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.
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.
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.
For me personally, web apps only got fast when I got a computer with M1 processor.
Google Docs runs well on a Chromebook. As does MS Office online. The modern desktop has really turned into a terminal - it's jut using HTML & JS and works... pretty well.
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.
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.
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.
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-970...
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
One simple reason that similarly to aeronautics chip manufactures are critical industries for US.
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.)
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.
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.
> 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...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Traffic_in_Arms_...
So there won't be any electronics manufacturing to ban at all, but it leaves the US in the same place.
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.
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...
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…One needs quite a crystal ball to predict such slow deaths, especially when it's going to be decade where chip production improvements are expected to slow down further and further. Finally, a slow death looks even more likely anyway if Intel doesn't change their ways.
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.
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.
Is a new way I like to be
Is a new way to set me free
The naming is intended to show old things can be made good, and fast :)
( Nice to see somebody gets it )
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.'
The problem is that by switching to another fab they lose these advantages.
That is one of the reasons Intel was able to get away with their garbage in-house EDA tooling and processes. Intel was also able to get away with delays to fix their bugs (due to awful validation methodology).
Even if Intel process catches up TSMC, they would have fix their design tooling, hire talented engineers and get rid of the entrenched hacks who built their careers on mediocrity.
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).
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.
And then Global Foundries couldn't keep up, cancelled their 7nm work, and AMD has been sending more and more business to 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.