[HN Gopher] The Intel Split
___________________________________________________________________
The Intel Split
Author : feross
Score : 226 points
Date : 2022-01-18 15:07 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (stratechery.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (stratechery.com)
| cletus wrote:
| IMHO this is just Intel hiding rather than solving its problems.
| It gives the appearance of management doing something but it's
| the wrong thing.
|
| If we've learned nothing else, the big winners are at the cutting
| edge and vertically integrated. Splitting design and fab seems
| like a good idea: force fab to compete for design business. But
| middle management will take over and create perverse incentives
| where neither fab nor design radically improves.
|
| I've heard tales of Intel being rife with politics, fiefdoms and
| empire-building. This is classic middle management run amok in
| the absence of real leadership. I honestly think the best thing
| Intel could do is fire everyone above the director level and
| start over.
|
| Intel dominated when their fab was cutting edge and no one else
| had access to it. Splitting this means if their fab improves then
| everyone has access to it.
|
| There's clearly an organizational problem here but this split
| isn't going to solve it.
| threatripper wrote:
| IMHO it's the same pattern of the time when Intel gave up on
| their memory business and entered the CPU business. Citing from
| memory: "If you were the new CEO what would you do to save the
| company?" - and he immediately knew the answer - "Then let's go
| back in the boardroom and do that."
|
| Judging from that it seems like their fab business doesn't have
| any long term future, the outside world just doesn't know it
| yet. Now they put on a show until they are ready to fully
| convert to other fabs. After all, the current fabs are still
| cranking out chips that make them billions each month.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _their fab business doesn 't have any long term future_
|
| It has a fine future, just not in a 60%+ margin business.
| Intel should bite the bullet and spin out its fabs. Let it
| compete and grow as a separate company from Intel's design
| units. Stratchery is spot on, as he's been about Intel from
| day one.
| notswiley2 wrote:
| Isn't this kind of thing part of what killed the PalmPilot?
| bluedino wrote:
| Imagine what could have been if Intel wouldn't have sold XScale
| back in 2006 and kept focusing on ARM
| stefan_ wrote:
| What exactly would have been? There is no inherent superiority
| in the ARM architecture. Hell, 2006 ARM is a trash
| architecture. They just happened to be the only vendor that
| cared about that niche, and then the niche stopped being niche.
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| ARM is not end all and be all. x86 still have a big market
| share
| neogodless wrote:
| That's one way to put it! I'm not finding any comprehensive
| sources, but here's an example:
|
| https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/12/apple_arm_m1_intel_x8.
| ..
|
| > Arm's market share in PC chips was about eight per cent
| during Q3 this year, climbing steadily from seven per cent in
| Q2, and up from only two per cent in Q3 2020, before Arm-
| compatible M1 Macs went on sale.
|
| ARM is very much on the rise, but also still in the single
| digits, leaving plenty for x86.
|
| https://futurecio.tech/intel-losing-share-to-amd-and-arm/
|
| > 5% of the servers shipped in the third quarter of 2021 had
| an Arm CPU
| carlycue wrote:
| Intel cannot and will not catch up. The arrival of the M1 chip is
| analogous to the arrival of the monolith in 2001 A Space Odyssey.
| It's efficiency is frankly alien technology.
| pjmlp wrote:
| M1 only runs on Apple hardware. Hardly matters to Intel
| customers.
| foobiekr wrote:
| That's true to an extent but no one lives in isolation.
| Losing Apple was a pretty massive blow.
|
| Still the real blow will be if someone successfully enters
| the server business. Graviton* are interesting but that's not
| a broad threat yet.
| sydbarrett74 wrote:
| I think it'll be another huge blow if Windows users with
| laptops move almost entirely to ARM over the next 3-5
| years. While Intel may have an absolute performance
| advantage in the desktop and server arena, most Windows
| users these days are using laptops, where ARM's energy
| efficiency matters more.
| malfist wrote:
| Why do you say that? They're already responding to ARM with
| their big.Bigger architecture in their latest generation.
|
| I'm sure people said the same thing about Intel when AMD
| introduced 64 bit procs or Sun introduced multicore processors.
| Intel has adapted and lead the field many times after being
| overtaken. No reason to expect them not to do the same here, or
| at least compete.
| klelatti wrote:
| Not sure 'already' is appropriate here. big.LITTLE was
| announced in 2011. Taking 11 years to copy a competitor's
| successful feature must be a record of some sort.
| Kon-Peki wrote:
| Not sure you understand the point of big.LITTLE. It's about
| dealing with power and thermal constraints in the quest for
| more performance [1]. So was the transition to multicore
| processors, BTW [2]. These are the things hardware
| companies do when they have no other option. And as [2]
| points out, we software folks _still_ don 't have a good
| way to deal with it.
|
| [1] https://armkeil.blob.core.windows.net/developer/Files/p
| df/wh...
|
| [2] https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2006/EECS-
| 2006-...
|
| Alder Lake is about dealing with power and thermal
| constraints. Intel has finally pushed performance so far
| that they need to do this. The chips are benchmarking so
| well _because_ of this move, not in spite of it.
| klelatti wrote:
| I do know what big.LITTLE is about thanks. No idea why
| you'd think otherwise from my post.
|
| Of course Alder Lake is benchmarking well because of it.
|
| My point was 'already' makes it sound like Intel is
| rapidly adopting this technology - not 11 years after
| Arm.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| > It's efficiency is frankly alien technology.
|
| That's probably an exaggeration, and this exaltation of Apple
| is a Bad Thing. The M1 had good designers - two of which have
| moved on already, one to Microsoft [0], and the lead designer
| to Intel [1] only days later.
|
| [0] https://9to5mac.com/2022/01/12/apple-silicon-microsoft-
| poach...
|
| [1] https://9to5mac.com/2022/01/06/apple-engineering-
| director-m1...
| atty wrote:
| I love my M1, but it is most certainly not alien technology
| that can't be replicated, nor does it imply that other
| foundries/chip designers can't catch up. In many respects AMD
| is already very close (on a previous node, no less), and Intels
| 12th Gen, while very power hungry, is very good in terms of
| total performance (obviously not competitive on perf/watt, but
| it was never going to be, because of the node difference).
| tomjen3 wrote:
| You can get better performance than an M1, but you are not
| getting anything else with the performance and battery life.
| Except maybe the M2.
|
| If you want an actual ultra portable, you are getting a Mac.
| kcb wrote:
| If you want a Mac.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Well, if "ultra portable" matters more than "Mac vs non-
| Mac", then get a Mac (at the moment). If you want "not
| Mac" more than you want "ultra portable", then don't get
| a Mac.
| criddell wrote:
| Are you saying that AMD is very close in perf/watt? If so,
| that's pretty cool.
| atty wrote:
| Sorry I should have been clearer. As far as I am aware, the
| M1 is still better at perf/watt (again, comparing TSMC 5 to
| 7, so it's not unexpected) - for laptops, the M1 also has
| an extremely low idle power draw that I don't think anyone
| else can match right now, which significantly improves
| battery life. I meant comparable single-threaded
| performance in a laptop form factor.
| donkarma wrote:
| if my understanding is correct then M1 was a one time boost due
| to the massive decoder and on chip RAM, it's not going to be
| constantly getting faster
| selectodude wrote:
| The M1 also has old cores from the A14. The A15 isn't hugely
| faster than the A14 but it clocks faster and has other
| efficiency tweaks. Clock for clock, the M1 is _slower_ than
| the iPhone 13 Pro.
| [deleted]
| foobiekr wrote:
| That's basically it. Apple went big because the target
| process allowed it. To someone out of the ASIC industry, it
| is a set of interestingly scaled but pedestrian design
| choices coupled with some exaggeration (realizable memory
| bandwidth per core on the Max is a fraction of what you'd
| expect based on Apple's aggregate memory bandwidth claim for
| the processor as a whole) and a very serious investment in
| performance/watt (legacy of the phone use case).
|
| The Max has barely any improvement core-wise than the first
| M1. It's going to be interesting to see what the real next
| generation looks like.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| > The Max has barely any improvement core-wise than the
| first M1.
|
| Isn't that what you would expect in two chips that use the
| same core design?
|
| There is more memory bandwidth to the Max, and the system
| level cache is larger, so there are differences outside of
| the core, but the core itself didn't change.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| >one time boost
|
| That's not what you would expect if you look at the graph of
| six years of year-over-year SPEC performance gains on iPhone
| cores. Their history shows a pretty reliable 20% gain per
| year.
|
| >Whilst in the past 5 years Intel has managed to increase
| their best single-thread performance by about 28%, Apple has
| managed to improve their designs by 198%, or 2.98x (let's
| call it 3x) the performance of the Apple A9 of late 2015.
|
| https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-
| silicon-m1-a14-de...
| stingtao wrote:
| If Intel split the manufacturing unit, it would not be
| competitive unless it invested lots more in advanced new
| processes.
| rkagerer wrote:
| The company's willingness to tackle tooling to multiply the
| effectiveness of their employees was a key factor in their
| success:
|
| _This incredible growth rate could not be achieved by hiring an
| exponentially-growing number of design engineers. It was
| fulfilled by adopting new design methodologies and by introducing
| innovative design automation software at every processor
| generation. These methodologies and tools always applied
| principles of raising design abstraction, becoming increasingly
| precise in terms of circuit and parasitic modeling while
| simultaneously using ever-increasing levels of hierarchy,
| regularity, and automatic synthesis.
|
| As a rule, whenever a task became too painful to perform using
| the old methods, a new method and associated tool were conceived
| for solving the problem. This way, tools and design practices
| were evolving, always addressing the most labor-intensive task at
| hand. Naturally, the evolution of tools occurred bottom-up, from
| layout tools to circuit, logic, and architecture. Typically, at
| each abstraction level the verification problem was most painful,
| hence it was addressed first. The synthesis problem at that level
| was addressed much later._
| adamc wrote:
| Reading this, I had the uneasy feeling that we might be seeing a
| company chase a past that cannot be its future.
| blinkingled wrote:
| I don't think Intel's manufacturing problem is purely that of
| incentive which will be fixed by a split. That's massive
| oversimplification.
|
| The approach Intel is taking - outsource cutting edge products to
| TSMC while continuing to invest in their fabs making their lower
| end stuff and other people's stuff like automotive chips in-house
| is the best strategy to buy some time to advance their fabs while
| letting them earn money to support R&D investments.
|
| It's a huge problem and nobody except TSMC has succeeded at it.
| Besides there is years of lack of focus, incentives and interest
| in specialized education and manufacturing processes that'll take
| time for Intel to fix. Meanwhile they will be competitive in
| consumer markets by going TSMC 3nm and continue to improve on the
| side by taking on outside fab orders. Seems reasonable to me.
| ryan93 wrote:
| They had profit of 20B last year. The bean counters are the
| reason they wont invest in cutting edge fabs not a lack of
| capital.
| blinkingled wrote:
| Sure, but does it sound more challenging to invest in a spin
| off company than an integrated arm that will deliver revenue
| from inside and outside business? I am sure the shareholders
| would be more agreeable to the latter. Especially when there
| is enough demand for chip making to be almost certain that it
| will not be a huge money loser.
|
| To invest Intel's money in a spinoff fab company while losing
| strategic control over its direction and have little to gain
| from its success doesn't feel all that attractive to me.
| dannyw wrote:
| Intel is already competitive on 10nm (Intel 7) with Alder Lake
| on desktop against AMD; I'm frankly impressed to see what
| Intel's designs on TSMC 3nm will do.
| saberience wrote:
| Only competitive if you don't look at energy usage, Intel
| relies on cranking the energy usage in order to get their
| chips almost to compete with AMD.
| khyryk wrote:
| Alder Lake is more power efficient under low to moderate
| loads, which includes all gaming. It's only less efficient
| under loads pushing it at 100% on all cores when it's on a
| high power limit.
| wtallis wrote:
| Ironically, Alder Lake is only efficient when it doesn't
| have to use the E-cores.
| khyryk wrote:
| Intel's (literally) doubling down on the Atom cores in
| Raptor Lake so they'll have to get it right for them to
| have a Zen 2-esque progression. CPU advances beyond the
| old +5% per generation are pretty exciting.
| api wrote:
| That may depend substantially on process node. 3nm would
| use less power.
| phkahler wrote:
| Sure, but it's not Intel 3nm. AMD is moving to TSMC 5nm
| and will go to 3nm in the future as well. It really
| bothers me when either side compares tomorrows products
| to competitors todays products.
| the_duke wrote:
| Sure, but so would AMD chips, which aren't even on 5nm
| yet.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| I'm suspicious that reliability issues stemming from an
| extreme power draw and level of heat generated when you run
| AVX-512 instructions was the reason for those instructions
| being disabled recently.
|
| >One of the big takeaways from our initial Core i7-11700K
| review was the power consumption under AVX-512 modes, as
| well as the high temperatures. Even with the latest
| microcode updates, both of our Core i9 parts draw lots of
| power.
|
| The Core i9-11900K in our test peaks up to 296 W, showing
| temperatures of 104oC, before coming back down to ~230 W
| and dropping to 4.5 GHz. The Core i7-11700K is still
| showing 278 W in our ASUS board, tempeartures of 103oC, and
| after the initial spike we see 4.4 GHz at the same ~230 W.
|
| There are a number of ways to report CPU temperature. We
| can either take the instantaneous value of a singular spot
| of the silicon while it's currently going through a high-
| current density event, like compute, or we can consider the
| CPU as a whole with all of its thermal sensors. While the
| overall CPU might accept operating temperatures of 105oC,
| individual elements of the core might actually reach 125oC
| instantaneously. So what is the correct value, and what is
| safe?
|
| https://www.anandtech.com/show/16495/intel-rocket-
| lake-14nm-...
| celrod wrote:
| In that particular benchmark (3d particle movement), the
| 11700K performed about 4x better than the AMD 5900X.
| Performance/watt clearly wasn't suffering.
|
| Perhaps it could downlock more to address the wattage
| while still coming well ahead in terms of performance,
| although some older CPUs doing this gave AVX512 a bad
| reputation.
|
| Few workloads are as well optimized to take advantage of
| AVX512 as the 3d particle movement benchmark, so both the
| increases in performance and wattage seen in that
| benchmark are atypical. If they were typical, then AVX512
| would be much more popular.
|
| FWIW, I'm a big fan of wide CPU vector instructions. The
| real reason it was disabled is probably to push people
| like me to buy Saphire Rapids, which I would've favored
| anyway for the extra FMA unit. Although I'll also be
| waiting to see if Zen4 brings AVX512, which some rumors
| have claimed (and others have contradicted).
| GeekyBear wrote:
| One of the failure modes for chips as they move to
| smaller process nodes is electromigration.
|
| >Electromigration is the movement of atoms based on the
| flow of current through a material. If the current
| density is high enough, the heat dissipated within the
| material will repeatedly break atoms from the structure
| and move them. This will create both 'vacancies' and
| 'deposits'. The vacancies can grow and eventually break
| circuit connections resulting in open-circuits, while the
| deposits can grow and eventually close circuit
| connections resulting in short-circuit.
|
| Chips that get very hot are expected to be the first to
| show this sort of failure.
|
| >In Black's equation, which is used to compute the mean
| time to failure of metal lines, the temperature of the
| conductor appears in the exponent
|
| https://www.synopsys.com/glossary/what-is-
| electromigration.h...
| PixyMisa wrote:
| The high-end Alder Lake parts - particularly the 12900K -
| are terrible energy hogs. But as you move down the stack,
| efficiency improves a lot while performance remains very
| competitive with AMD parts in the same price bracket.
| jeffbee wrote:
| My 12700K has core power usage under 1W and package power
| under 4W when it's just sitting there, which is does a
| heck of a lot of. When it's running flat out compiling
| C++ projects on all performance cores, package power is
| ~90W. Single-threaded performance is much better than any
| Ryzen and even beats my M1 Pro. I'm not really seeing the
| energy argument for desktop/workstation usage. For
| datacenter TCO AMD is probably still the champ.
| monocasa wrote:
| I guess I weight datacenter workloads much higher for
| perf/watt because the higher margins there is what funds
| next gen's R&D. Cranking up power to get perf under load
| is a move that cuts off funding streams in one of the
| most capital intensive industries.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Intel still sells 85% of the server market including 75%
| of the megascale cloud market, so at this point it does
| not appear to me that Intel has been strategically
| wounded. I'm sure they have more than enough cash to fund
| R&D at this time.
| monocasa wrote:
| It was 98% of the datacenter market in 2017, and
| apparently the rate of decrease is accelerating, and
| that's even before taking into account that the
| datacenter chip equivalent to your 12700k doesn't come
| out until later this year and that's where you'd expect
| to see the real fall off in DC marketshare.
|
| That money can dry up very quickly.
| jeffbee wrote:
| By no means do I imagine that Intel has everything right
| where they want it. Clearly, they'd prefer to be the
| "machine of the day" at Google, instead of AMD having
| that honor. But, it's also not the first time they've
| been in this position. I would argue they were in much
| more serious trouble in 2008 or so, when it was Itanium
| and NetBurst vs. Opteron, and everyone bought Opteron.
| monocasa wrote:
| Intel still had leading edge node supremacy at that
| point, and everyone go caught with their pants down with
| the end of Dennard scaling. AMD simply lucked out that
| they weren't designing a core to hit 10Ghz in the first
| place (because what would become GloFo didn't have the
| node chops to even pretend that they could hit that in
| the first place even ignoring Dennard scaling issues).
| AMD therefore didn't have to pull slower mobile core
| designs off of the back burner like Intel had to which
| took time to readjust.
|
| Intel's in a much worse position now. Their process woes
| aren't issues that the rest of the industry will hit in a
| year or so like the end of Dennard scaling was.
| dannyw wrote:
| Not really: https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/qwn1
| j9/core_i9129...
|
| The holistic efficiency comparison definitely favours Intel
| on desktop, as Ryzen has heavy idle power usage, due to its
| 12nm I/O die from GloFo.
| thereddaikon wrote:
| idle power draw on desktop isn't a major concern. When
| people talk about power draw in a desktop context its
| really an indirect way to measure heat. Managing thermals
| at heavy load is the most important consideration. And if
| your chip manages to win benchmarks by creating massively
| more heat in the process then that is worth noting.
|
| In laptops idle power draw and heat are far more
| important because they effect system endurance. In fact
| most gains in mobile device power management are with
| lowering idle consumption not load consumption.
| marricks wrote:
| Clearly Intel has huge issues or they wouldn't be making such
| a drastic turn. For some people whatever happens to intel the
| picture is always extremely rosey.
| cs702 wrote:
| In short, Gelsinger and his team are configuring the company so
| Intel's internal manufacturing operations _must earn Intel 's
| business, in competition against every other fab-as-a-service
| provider in the world, including TSMC_.
|
| The risk is obvious: The company's internal manufacturing
| operations can survive only if they figure out how to outperform
| competitors. The upside is that all other parts of Intel stand a
| good chance of surviving and thriving -- but that remains to be
| seen.
|
| Only one thing is certain: Gelsinger and his team have a lot of
| _cojones_.
| lmilcin wrote:
| As an ex-Intel employee it is interesting to see.
|
| This seems to be sound long-term though it may cause
| significant shrink in the business in next couple of years to
| cut lines of business that are not above water.
|
| From the point of view of infinite game it makes a lot of sense
| to diversify and then cut any branch of business that is not
| profitable, before it drags entire company.
|
| While I think it is difficult to predict results, one thing is
| sure -- this will force a lot of change in Intel and we would
| likely not recognise the company ten years from now.
| threatripper wrote:
| This means that Intel manufacturing is used where it makes
| sense and vice versa isn't used where it doesn't make sense.
|
| I can see those general outcomes:
|
| * Intel manufacturing is soon again better than other
| manufacturers in all aspects as it has been a long time. All
| Intel business goes to Intel manufacturing and things return to
| what they were.
|
| * Intel manufacturing is better in some aspects and continues
| to outcompete other manufacturers in some areas. Most Intel
| business goes to Intel manufacturing but some special business
| goes to other manufacturers. Some other companies use Intel
| where they have an advantage. Everybody wins.
|
| * Intel manufacturing cannot keep up with the market leader.
| Most Intel business goes to the leading Fab. Intel
| manufacturing cannot catch up as they don't earn enough money
| to do so. They start cutting costs and compete downmarket with
| lower tier fabs. In the long run Intel becomes fabless.
| opportune wrote:
| I think there is a pretty clear outcome, Intel will go
| fabless for highest end chips and continue as normal with
| everything else. They will have many customers (USG) who will
| require domestically manufactured chips. But they also need
| to compete with AMD, Apple, and friends and this will allow
| them to fab out to TSMC while, for lack of a better term,
| saving face.
| paulpan wrote:
| Agreed except there's only 2 outcomes: #1 (win) or #3 (lose).
| The chips business is a winner-take-all market where if your
| product isn't the best (in efficiency, performance, whatever
| metric), then it can't command a price premium nor the
| attention of OEMs. Also the core business isn't consumer but
| for enterprise/datacenter market where efficiency/performance
| is paramount.
|
| If #1, then everything is rosy and Intel will regain its
| dominance from the days of Sandy Bridge. Its chips will be
| fabricated internally and they get to enjoy the profits from
| vertical integration.
|
| If #3, then Intel will certainly spin off or sell off its
| manufacturing/fabrication business very similar to AMD more
| than a decade ago.
|
| The caveat is that I don't think Intel's problem right now is
| simply a manufacturing issue. Sure their Alder Lake is
| competitive but it's not superior to AMD's offerings or even
| measured against Apple's SOCs. Remember that unlike the last
| iteration (Rocket Lake), Alder Lake doesn't suffer from a
| mismatch in design vs. manufacturing cadence - it's arrived
| as expected.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Another possibility is that the market is changing. The age
| old Xeon/Core/"binned low end" model may not be viable
| anymore as hyperscale cloud providers start to rule and
| people don't care about CPUs as a differentiator. Add in
| COVID chaos and the answers are unclear.
|
| Hell I just replaced thousands of older desktops with slower
| laptop chips -- nobody noticed. Frankly, I only bought new
| devices because of Microsoft's bullshit Windows 11
| requirements.
|
| The guaranteed cash flow train is slowing down, which makes
| setting billions of dollars on fire with high risk fab
| processes a big deal.
|
| Intel had to adapt like this in the early 90s when memory
| became a commodity. We'll see if they make it.
| xt00 wrote:
| Yes, the market is changing -- on all fronts for Intel.
| Many people talk about this being a tech problem, really
| its more like the logic at companies when you hold a close
| to monopoly position -- why invest tons of R&D dollars when
| you can just increment more slowly and make the same
| money.. So they end up with a loss of tech leadership when
| they easily could have had it. The biggest mistake that
| Intel appears to have made was their failure to bring up
| the new 13nm EUV processes at the same rate as TSMC --
| probably they were hoping it would fail, but it did not.
| Now TSMC has done a couple of nodes with EUV and they have
| some customers that are spending tons of money right now
| like Apple, AMD, nvidia, qualcomm, etc and now TSMC is
| flush with cash and have a strong runway in front of them
| -- its like TSMC is already in execution mode while Intel
| is still trying to get things working. Intel basically
| thought, hey lets see how long we can milk our big cloud
| customers with $2000 processors and only minor
| improvements. Those customers realized they could hire a
| chip team themselves and build their own processor for the
| amount of money they were paying Intel each year, so they
| did that. So they got attacked on the enterprise side by
| their own customers making their own chips like Amazon and
| Google, the consumer side by AMD just throwing lots of
| cores at the problem -- and Apple dumping x86 in their
| laptops -- and soon to be others, and they essentially have
| nothing in the mobile space. So they went from being
| dominant 10 years ago to being 2nd place in multiple of
| their core businesses. Clear failure of leadership to
| realize they need to maintain technical supremacy otherwise
| they will not be able to charge the prices they want to
| charge. Now their competitors are shipping chips with 64
| cores and Intel's plan to uber slowly release 16 cores,
| then 20 cores, 24 cores, etc over a 8 year period or
| whatever their plan was is blown up..
| seanp2k2 wrote:
| I'm still bullish on $AMD to break much further into the
| enterprise space. So many AWS instances still run on
| Xeons. That's slowly changing, especially now with stuff
| like Graviton , but I think AMD can go much higher just
| on enterprise.
| rjzzleep wrote:
| > Hell I just replaced thousands of older desktops with
| slower laptop chips -- nobody noticed. Frankly, I only
| bought new devices because of Microsoft's bullshit Windows
| 11 requirements.
|
| Big enterprises think like that yeah, because they can't
| get their crappy Dell Inspirons to new employees anymore.
|
| Personally I just had to get a Ryzen laptop replacement
| temporarily because Lenovo took too long to repair my
| thinkpad. And the result was delightful. Better sound,
| fantastic compile times, beautiful screen for half the
| price of my thinkpad. Next time I'll get a cheap Ryzen and
| if it breaks just buy a replacement device instead of
| relying on a pro intel enterprise device with crappy
| overpriced enterprise service.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Agreed - but that's a problem for Intel, as they need
| enterprises to lap up those shitty Dell laptops to keep
| the throughput going!
|
| NYC Public Schools buy like 200,000 computers a year. A
| decade ago, it was probably 50% higher due to faster
| refresh cycles. There are a lot more big dumb enterprise
| endpoints than you might think. When I sold computers in
| college to commercial customers, the average refresh was
| 30-40 months. Now it's closer to 60.
| acdha wrote:
| > Hell I just replaced thousands of older desktops with
| slower laptop chips -- nobody noticed.
|
| This is certainly plausible if these were mostly Office
| users but how confident are you that you'd know if they did
| notice? Most of the large IT departments I've interacted
| with would post glowing self-evaluations while the users
| had plenty of complaints and/or were doing their real work
| on personal devices. Depending on how the business is
| structured and the relationships, this can be hard to
| measure without a fair amount of effort -- I've heard
| people say they weren't going to report something because
| they didn't think it was worth the effort or they were sure
| that the IT people would notice and fix it.
| chasil wrote:
| The problem that the industry faces is that the economics and
| reliability of these chips have been undermined on the recent
| nodes.
|
| Sophie Wilson has said that cost-per-transistor is rising
| since we shrank below 22nm, and that a 7nm die cannot run
| more than half of its transistors at the same time without
| melting.
|
| Sophie addresses the cost rise at 22:00.
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zX4ZNfvw1cw
|
| Heat is more of a problem because finfet can't dissipate as
| well as planar, and reliability is declining at smaller
| nodes.
|
| "With a planar device, you do not have to bother about self-
| heating. There are a lot of ways to dissipate heat with a
| planar device, but with finFETs that is not the case. The
| heat gets trapped and there are few chances for that heat to
| get dissipated."
|
| https://semiengineering.com/chip-aging-becomes-design-
| proble...
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29889951
|
| If I needed a 20-year service life, I would not choose 7nm.
|
| Edit: I did not realize that ARM1 had fewer transistors
| (~25k) than the 8086 (29k), and over ten times less than the
| 80386 (275k). Intel should have bought ARM in the 80s;
| instead Olivetti got them.
| bentcorner wrote:
| Anecdotally, I recently had a CPU fail for the first time
| and it was a 7nm one. Sent it to AMD, they verified the
| failure and sent a new one back. Meanwhile I have had
| assorted 22nm/14nm processors around the house chugging
| along for years without any issues.
| monocasa wrote:
| > Sophie Wilson has said that cost-per-transistor is rising
| since we shrank below 22nm
|
| The data has been saying otherwise. 5nm is the only node
| that increased $/transistor beyond it's previous node
| (7nm), and that's at a time when Apple payed out the ass
| for a monopoly on the node except testing shuttle runs from
| competitors but isn't a sign of a fundamental increase in
| cost.
|
| https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/Unwdy4CoCC6A6Gn4JE38Hc-97
| 0...
|
| > and that a 7nm die cannot run more than half of its
| transistors at the same time without melting.
|
| That's true for trying to run multiGhz designs in classic
| plastic package BGAs like most cell phone chips, but that's
| been true for a while, hence why flip chip packages are a
| thing. Actually having a heat spreader connected to the die
| goes a long way.
|
| Wilson's comments aren't incorrect from a certain point of
| view, but tend to get extrapolated out of her niche to the
| greater industry in a way that pushes the statements into
| inaccuracy.
| chasil wrote:
| Thanks, the cost per wafer does look convincing. I wonder
| where Wilson's figures emerged.
| [deleted]
| monocasa wrote:
| I think what's happening is that initially a node is more
| expensive, because of consolidation of the market and
| supply/demand amongst all of the fabless customers until
| capacity fully comes up. Once we're back into steady
| state we see the traditional economics of $/transistor
| falling.
|
| That sort of coincides with TSMC having competitive,
| close to leading edge nodes (so the 28nm timeframe) which
| would line up with the rumor. The information simply
| hasn't been updated over the timeframe of the node.
| Previous to that the cost of the node was pretty fixed as
| long as someone like ARM cared about, now there's a lot
| more economic effects from the increased buyer
| competition that heavily changes final cost over time.
| chasil wrote:
| I believe her talk was from late 2017, so 7nm would have
| been expensive.
|
| At the same time, AFAIK Intel was doing quite well at
| 14nm finfet even then (likely better than any other
| foundry?), but that production capacity was not available
| to ARM, so I guess it didn't count.
| monocasa wrote:
| Yeah exactly. I want to be clear, I've got a tremendous
| amount of respect for Sophie Wilson; she's a much better
| engineer and more connected to how the industry is going.
| Her statements simply require a lot more caveats than
| they are normally given. It's more about the much the
| changing position of ARM and TSMC in the market place
| than anything else.
|
| > At the same time, AFAIK Intel was doing quite well at
| 14nm finfet even then (likely better than any other
| foundry?), but that production capacity was not available
| to ARM, so I guess it didn't count.
|
| Yeah, and Intel was right in the middle of their biggest
| misstep. Intel 10nm was in risk production for Cannon
| Lake with awful yields and therefore a huge $/transistor.
| It got shipped anyway as one SKU in May of 2018 that
| didn't make financial sense (there's rumors that
| management bonuses were tied to that release), before
| being relegated to process improvements for years until
| just recently.
|
| It would have been fair for her to extrapolate a trend
| there that actually ended up being more complex in
| hindsight.
| seanp2k2 wrote:
| We're going to need stuff like processors with built-in
| microfluidic cooling layers. Why not have club sandwich
| construction with every other layer working on heat
| extraction, power, or both? I see a future with cube-shaped
| processors with hundreds of layers.
| threatripper wrote:
| This problem is not specific to Intel. Many chips are not
| using the smallest node sizes and old fabs get a second
| life producing those chips instead of CPUs. That could soon
| be the future for Intel fabs.
| monocasa wrote:
| That's where a fab goes to die. It needs to be fully
| capitalized at that point or else you don't have the
| money for R&D on leading edge. Intel going this direction
| is the direction of GloFo and no longer even attempting
| leading edge node production in the US anymore.
| me_me_me wrote:
| Fabless scenario will not happen, ever.
|
| One simple reason that similarly to aeronautics chip
| manufactures are critical industries for US.
|
| US government will not let either one die.
| credit_guy wrote:
| Does an Arizona fab of TSMC count as an American fab?
| threatripper wrote:
| We don't need small nodes for military/aero chips. It would
| suffice to keep some old fabs running to secure supply. The
| US needs fabs but they don't need Intel as a company.
|
| Splitting out the fab business and letting it run into the
| red however could incentivize the government to save the
| fabs and the jobs with billions of bailout money while the
| other Intel continues to rake in money with TSMC chips.
| alrs wrote:
| This assumes that US military has no need for servers,
| desktops, or mobile devices.
| threatripper wrote:
| Which will be covered by fabs built on US soil which
| presumably are contractually obliged to manufacture chips
| for the military on demand. (And obliged to take the
| precautions to be able to do so.) Some of them can be
| (ex) Intel fabs, some TSMC or Samsung. I don't see any
| hard necessity for Intel to keep their fabs in house when
| there are other solutions.
| me_me_me wrote:
| Literally every sentence is out of touch and outright
| wrong. I don't even know where to start.
|
| > We don't need small nodes for military/aero chips. It
| would suffice to keep some old fabs running to secure
| supply.
|
| What? How do you think the military works, via smoke
| signals? They need computer, a LOT of computers to
| operate day to day. And that PCs for just boring clerk
| work. Not to mention the idea that old chips would
| somehow be good enough to keep up technologically, both
| military and economically.
|
| > The US needs fabs but they don't need Intel as a
| company.
|
| Oh yeah? They will just a walk a engineer corps to a fab
| and have them press big red manufacture button few
| million times to make enough chips right? Can't be more
| difficult than that...
| threatripper wrote:
| What is the problem with an Intel design manufactured in
| a TSMC fab built on US soil? There will be fabs on US
| soil in the future but they might not be owned by Intel.
| me_me_me wrote:
| hmmm I dunno... maybe China taking Taiwan and banning all
| export of electronics to US, leaving US with pants down
| monocasa wrote:
| If China invades Taiwan, the rumor is that Taiwan's
| strategy is to scuttle everything at the last second so
| China isn't additionally incentivized to invade just to
| get the electronics manufacturing infrastructure.
|
| So there won't be any electronics manufacturing to ban at
| all, but it leaves the US in the same place.
| Kon-Peki wrote:
| It probably depends on whether the chip is a commodity
| chip or something special
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Traffic_in_Ar
| ms_...
| thereddaikon wrote:
| The military doesn't just need chips for cruise missiles
| and radars. There has actually been a big push the last
| 20 years to move a lot of systems to COTS architectures.
| An Arleigh Burke destroyer uses Xeon powered blade
| servers to run its Aegis combat system not some weird
| proprietary chip from the 80s.
|
| The level of computerization and networking is going up
| in the military so the needs will only increase. Intel's
| CONUS fabs are a national security concern.
| monocasa wrote:
| Increasingly we do. The military is very much embracing
| edge compute currently.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _US government will not let either one die_
|
| This isn't Intel's shareholders' problem. Split the
| businesses. If the U.S. wants to bail out Intel's fabs, let
| them. (Though a better strategy would be a general subsidy
| for anyone building fabs in America, which should be a
| thing.)
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| > Intel's internal manufacturing operations must earn Intel's
| business
|
| This is putting lots of high-level employee's future earnings
| on the line in a far more direct manner. It will be interesting
| to see if they accept this challenge, or fight it in order to
| accept the slow decay that will still ensure at least a longer-
| term personal financial gain (i.e., instead of failing in 2
| years, failing slowly over 10).
| skynetv2 wrote:
| This was always the case. If anyone tells you otherwise, they
| do not know. In fact, every team at Intel operates as a P&L
| ruthlessly, not just manufacturing.
| strikelaserclaw wrote:
| decoupling
| blihp wrote:
| I don't see it as that much of a risk. One of the reasons Intel
| has so thoroughly dominated for so long was that they were at
| least at parity to slightly ahead on process nodes. If they
| don't get back there fast, they are in real trouble. Intel
| likes to command a price premium and you can't do that in
| second place.
| threatripper wrote:
| I think some of the advantage comes from synergies of having
| microarchitecture development and process development under
| one roof. You can fine tune them together to get the best
| performance/power ratio. Even if both alone are just on par
| with the competition, together they are still ahead by a few
| iterations. Also they get out new products a bit faster.
|
| The problem is that by switching to another fab they lose
| these advantages.
| DCKing wrote:
| > The company's internal manufacturing operations can survive
| only if they figure out how to outperform competitors.
|
| Is outperforming competitors necessary for Intel's survival?
| There's plenty of fabs in the world doing quite alright well
| behind TSMC, the vast majority of which can't even come close
| to Intel's current capabilities [1]. Even if Intel never
| succeeds with their existing process roadmap - which is _not_
| on pace to beat TSMC - they still possess some of the most
| advanced chip manufacturing processes in a world that 's all
| the more dependant on chip manufacturing.
|
| GlobalFoundries got out of the race on 14nm - a 14nm not as
| good as Intel's 14nm and far behind Intel's 10nm - and is still
| posting YoY revenue growth, despite losing much of the volume
| they were producing for AMD over the last few years.
|
| In addition to that, I suppose that even if Intel merely
| succeeds in roughly keeping up with TSMC and Samsung (their
| current 10nm being on par with Samsung's and TSMC's 7nm would
| classify as "roughly keeping up", I think) there's American
| national security interests at play. _Especially_ so if Intel
| 's manufacturing capabilities are accessible to (American)
| third parties. No way the powers that be would let Intel's
| manufacturing plants go under.
|
| It's a pretty bold strategy at face value, but I think it's
| actually a pretty straightforward choice and the risks aren't
| all that existential.
|
| [1]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricat...
| seanp2k2 wrote:
| >No way the powers that be would let Intel's manufacturing
| plants go under.
|
| Perhaps that's part of the calculus too; if they know that
| Uncle Sam will backstop any failures, are they not also
| making the same play as their competitors were in the 80s?
| The problem is that by the mid-1980s Japanese competitors
| were producing more reliable memory at lower costs
| (allegedly) backed by unlimited funding from the
| Japanese government, and Intel was struggling to compete...
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _Intel 's internal manufacturing operations must earn Intel's
| business, in competition against every other fab-as-a-service
| provider in the world, including TSMC._
|
| I think this might be an interesting retrospective application
| of _The Innovator 's Solution_'s 'be willing to cannibalize
| revenue streams in-order to avoid disruption.'
| kelp wrote:
| It seems like echos of, and a less drastic version of the
| AMD/Global Foundries split.
|
| And then Global Foundries couldn't keep up, cancelled their 7nm
| work, and AMD has been sending more and more business to TSMC.
| bsder wrote:
| > In short, Gelsinger and his team are configuring the company
| so Intel's internal manufacturing operations must earn Intel's
| business, in competition against every other fab-as-a-service
| provider in the world, including TSMC.
|
| This is a monumentally stupid idea and, even worse, _we have
| seen it before_. Every company that has done this in the past
| is _gone_.
|
| I would say that every VLSI designer in Intel should be
| printing their resumes, but I'm pretty sure that the decent
| ones left long ago.
|
| In addition, this _completely_ throws away the advantage that
| having a fab brings at a time when it 's finally important.
|
| Fabless works great when you can push a synthesis button every
| 18 months and your chip doubles in speed. Smart design can't
| keep up with that.
|
| However, once Moore's Law stops and you can't run every
| transistor without melting your chip, suddenly design matters
| again. You want to be able to do creative things with a bit of
| tweak from your fab.
| ksec wrote:
| >Only one thing is certain: Gelsinger and his team have a lot
| of cojones.
|
| Trained and mentored by Andy Grove. Disciple of the old school
| "Only the paranoid survive". I expect nothing less.
|
| I hope someday he could do the next unthinkable, Once their
| foundry could at least compete against Samsung, open up the x86
| ISA. Or clean up the ISA and call it something like AE86. In
| the very long term, x86 is pretty much dead. By 2030 you would
| expect all hyperscaler to be on ARM with x86 serving some minor
| legacy clients. You have PC manufacture eager to compete with
| Apple and ChromeBook. So x86 could loss up to 50% of its
| current volume by 2030. Then a long tail of 10 - 15 years
| decline.
| alfor wrote:
| - The PC is in decline (bad for intel)
|
| - Intel lost the mobile platform
|
| - Apple is moving to ARM, PC laptops to follow soon.
|
| - AMD is eating intel lunch in the high performance x86
|
| - Servers are starting to move to ARM
|
| Last piece of the puzzle - Intel is not doing great at the fab
| level.
|
| It doesn't look good for Intel, they need to do a radical
| transformation fast.
|
| Innovate now or die.
| neogodless wrote:
| I agree with many of your points, however...
|
| > - Apple is moving to ARM, PC laptops to follow soon.
|
| > - AMD is eating intel lunch in the high performance x86
|
| That first one really needs... a source? It's a guess, but far
| from a certainty!
|
| The second one is partially true? AMD has greatly increased
| their market share and is much more competitive with Intel than
| they were 5 years earlier. They are not _beating_ Intel in
| market share, but they are gaining on them. They recently had
| leads in performance, but it 's not a one-sided race.
| silvestrov wrote:
| The first is true to a degree if "PC laptops" includes the
| laptops kids use in schools: a lot of schools have switched
| to ChromeBooks due to price and ease of management.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| The more I have seen of big tech companies, the more I think they
| need to split up from time to time. Complacency and ossification
| emerge as a product of scale. If you want to avoid them, reduce
| your scale. If your manufacturing engineers (really, the
| managers) need to be at the cutting edge of manufacturing or be
| out of a job, they will figure out how to get there.
|
| Intel has had a number of embarrassing technology misses that
| have put them behind: the first I remember was through-silicon
| vias for 3D stacking and it was only a matter of time before they
| missed something necessary for an advanced fab, and they missed
| on EUV.
|
| Their foundry engineers at the same time were recruiting more
| engineers out of school on the basis that they were the "best in
| the world." They thought their position was unassailable because
| they had high yield at 22 nm, so they rested on their laurels and
| missed technology after technology before it bit them.
| airstrike wrote:
| > The more I have seen of big tech companies, the more I think
| they need to split up from time to time.
|
| This is somewhat true of every industry. Industrial companies
| in particular are always playing the game of conglomerization
| vs. specialization. But I agree it will definitely be
| interesting to see this play out in Tech in the near future
| threatripper wrote:
| There is little information available on what was actually
| going on inside Intel. All big companies have big problems and
| each single division or working group is not indicative of the
| company as a whole. You can find several people with good and
| bad experience painting all kinds of pictures. A single voice
| won't tell you the whole picture. Probable even the leaders of
| Intel don't really know exactly where they are standing.
|
| Of course all companies go through cycles of explosive growth,
| ossification and renewal. Small companies often die because too
| much of the company goes sour at the same time. In big
| companies this can be more spread out over time and space and
| there's always enough left to rebuild the leadership from the
| inside and push out new profitable products in time.
|
| That being said I don't have any indication that Intel right
| now is in a particularly good position. Nobody in the
| engineering area seems to feel too honored for having worked at
| Intel. Yet, they got 10nm finally working and continue to rake
| in money. Of great concern to me is that much of that money is
| paid out to investors instead of reinvesting it into the
| company. There doesn't seem to be a convincing plan of growing
| the business in the future. Also they did not admit that they
| have a serious problem at their hands for a long time. You just
| can't trust anything that Intel releases; it's just a rosy
| projection of the future when everything goes as planned.
|
| Unless a group of senior Ex-Intel get together and tell their
| war-stories we won't know what actually was going on inside.
| pm90 wrote:
| How to fix Intel:
|
| 1. Lobby the US Government and public to increase public spending
| on manufacturing semiconductors in the US
|
| 2. Corner most of those subsidies/funding
|
| 3. Done
|
| Only partially joking; Why has Intel not made the over reliance
| of overseas fabs a natsec issue?
| khyryk wrote:
| It has, now it's waiting for money from the CHIPS Act, which is
| now in the House.
| awill wrote:
| I'm always confused when I hear reviewers say that Intel is back
| on top.
|
| They beat AMD's benchmarks at ~double the power. I get it's
| winning, but it's not a fair fight. I certainly don't want my
| computer to be 10% faster at double the wattage.
| magila wrote:
| The whole "double the power of AMD" meme is an
| oversimplification at best. It's all based on a 12900K running
| a heavy multi-core load with an increased power limit. This is
| the ultimate "I don't care about power efficiency" setup so
| it's kind of silly to knock it for drawing lots of power.
|
| If you care about power efficiency you can drop the power limit
| and still be very competitive with AMD. The only reason you
| don't see Ryzen CPUs drawing the same power as a maxed out
| 12900K is because if you pumped that much power into a Ryzen
| CPU it would explode (at least without LN2 being involved).
| pradn wrote:
| For home use, that's fine. I don't worry about the power peak
| usage of my computer since it rarely gets to that level. For
| servers, that's a no-go.
| neogodless wrote:
| I think there's another way to word this or spin this...
|
| For home use, it's going to depend on the consumer. Some
| people want a chip that's easy to power and cool, and still
| gets 80/90/95% of the performance. Some people want the
| _absolute best performer_ (for their specific uses) with less
| regard to cooling and power.
| pradn wrote:
| I think peak performance, even if it gets thermo-throttled
| quickly, is important. Web site JS parsing during loading
| is like that, and that's an essential function of my
| computer these days. And perhaps for bursty sections of AAA
| games as well.
|
| But yes, it depends on the user.
| acomjean wrote:
| Reviewers like a good comeback story. And intel is doing much
| better than it was doing before (I own machines with both types
| of CPUs). And intel did some different things with the new
| chips (2 different core types.), so interesting.
|
| AMD hadn't released there new chips when some of that stuff was
| written. but its actually a little bit exciting that
| competition has returned and I suspect it will be good for
| consumers as long as both chip makers have competitive
| products.
| wmf wrote:
| Alder Lake is efficient at the low end; the 12100 and 12400 are
| really good against AMD.
| mwcampbell wrote:
| > if tomorrow morning the world's great chip companies were to
| agree to stop advancing the technology, Moore's Law would be
| repealed by tomorrow evening, leaving the next few decades with
| the task of mopping up all of its implications.
|
| On the one hand, if this happened, it could be good for putting
| an end to the routine obsolescence of electronics. Then maybe we
| could get to the future that bunnie predicted roughly 10 years
| ago [1], complete with heirloom laptops.
|
| On the other hand, ongoing advances in semiconductor technology
| let us solve real problems -- not just in automation that makes
| the rich richer, enables mass surveillance, and possibly takes
| away jobs, but in areas that actually make people's lives better,
| such as accessibility. If Moore's Law had stopped before the SoC
| in the iPhone 3GS had been introduced, would we have smartphones
| with built-in screen readers for blind people? If it had stopped
| before the Apple A12 in 2018, would the iOS VoiceOver screen
| reader be able to use on-device machine learning to provide
| access to apps that weren't designed to be accessible? (Edit:
| A9-based devices could run iOS 14, but not with this feature.)
| What new problems will be solved by further advances in
| semiconductors? I don't know, but I know I shouldn't wish for an
| end to those advances. I just wish we could have them without
| ever-increasing software bloat that leads to obsolete hardware.
|
| [1]:' https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?page_id=1927
| lvl100 wrote:
| I am pretty bearish on the the semi space especially after TSMC
| comments last week. I really think they're expanding at the worst
| possible time. Understandably, this is largely due to politics.
| [deleted]
| altcognito wrote:
| I can't quite grasp why anyone would be bearish on the semi
| space. It's been non-stop growth for the past four decades and
| only appears to be accelerating.
|
| What in the world is there to be "bearish" about?
| acomjean wrote:
| I'm not the original poster. But I'm guessing that the
| reasoning is: there might be more capacity than needed so
| that would drive profits down. Cheap chips seem like a great
| thing to me, but I'm not selling them.
|
| But at this point when there putting chips in everything its
| hard not to see the market expanding to meet increased
| capacity. (I think some greating cards have chips in them to
| control music/lights....)
| mrintellectual wrote:
| Having worked at Intel before, I can safely say that it's
| difficult to boil down Intel's problems to a single issue (e.g.
| chip manufacturing). Stagnant company culture, limited growth
| opportunities within the company, and a fanatical focus on
| selling CPUs instead of innovating are all problems that Intel
| currently faces.
| hedgehog wrote:
| The conversation is also muddied by varying definitions of
| success and failure. Intel isn't going to go broke in any
| foreseeable future but they may lose the premium margins they
| used to earn for having the best performing product. To the
| extent fab advantage drove that advantage (likely a big part)
| and that advantage is not coming back (because they no longer
| have a scale advantage) then maybe the premium margins will
| never come back. That's what investors worry about.
| anonporridge wrote:
| Limited growth opportunities seems like a big problem that can
| kill any organization.
|
| Specifically if leadership gets ossified and there's no
| realistic path for ambitious young people to rise into
| positions of power and responsibility.
|
| When this happens, the ambitious young people are more likely
| to vote with the feet and build a competing organization that
| they will actually have power running.
|
| This is especially problematic when it happens in government.
| What are young people in America supposed to do when the
| political conversation can't break out of asking which of near
| geriatric octogenarian who had a childhood with rotary phones
| should be our next president?
|
| Our culture seems to have lost the very important feature that
| there comes a time when you've had your turn at the helm, and
| now you need to step down and support new leadership.
| gumby wrote:
| I think Thompson says this (while talking about a series of
| lackluster CEOs) and says the topic of the "split" is a
| consequence of that, which has to be fixed (and is merely one
| of the problems)
| klelatti wrote:
| Problem is the less product Intel pushes through its own fabs the
| less investment they will get and the more they will fall behind.
|
| This feels like a defensive / short term value maximisation
| strategy - and might be the right one in terms of total value. It
| doesn't feel like a long term vote of confidence.
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| >less product Intel pushes through its own fabs
|
| that's the problem the article mentioned. Intel is an IDM. they
| developed their own tools/process and it gave Intel an edge
| during the early years of the semis industry.
|
| however, it look like the industry catch up to Intel. Intel's
| own tools/process is no longer enough and in fact it became an
| technical debt.
|
| Intel split into two allowed Intel's foundry to use standard
| equipment/software thus no needs to waste money on building its
| own tools.
| klelatti wrote:
| Why can't they migrate to industry standard tools whilst
| keeping their business in house?
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| no conflict of interest with Intel's foundry customers.
| klelatti wrote:
| Not sure I understand your point here. They will need to
| migrate to industry standard tools for foundry customers
| anyway.
|
| Seems to me that planning to place more business with
| TSMC is essentially an admission that they don't expect
| to be competitive with TSMC in the near future. And
| Gelsinger has more visibility on this than anyone.
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| >They will need to migrate to industry standard tools for
| foundry customers anyway.
|
| foundry is about trust. lets say AMD want to use Intel
| foundry, how can you be sure the Intel's design side
| won't take a peek at AMD's x86 design. your fabless
| customers spend million on design and their design is
| their life blood. how they going to trust you if you also
| sell semis.
|
| example: Samsung used to make chip for iphone. Apple
| ditched them as soon as Samsung compete with Apple w/its
| own smartphone.
|
| TSMC have over 50% of the market share because they only
| do one thing and one thing only.
| prewett wrote:
| Intel can already peak at AMD's designs, just take the
| cover off and dissolve off the layers one by one. It's
| probably about as helpful getting your competitor's
| source code; figuring out what's going on probably takes
| longer than figuring out how to do it yourself. Maybe
| worse, since everything is so low-level in hardware, it'd
| make assembly look like a high-level language. I'm no
| hardware designer, but I expect that the results of tape-
| out are roughly the same as the results of etching off
| the layers: they need to create masks for each layer,
| specify the composition of the layer, etc. And then after
| understanding it, you still have to implement it and get
| started fabbing it. So I'm not sure that fabbing your
| competitor's product is a huge risk.
|
| I think Apple stopping using Samsung is more related to
| Apple's higher-level issues: why do business with someone
| you accuse of violating your design patents. Not because
| you think they'll copy your IP, but out of principle.
| There's no IP-related reason Apple needed to stop buying
| screens from Samsung; Apple has never manufactured
| screens.
| benreesman wrote:
| Intel blew EUV, which fair enough, it's hard as hell. Are there
| other problems, sure, but when you go from leading-edge process
| technology to a two node lag, you're fucked either way.
|
| This article is rambling and over-complicated.
|
| For a much more insightful and compelling view into Intel at its
| greatest I recommend "The Pentium Chronicles".
| [deleted]
| throwaway4good wrote:
| I don't get it - who would use intel as a fab? How would they
| competitive? And trustworthy in the sense, not doing competing
| designs in house?
| wbsss4412 wrote:
| People who need to make chips?
|
| It's not like there is an excess of capacity right now, and
| there are only a small number of players that even offer what
| intel has available.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Well first off, Intel themselves; they sell millions of chips a
| year. Given the current chip crisis, after their own capacity
| they would sell off the rest to the highest bidder. I don't
| think they would be shy of customers, except for direct
| competitors. But keep in mind that CPUs represent only part of
| the semiconductor market.
| intev wrote:
| Microsoft? Maybe another phone maker who can't secure
| manufacturing with TSMC? They will clearly be tier II for a
| while, but I think there's enough chip design companies out
| there vying for manufacturing capacity.
| dannyw wrote:
| Apple buys screens and other components from Samsung
| (potentially giving them an early look into the next iPhone's
| form factor, visual design, and specs); the supply chain is
| built around trust.
| jacobr1 wrote:
| Those who want to manufacture their chips locally (US or EU).
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| Apple will ditch TSMC if someone else offer better node and
| cheaper price.
|
| there is no loyalty. Apple will ditch you if they can get
| cheaper price or you are competing with them like Samsung.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| > who would use intel as a fab?
|
| We've got a very serious shortage of fab capacity right now
| that will probably last for at least 2 or 3 more years. The
| answer would be anyone who needs fab capacity of the sort Intel
| can provide (not likely AMD of course, though I could see Apple
| giving it a try).
| pwthornton wrote:
| I think that's the wrong question. Who would use Intel as a
| cutting edge fab? Unclear. But plenty of people would love
| access to a fab for their non-cutting edge needs.
|
| The risk with this is that Intel will become a fab for older,
| less expensive chips, while TSMC and others gobble up the top
| tier stuff.
|
| But the world needs more, not less, fab capacity, and there are
| plenty of people would gladly use Intel for their needs if the
| opportunity was there.
| ac29 wrote:
| Additionally, only 23% of TSMCs revenue comes from their most
| cutting edge 5nm process as of the most recent quarter [0].
| Everything else is 7nm or larger, which Intel is capable of
| doing today. In the scenario where Intel remains a major node
| behind TSMC, there is still a lot of fab business they could
| pick up.
|
| [0] https://twitter.com/IanCutress/status/1481581119740989440
| /ph...
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| bottom line: Intel's edge is an technical debt.
|
| Intel's own tools/process used to give them an edge over everyone
| else during the early years in the semis industry. Overtime, tool
| suppliers have catch up with Intel and Intel is falling behind
| due to their own tools delay/insufficient.
|
| Intel's own tools is losing out to commodity and standardized
| tools
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