It might have been hubris at having been at the cutting edge of fab tech for so long. It could have just been the fruits of pushing the envelope - sometimes what you predict will happen when you put theory to application proves false.

It has warped their business heavily for 4+ years now, but in the same way AMD had to "get their act together" with their processor design after Bulldozer failed spectacularly in practice and took ~7 years to fix it companies at these scales cannot turn on a dime - Intel had their roadmap planned a decade in advance, and to have it so thoroughly trashed starting around ~2015-2016 will require until at least 2021 to correct in all likelihood.

0: https://www.anandtech.com/show/13405/intel-10nm-cannon-lake-...

The GPU was disabled because it is those blocks which are the most problematic yield wise.

But isn't the whole die exposed and otherwise processed as a whole piece? Very much not deeply educated here and can't justify the investment to change that, my primary mental models for defects are either something that takes out a whole die, like one lithography step being misaligned, or spot damage like a piece of dust.

But there are clearly issues in between that are statistical inside a die, I recall Semiaccurate saying one of Nvidia or AMD did a GPU tape out to a TSMC process where they duplicated vias because that process' were iffy, and they compensated with a less dense design where either one or two working was OK. If Intel is suffering that sort of problem, then the GPU is a big part of the die that can be fused out while you still have something useful. If all your CPUs or all your L3 cache banks fail, a working GPU is pointless.

That article points out two particularly suspect things Intel is uniquely trying at this node: SAQP for the metal layers, which I've seen cited before, and which they generically officially blame, and cobalt in interconnects. And at least one other thing was mentioned as suspect, and four new things total.

One ray of hope is mentioned for Intel, in that they were the most aggressive in the industry with their 14nm and 10nm nodes, and in both cases paid the price in yields, while they're being conservative for their 7nm node, no doubt because EUV is a very big step for everyone. Semiaccurate also commented and/or theorized that a compelling reason Intel is continuing to work on their 10nm at one fab is that one or more things in it are also going to be used in their 7nm, so they might as well debug them now and there, and sell some chips while they're at it.

Now to do some catching up on SemiWiki, thanks!

But perhaps there's something I'm missing here. Is there a misconception or lack of information here on my end that needs to be clarified? I can only make my analysis largely as an outsider looking in when talking about semiconductors.

The spoiler though is that different architectures have different scaling properties and limitations. IBM's Power architecture has already scaled past where Intel is, not because of the semiconductor process, but because the architecture is more streamlined. ARM is somewhere in the middle, it started off pretty streamlined but it has been adding warts (special instructions) to more directly compete with Intel and that creates impediments to scaling.

So much so that we're now we're down to two companies in the whole world who are successfully executing the smallest CPU nodes, unless Intel manages to make their "10nm" work, or pulls off their "7nm".

While we're hearing the very roughly equivalent TSMC "5nm" node is starting risk production (https://wccftech.com/tsmc-5nm-production-euv/ beta testing, you might say, someone outside of TSMC has to be the first, second, etc. to try to get real world dies that work on a new node). Intel isn't saying anything, but Semiaccurate has reported at least two fab lines that were slated to move to their 10nm are installing lots of EUV equipment consistent with using them for their 7nm node (and at least one fab moving back to 14nm).

Intel is struggling because of their struggles with 10nm. Apple and AMD are not because TSMC has pulled off 7nm. Architecture matters, but process node matters a lot too.

They compounded their problems by essentially stopping microarchitecture development on 14nm, which is why eg. their laptop processors still don't support LPDDR4, and they're still shipping basically the same CPU core they released in 2015. Coupling microarchitecture and fabrication development has at times been an advantage for Intel, but for the past few years it's been a huge mistake, and they've promised changes to their design processes so that they don't get stuck like this again in the future if fab advances aren't ready when new microarchitectures are.

TSMC naturally doesn't have this problem, because they're a pure play foundry. Their customers have to each make their own bets on when new fab processes will be truly ready, and how well they will perform in practice.

But it's a brittle model, if a company screws up a node and is too messed up to handle the failure gracefully, as Intel is doing with their "10nm", no doubt with pride as a factor. And it's not uncommon for institutions to permanently lose abilities, I'm not counting on Intel succeeding with their "7nm" node.

On the third hand, we're now down to 2-3 high end CPU fab companies, Samsung, TSMC, and maybe Intel. That also can be a brittle thing.

I don't think any of this represents a short-term problem for Intel, other than the general downturn in processor sales because fewer people will need to upgrade. But I think it represents a very serious long-term threat.

They have some really cool technical advances, like 3D xpoint. But I'm concerned that they do so badly on embedded and custom integration from a long-term perspective.

Also, Apple doesn't make its own A-series processors - it uses TSMC for that.

I don't know enough about this, but the GP's argument of "Intel hit the wall first because they were the first to reach that level of performance" makes logical sense to me.

Yes, Safari, but iPhones do compete with your average desktop processor (not the top end).

https://macdailynews.com/2018/09/23/apples-iphone-xs-is-fast...

Don't forget that Intel CPUs have things that A CPUs are missing like QuickSync, AVX2, massive PCIe interconnectivity.

Whether the A-series CPU could be modified into something competitive on that front is yet to be seen. Whether this actually matters considering the state of our compilers and software development is yet another question.

And as you said, you're comparing the top-of-the-line iPhone to an "average" CPU.

They really don't. A12 added a couple of instructions for floating point conversions, but contrary to claims making rounds on Twitter at the time, they were not even generated by WebKit when the benchmarks were run.

In terms of architecture and vulnerabilities, it's not prudent to bet Intel chips are more vulnerable to exploits than others - it's just that we know more about those vulnerabilities. If you want to find vulnerabilities with high impact in cloud and enterprise data centers, Intel Xeon CPUs will be your primary research target.

It's also naive to dismiss the possibility for Intel to have learnt a lot from some of the failures in 10nm that will prove useful in accelerating node development in the future.

We've yet to see how competitive they'll be once Intel leapfrogs that 10nm node. That's assuming that they can, of course...

I wouldn't expect any massive leads in any industry to last for long. This might just be regression to the mean.

They still seem to be producing the fastest processors available for desktop and server.

It doesnt matter if someone else is making even a 3nm chip if the chip still can't outperform the current offerings.

They aren't comparable between AMD and Intel. They absolutely are comparable between Intel and Intel.

It's eking. Eke, eked, eking.

Tell me when they have really fallen. Still very far from it.

In technology, downward swings of fate tend to come fast and hard. The camera world went from 100% film to 100% digital in the space of about five years, which extinguished Kodak. Or consider Palm/Nokia/ Blackberry, who went from collectively owning the entire mobile market to dead as doorknobs in even less time.

It’s easy to see how it happens to Intel too: AMD’s big-core-count chips start eating up server business, while ARM takes over PCs (at this point people consider it all but certain Apple is switching to ARM in the next few years, and Microsoft is building Windows on ARM as a hedge), and without another business for Intel to fall back on (they’ve shut down modems, mobile chips, and anything else that could’ve been a new source of revenue), that’s the end.

I’m not saying it’s certain, but I’m saying it’s totally possible and their current market share means nothing.

performance benchmarks mean even less when those security issues are band-aided by performance metric-hurting-workarounds.