Do we know what really went wrong at Intel ? I know they made a big bet on a technology that didn't pay off. Is it that they just had no competition for years and became complacent ?
I also wonder how much TSMC will ask Intel to split the company to ensure that their process does not leak to the Intel side. There is probably lots of interesting details about what works you can obtain if you work closely with TSMC engineers.
Now this doesn't come from any position of authority or knowledge of the industry but if I had to guess I'd say their problem has been twofold: shareholder value and lack of competition.
Intel, for years, has been the standard choice for the datacenter: AMD never really had a look in there. As a result, Intel has still been making tons of money for years and, by extension, the shareholders have also been making it too so there hasn't been any real reason to take too many risks or change direction especially as AMD was a fraction of the size.
AMD have only just recently (last couple of years) been an actual, quantifiable, threat to them so, if I had to guess, Intel are in a bit of a panic as the world makes a slow shift to AMD (possibly ARM and more specialized chips too!).
I can imagine that the lead time for chip designs is measured in years so Intel can't just make a massive direction change overnight, hence the reason to ask for external help.
Time will tell if this turns out to be a brilliant move for Intel...
As for whether or not they will eventually work, that's the many-billion dollar question. In mid-2018 the boots-on-the-ground were not hopeful (the "10nm will never work" leaks) but clearly someone at Intel thought there was hope because they didn't just abandon the features. I think we just saw that "someone" get fired, though, so I suspect the attempts to save these features have failed.
It's certainly possible that EUV fixes everything and 7nm is a relatively smooth node, maybe this is just the one oops and it's all smooth sailing from here, but I don't think anyone really believes that. Everyone is worried it's going to be 10nm all over again where the schedule slides 4 years in 4 years, 6 months at a time.
Everything I've heard from Intel engineers is that they have a culture problem. It's a high-stress, low-empowerment environment with overbearing, micromanaging bosses and over the last ten years as AMD faded out the beancounters overtook the engineers and started making decisions that hurt the product. The middle managers and beancounters are in control and mostly concerned with (respectively) cover-your-ass and rent extraction than engineering the next generation of a great product. A quote from someone else was that he guessed they needed to cut away "the top 3 layers" to get the rot.
Unfortunately, rototilling the staff to cut away the rot will probably produce even more delays in the short term. Institutional knowledge gets lost, people start to look for other job opportunities, etc. Intel is in deep shit.
I don't even know what the short-term fix would be. The designs are tied to the process, the process is fucked because the approaches they're using are fucked and don't work, and they aren't going to repeal the laws of physics in the next 2 years. I guess you produce it even if it's not what the profit you normally expect, just to try and maintain marketshare?
Middle term they need to find a Jensen Huang or a Lisa Su. An engineer-CEO who understands the tech intimately and the tradeoffs being made, and where the market is going.
Comedy option, merge with NVIDIA, and make Jensen the CEO. AMD wanted to do it back in the day, AMD's board just couldn't find their way to "yes", which was a massive mistake (bulldozer probably would not have happened under Huang), led them to acquire ATI at a hugely overvalued price, and the resulting financial troubles caused them to lose their fabs. His work culture is also pretty toxic but they actually get shit done like few other companies. I'm really only half joking, but it'll never happen.
Jensen taking over would certainly be interesting!
The old adage about "when they take away the free soda it's time to start looking for the exits" rings as true as ever. It's fine if you don't ever offer it in the first place but when the CFO is suddenly checking the phone booths for leftover change, there are bigger problems.
IBM in the past, Boeing recently, Intel right now.
It isn't just the USA. The natural state of things is to not be run that well. Any well run company will tend to descend and get worse, revert to the mean. It happens to everything, everywhere.
They already paid for that several times over. AMD only exists today because Intel was forced to license their technology. Intel has been artificially restrained for decades. Competition all over the world has benefitted massively from that.
Now of course people conveniently forget that history and pretend Intel wasn't made to fight with one hand tied behind its back for three decades.
There's nothing quite like watching the tied-down champ get beat, and then watching the crowd gloat about it.
The US did this to itself by crippling Intel. The US always does this to its champions, meanwhile competitor nations do the exact opposite, aggressively promoting and shielding their most valuable companies. Then people wonder golly gee what happened to such and such company, we tied its hands behind its back and it got beat to a bloody pulp, how could that outcome happen. Get up champ, take some more punches.
Anyone think China is going to cripple its strongest companies? South Korea is going to break Samsung into pieces? Taiwan is going to break up TSMC or force it to license its technology to Intel to spur competition? Germany is going to break up its oligopoly auto companies? Of course not, nobody else behaves that way. Meanwhile the US is going after its most powerful tech companies and always does. US competitors laugh their asses off as we make everything easier for them.
Intel tried to ditch second sourcing with the 386 but AMD was able to continue manufacturing compatible CPUs.
Much later Intel was accused of anti-competitive behaviour by AMD in various markets - which resulted in a fine in Europe and a $1.25bn dollar payment to AMD and patent cross licensing.
But - AMD licenses some important technology to Intel eg x86-64.
The real answer here is not to come up with artificial Intel-specific legal kludges like forcing them to cross-license to AMD, but rather to adjust copyright and patent law to define APIs and ISAs as non-protectable.
I don't think this is correct, because TSMC isn't so vertically integrated. There is not a "TSMC CPU" or GPU per se, they're providing a service to other businesses, not in direct competition with every other design. That doesn't mean there couldn't potentially be adverse results, but if so they'll probably be different adverse results since TSMC is entering more into a "basic infrastructure" role vs B2C. Chip design matters a lot to ultimate performance/efficiency, and fabless has promoted rather then reduced competition there. Their customers also have very deep pockets themselves, and TSMC has a lot to gain from keeping demand high with improvements.
In fact a potentially more worrisome aspect then any immediate competition threat is the sheer reduction in redundancy of critical production (as we've seen with hard drives and NAND production for example). TSMC has four of their 300mm gigafabs in Taiwan and a 5th in construction, and another four 200mm fabs. They've got a single 300m in China, and that's it for that size. They've got a 200mm in China, one in the US, and one in Singapore. A lot of capacity is in one small island.
Taiwan is on the ocean around the ring of fire. I know TSMC has of course done major disaster prep, but it's not impossible for the world to throw curveballs. Taiwan has had earthquakes in the last 100-someodd years up to magnitude 8.3, but only 7s for the last 50+ (the biggest more recent one for them I think was 1999). Of course construction codes (and major manufacturers even more so) take earthquake resistance into account. But what if there was a 9er and a typhoon say?
And of course there is geopolitics too, China has made no secret of its desire to retake Taiwan but haven't been taking recent actions to make it attractive and peaceful. And of course the very presence of so much critical-to-US production there enhances the risk (hope?) that yes, the US will in fact honor its defense agreement and cause the whole thing to get very hot.
So not that other fabs wouldn't be good for competition reasons too, but redundancy may be valuable in and of itself. However, if so it's not something the market can likely provide, the market tends to optimize out that kind of redundancy since it is by definition not efficient. Fabs represent enormous capital expenditure with long lead times that requires extremely large scale to operate profitably, so governments would probably have to step up and flat out pay for redundant capacity. And arguably should, but even at the government level $10-20b isn't nothing.
It would also be nice to have some capable foundries in Europe, like STM or Infineon. Just in case.
They design their own chips in-house, they are moving to use them across their full stack, they are already TSMC's #1 customer by a wide margin, and they could literally build a 3nm fab with 40k wafers per month with less than 10% of the liquid cash they have on hand ($5b for the node and $15b for the fab). And they are the type of company who brings everything possible in-house, and the type of company who looks at a single-source monopoly like TSMC as a business risk. Fabs are literally the last part of their hardware/software stack that they don't control and that another company could potentially leverage them over.
Right now there is no alternative to TSMC, people literally pre-eulogize NVIDIA Ampere and other products simply because they're on Samsung instead of TSMC. How do you think that looks to a company like Apple, that they are completely dependent on this company for node tech and subject to increasing competition for wafers as everybody else realizes there is no alternative and piles in too?
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/272096-3nm-process-nod...
There's also TI's site in Freising which is a notable fab producing analogue parts.
There are loads of companies in the supply chain for fabs, all of them specialising in vital bits of equipment that nobody else can replace. ASML is not the only ASML.
ASML bet on EUV and finally made it work well enough.
ASML is a niche of a niche.
> It is NOT protable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that's all I have :-(.
And he meant it too, as later in the thread when someone says they don't believe him about the non-portability:
> Simply, I'd say that porting is impossible. It's mostly in C, but most people wouldn't call what I write C. It uses every conceivable feature of the 386 I could find, as it was also a project to teach me about the 386. As already mentioned, it uses a MMU, for both paging (not to disk yet) and segmentation. It's the segmentation that makes it REALLY 386 dependent (every task has a 64Mb segment for code & data - max 64 tasks in 4Gb. Anybody who needs more than 64Mb/task - tough cookies).
This is a historical curiosity of course. The Linux kernel supports more architectures than anything else.
Mostly because of the slow adoption which allowed a lot of flexibility. It's much easier to move around when you don't have the baggage of millions of users and applications to consider.
Even Windows ran on plenty of non-x86 architectures usually because they got in on the ground floor before there was baggage to migrate. And even now you can run it on ARM but without much traction because people hate losing functionality.
And it was ported to Alpha early on to be ported to a very 'not 386' style architecture. Before that it was very x86 specific.
Linux never had a significant footprint in any long existing segment at the time they migrated from one architecture to another, especially not in a consumer one. Take Apple and their move from 68K to PPC to x86 to ARM.