Apple, ARM, and Intel

Re:Apple, ARM, and Intel by tarlinian on Tuesday June 16, 2020 @11:56AM (#23540668)

IMO your last statement is kind of ridiculous. Intel is literally the only company that does high volume wafer manufacturing in the US at anything approaching leading edge geometries. Are there any other American companies the government could even realistically support? (The only other US company that has any modern wafer fabs in the US is Micron and the only really have R&D and legacy long-life products being manufactured in the US.) Maybe if this program occurred 20 years ago you might have had another option. (And you would have basically looked like an idiot as for the next 10 years Intel pretty much made all the right decisions in manufacturing while everyone else in the US went down dead ends.)

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Re:Apple, ARM, and Intel by throwawaygh on Tuesday June 16, 2020 @12:28PM (#23541038)

Yes, I agree with you. It's a huge problem for the US right now, both with Intel and with Boeing.

My last statement is ridiculous, but also TFA is correct in its diagnosis of Intel.

So... where does that leave us?

I don't pretend to have good answers to your question. There are some smaller shops nowhere near the scale of Intel. Some foreign-owned companies have fabs in the USA (including TSMC). Also, Intel is made of people who might be interested in striking out on their own.

But, yeah. Building things is hard and expensive and risky.

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Re:Apple, ARM, and Intel by tarlinian on Tuesday June 16, 2020 @12:45PM (#23541217)

There are many other aerospace companies that are in principle capable of designing high performance airplanes in the US. There are literally no other companies in the US with modern semiconductor manufacturing expertise (in logic, not memory, GF doesn't count). The level of capital expenditures and technological expertise and IP required to manufacture leading edge semiconductors is staggering. It's unlikely you could even start a new company that could manufacture leading edge semiconductors for the entire $23 billion that is in that bill. (They'd also probably get sued into oblivion by existing manufacturers with basically zero patent protection.) Just look at what happened to Globalfoundries. It was given effectively free capital for close to a decade, a not totally instate starting point of starting from nothing AMD's old fabs, and in the end gave up.

The "diagnosis" of Intel is that it threw away the chance of higher volume for lower margin which gave TSMC a bunch of money to catch up to them. (I think that's a very hindsight is 20/20 kind of view too...I don't think anyone thought that the iPhone would become larger than the entire PC market when it came out...and at those volumes Apple would eventually realize anyway that it wouldn't make sense to keep paying Intel to make chips for them.) I don't see how a start up is going to capture that volume without some sort of pseudo-captive market to grow with (which is basically how the various companies in China are progressing...).

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Re:Apple, ARM, and Intel by dragontamer on Tuesday June 16, 2020 @12:35PM (#23541107)

Global Foundries may be stuck at 14nm, but they'd be the most natural successor to next-generation if their financials could be improved a bit. Its a shame that the New York based semiconductor fab has fallen behind.

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Re:Apple, ARM, and Intel by monocasa on Tuesday June 16, 2020 @01:03PM (#23541402)

They've spun down so much of their R&D, that it'd be a real uphill battle to get going again. There's been so much brain drain.

And the wall at 14nm is them not investing in EUV, so they'd have even more work versus say the 14nm/28nm transition.

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Re:Apple, ARM, and Intel by hitpointdrew on Tuesday June 16, 2020 @04:24PM (#23543615)

Global Foundries is hardly an "American" company...it's owned by the Emirate of Abu Dhabi.

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Re:Apple, ARM, and Intel by DarmokJalad1701 on Tuesday June 16, 2020 @12:17PM (#23540918)

Doesn't Samsung have a semiconductor fab in Austin? I guess they don't count as a US company ...

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Re:Apple, ARM, and Intel by tristan957 on Tuesday June 16, 2020 @03:16PM (#23542942)

I think they dropped the whole semiconductor team a few months ago iirc.

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Re:Apple, ARM, and Intel by my123 on Tuesday June 16, 2020 @04:15PM (#23543531)

That is their custom CPU design team, nothing to do whatsoever with this. (and which wasn't very good in practice). Samsung is committed to their semiconductor business.

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Re:Apple, ARM, and Intel by gumby on Tuesday June 16, 2020 @04:15PM (#23543521)

> IMO your last statement is kind of ridiculous. Intel is literally the only company that does high volume wafer manufacturing in the US at anything approaching leading edge geometries. Are there any other American companies the government could even realistically support?

Well yes, but... you could hire a bunch of foreigners to run things, as that's where the current experience mostly is, as you point out. But that experience includes use of semi fab equipment, essentially all of which is built in the USA.

That said, I'm not a fan of industrial policy; not sure what results were generated by the megabucks spent on Sematech (and I worked for Sematech sibling/neighbor MCC in its day too).

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Re:Apple, ARM, and Intel by emilecantin on Tuesday June 16, 2020 @08:37PM (#23546241)

What about IBM? They have a few foundries in the US (and Canada), and used to produce the processors for Xbox 360 and PS3, which were both pretty advanced. And these were far from their most advanced chips, the stuff they built for their Z-series is truly impressive.

I haven't followed them much since, but 10 years ago, they were doing good stuff when I worked there.

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Re:Apple, ARM, and Intel by fomine3 on Tuesday June 16, 2020 @09:18PM (#23546567)

IBM's fabs are acquired by GlobalFoundries and GF retired to develop leading process.

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Re:Apple, ARM, and Intel by emilecantin on Tuesday June 16, 2020 @09:28PM (#23546646)

Thus continuing IBM's very sad tendency to sell every part of itself that's interesting.

I didn't know, but I'm not surprised.

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Re:Apple, ARM, and Intel by dzonga on Tuesday June 16, 2020 @12:15PM (#23540890)

does it have to high volume ? lots of semi-conductor companies in the US, some of them flying under the radar. the us stimulus will help these companies invest more capital, talent. hell, I will say any country needs to be manufacturing and designing their own silicon. and like said by ben, not all silicon has to be for pc's.

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Re:Apple, ARM, and Intel by kevin_thibedeau on Tuesday June 16, 2020 @02:44PM (#23542623)

None of them are on cutting edge processes.

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Re:Apple, ARM, and Intel by Cieplak on Tuesday June 16, 2020 @12:14PM (#23540874)

Are there any other American companies the government could even realistically support?

Micron is perhaps a candidate, though not sure it meets all your criteria.

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Re:Apple, ARM, and Intel by tarlinian on Tuesday June 16, 2020 @01:47PM (#23541915)

Unlike Intel, Micron has practically outsourced most of their manufacturing to Singapore, Taiwan and Japan. Their only production fabs in the US are in Utah and Virginia both of which are mostly focused on niche or older products. More importantly, they only produce memory. Logic and memory processes are very different.

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