"). That did in fact forestall investment in a competitor until recently.
They have also been expanding outside China-Taiwan, distributing their capacity and developing support in the USA and Europe. Worst case (actual shooting war between China and Taiwan) they would have a lot to fall back on.
Hon Hai has followed the same geostrategy (to even greater extreme) with its Foxconn subsidiary.
Very unlikely. In case of a shooting war, the industry will run out of consumables sooner, or later. As a fact, 90%+ of them come from the Taiwan/Japan/Korea triangle, and just any military move in the region will be effectively shutting the industry down globally.
And seeing men thinking so again, 100 years after, only tells that Raymond Poincaré was right.
TSMC's GIGAFABs (> 100K/month) are used for mass manufacturing bleeding edge consumer electronics. They are still build only in Taiwan.
[1] https://technosports.co.in/2021/03/03/tsmc-to-build-5nm-plan...
Biden has to repair our US hegemony. Trump sure hurt it a lot in spite of his anti-china rehtoric.
Selling weapons to taiwan doesn't contain china. We will send our own guns if a hot war is brewing there.
Taiwan recognition is not the same thing as meaningfully containing china. The TPP and asia pivot from obama was the last time that america seriously tried to restrain the rise of china.
Trade deals are ugly.
But if your geopolitical goal is to prevent Asia from moving closer to China, you can, and we have, done worse than the TPP.
And people still celebrate Trump for being tough on China...
All of these states need to be strong enough to be a credible deterrent to invasion on their own.
US support is neither speedy nor certain. And a speedy capitulation by Taiwan compromises the US's ability to help even if willing.
US does not have expertise to make modern non-nuclear subs. China can intimidate anyone in Europe not to sell. It was fortunate for Taiwan that Chinese pissed off Japan enough. Half a dozen of Soryu knockoffs can shut down PRC maritime trade if needed.
This isn't an attempt to start a debate, just saying that the U.S. won't intervene unless there's material gain, regardless of what the voters want.
It's really more of a petrol bomb, yeah.
Realpolitik is what it is, but in this case standing up for the cause of Taiwanese freedom against (mainland) Chinese aggression aligns fairly well with the current political climate in the US. I'm willing to accidentally do the right thing if we have to.
So long as TSMC and Samsung remain competitive (note, this doesn't mean better, just close enough -- better is also fine), I expect the vast majority of AMD and Nvidia chips to be manufactured by those two.
Why not? Nvidia seems to be very pragmatic in their foundry picks on what's available for example.
It helps of course that the PLA’s primary objective is war fighting whereas outside of special operations the US military’s priorities are more diversified.
Yes and no. This is also a possible signal that Intel is getting ready to go fabless. AMD made similar moves with Globalfoundries before parting ways.
Intel may make it modular, but Intel will still own those fabs. I do not see them spinning fabs as separate business at least for the decade of 20s.
I also think China/TSMC is more of an economic than an existential risk. The US military doesn't need 2nm semiconductors. US manufacturers are more than capable of supplying essential US supply chains. They're just not cutting edge like the East Asian fabs are.
I don't know why you are surprised as lots of HN users keep saying that we either already have FSD as promised or that it will be here soon (in the Tesla beta?). People believe the most crazy things, especially if they have already bought into the ecosystem somehow (see also Apple Vs. Android discussions).
I doubt it changes much to the demise of modern world. The industry will still go down given that you have many, many, many more things in the semiconductor supply chain that is run by some single vendor in the world from Taiwan, and that includes consumables too.
US may get a modern fab, or two, but it will still eventually run out of many know-how intensive inputs for those fabs.
nice to see someone addressing that. I welcome technical leadership back to intel.
Intel foundry have to be a pure play in order to win customers trust. Apple move away from Samsung and now a core customer of TSMC, trust is an issue.
This. It is the reason why Apple dont Fab their SoC with Samsung Foundry.
If you have no direct competition with them then of course you can Fab with Samsung.
Samsung talked about Firewall between Samsung Electronics and Foundry, but knowing the Korean culture and Samsung, that wouldn't be much of a good idea. I would even bet Foxconn CEO Terry Gou had a few word of advance to his friend Tim Cook.
But given the combination of losing the node advantage to TSMC and performance advantage to AMD & ARM, I'm guessing Intel has accumulated inventory and this poses a business risk. Opening up their fabs in the future is a way to mitigate this risk; essentially becoming both a chip seller and external manufacturer.
The other reason is probably textbook monopolistic behavior: vertical integration means if you want top tier chips, there was no other option but Intel. Often overlooked is how closely correlated fabrication node is to chip performance, e.g. if Apple's M1 is fabbed at TSMC 7nm instead of 5nm, the performance wouldn't be so widely lauded.
When fab is 4-5 years old, they start to manufacture other products. Different CPU's, chipsets, SoCs, microcontrollers, NICs, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chipsets, vechicle SoC's for Intel and Intel customers.
This is the microeconomic equivalent of the "dutch disease"
Intel becoming the best foundry in the world might be the only way they can sell vastly more chips, but it's not easy; and it's not being headed by a turnaround king, but rather the master of harvesting (why is there still vmware around since virtualization became a feature of chips and operating systems?)
I'd have to say - if you think VMware is delivering only virtualization to their customers then you probably haven't looked at their portfolio as of recent.
They have over 60 unique products that target many different areas of compute in the enterprise. Gelsinger is generally attributed for keeping VMware relevant. Not everybody is a consumer of a hyperscaler and some customers want extended enterprise functionality for virtualized (VM and containers) environments.
Because VMware (mostly through acquisitions) makes a whole bunch of other stuff now too.
Because, besides the need for a frontend, there's a lot of devices to emulate.
If you take a look at https://www.vmware.com/products.html you'll note the majority of VMware's products are NOT related to compute virtualization (and a very significant entry from that category, vSphere Hypervisor, is given away for free).
If Intel can pull this off it will be one of the most impressive recoveries in history, up there with Watson at IBM, Gerstner at IBM, and Jobs' return to Apple.
And if Intel can pull this off I wonder if someone will be able to do the same for GE.
Compared to GE... there's been more structural changes to GE over the years which would hurt its ability to regain a useful position in vertical integration from where they're at - they need multiple decades of long term planning to get around this, especially as their industrial side becomes increasingly costly. This is unlike Intel, who is still in a "good" position to pivot on the reality that x86 is a lot less valuable compared to 2009 into a more up-to-date vertical monopoly.
Gerstner was astonishing too. I just thought of him as the "cookie guy" when he showed up. But he saved a company that was spiraling towards the ground...he didn't restore it to its former glory but did bring it back to a successful life. An achievement subsequently squandered.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/silicon-revolution/bu...
S/360 was/is a big deal in history.
IDM in most people's minds is Intelligent Dance Music.
But, in Tech I am familiar with many people using IDM for IDentity Management. When I was associated with a different Tech vertical than I am now, people used IDM as an acronym for Integrated Document Mangement.
IDM = Industrial Dance Music for me. I guess there are a few definitions floating around.
1. This is Intel's proverbial hailmary rather than "unleashed". The industry is moving on from x86 and with its other bets (e.g. radio modem, mobileeye) not paid/paying off, the revenue will quickly nosedive within the next few years.
2. IDM 2.0 is an involuntary move due to Intel's loss of both performance leadership (to AMD/ARM) and fabrication node leadership (to TSMC). Clearly their factories are becoming liabilities and opening up to outside business cushions the freefall.
3. 2023 is a long time away in the silicon industry. As pointed out in Stratechery, 7nm is actually further delayed than what Bob Swan previously announced. Apple is rumored to be on TSMC 3nm this year and AMD will likely move down to 5nm by next year. Unless Meteor Lake is a massive performance uplift, then it may not change the overall trajectory. Intel's saving grace at this point is the capacity constraints at both TSMC and Samsung.
No idea how to measure the impact, but I'm sure it's in the tens of billions.
It doesn't even matter if it's right or wrong - it matters because the headline of 7nm vs 5nm sucks for INTC stock.
I think Intel could easily put some marketing language about shifting to an "industry standard measurement practice" or something similar (remember, it's not for techies, but the people who buy INTC stock).
If everyone did, then things like GME would never happen.
Entirely precise yet only partially meaningful, which is just as true of the chase for node bragging rights.
So there's some karmic justice in Intel being pilloried for being behind in this way.
Separately, what you are saying is true -- size is not the be-all-end-all of processor performance. But GP is referring to the dislocation between nomenclature and geometry.
Interestingly, the shift to multi-core on the desktop hasn't been the big problem that a lot of people feared it would be. I remember hobbling on crutches cross-country to SF for an Intel quad core (?) launch and there was a lot of hand-wringing on the topic but mostly things worked out.
This bit Apple too when they boasted of their PPC clock speed, only to fall behind in both clock speed and performance. (I'm a Mac user: this is bipartisan criticism).
I'd say I'm glad those days are over, but of course the deceptive metrics have merely been replaced with different deceptive metrics.
Not sure where that rumour are from. But TSMC 3nm is next year.
If Gelsinger didn't lie, and the original 7nm schedule and spec were unchanged, the 100% increase in EUV usage would actually put it close to if not on par with TSMC 3nm. Although they will still be a year and a half behind TSMC.
And technically 7nm are taping out this year. The only reason why volume product wont come until 2023 is because Intel has a SuperComputer contract to fill with the US DOE.
Both Intel 5nm and TSMC 2nm will transition to GAAFET. But I guess Intel ( Pat ) want us to focus on the strategic changes rather than the detail of future roadmap.
It depends on how Apple maneuvers. Mobile chips (A15) are high volume so very unlikely to get moved but it's certainly possible for the lower-volume Mac products, e.g. M2/M1X for Macbook/iMac, to switch onto leading-node 3nm if yields are good.
Apple is certainly incentivized as it'd allow them to continue the narrative that their own SOCs are superior to anything else on the market.
Hasn't this narrative been largely shaped around performance impact on customer experiences?
Recall the announcement video which was decried as "marketing hype" by some tech voices prior to release.
If so, M2/M1X should be able to continue this narrative on a performance basis alone regardless of whether they make the jump to 3nm.
A big chunk of Apple's power advantage (which can translate to better perf as well, since the key limits are thermal) can be attributed to the process node, though we won't know how much for sure until we get an apples to apples comparison. I agree with Gap, retaining the process node advantage will help sustain and entrench the perception that Apple's chips are better, easing the transition.
7nm risk production: April, 2017
7nm first Apple SoC: Sept, 2018 (A12)
5nm risk production: April, 2019
5nm first Apple SoC: Sept, 2020 (A14)
3nm risk production: 2021Q4
Following this trend, when do you expect the Apple 3nm SoC to debut?
Risk production is when you start testing wafers and design for performance, yield, other tuning and bugs. Those are rarely if ever sold on the market ( Unless they are called CannonLake ). So realistically it is still 2H22 for 3nm.
And generally speaking leading edge node rarely if ever go to large die size SKUs first ( That is MBP and iMac ) simply due to yield and cost. ( Unless your customer is US DOE buying chips for their SuperComputer called Aurora. )
Intel can't even solve their 10nm yield problem. Its great to have another foundry but Intel needs to step up.
PREVIOUS (incorrect): You can buy them (the "Rocket Lake S" platform) beginning March 30th, I believe. One issue they are having with 10nm (though not intently a fatal one) is that it doesn't seem to achieve market-leading single-thread performance without being ridiculously power-inefficient. In lower-power environments, e.g. in laptops, the 10nm chips seem to be "fine", in that they are improvements over 14nm+++. They're still not market-leading, but they are an improvement and not at the cost of power (relative to previous generation).
Uh, what? Mobileye bagged $333mm in revenue last quarter.
See for yourself:
https://d1io3yog0oux5.cloudfront.net/_9ea32bedbda3919ea6d9a1...
"Hey we have a world class [whatever] over here. Wonder if we can sell it to the world as well as using it for our business?"
Which is what Intels move looks like to me. Go hard on Fabs, and sell production to others as well.
Cortex series are pretty potent for commodity chips. Now Apple does have their completely different cores that just happen to use ARM instruction set, but I think most fabless are not focused on the cores themselves.
I should have said arm64 chip. AMD is fabless and they do spend a lot of effort on core design.
> We are committed to ensuring this capacity will support commercial customers, as well as address unique government and security requirements in the U.S.
Geographic distribution makes a certain amount of business sense and getting those nice DoD contracts makes even more.
What doesn't make sense is China having Wing Attack Plan R ready to go against TSMC and Samsung.
I'm under the impression 10nm is largely working by now, it just took a long time to become competitive with Intel's ultra optimized 14nm process. Supposedly they have already shipped 100K+ units of Ice Lake Xeon Scalable CPUs: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16539/intel-ice-lake-xeon-sca...
Like, say, giving the engineers more say in the goals for the next process(es) to make them achievable. Talking, not ruling.