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Intel’s palpable desperation on display with Rocket Lake

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Re: Intel’s palpable desperation on display with Rocket Lake

#31

Post by Gibbon1 »

nxc18 wrote: post #12
jjtheblunt wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hotdesking?

Several of the engineers I worked with a few years ago left Intel (for the company I work at) after they switched to hotdesking to save money on facilities. Basically the concept was instead of engineers having an assigned office or desk, the office would have a large field of unassigned desks and generic equipment. Every day you would come in, reserve a desk, take any belongings from a locker, and set up shop. At th…

Trying to save money that way always makes me shake my head. Seriously what does 100 sqft of office space cost? $200/month? Maybe $300 when you include common space? So $3600/year. Or 3% of your engineers salary? Doesn't take a very big hit in productivity to erase any savings many times over.

Re: Intel’s palpable desperation on display with Rocket Lake

#32

Post by dragontamer »

ckemere wrote: post #22
DylanBohlender wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here are a couple good articles explaining it. https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/227720-how-intel-lost-10... https://semiwiki.com/semiconductor-manufacturers/intel/28919... The TL;DR is that Intel has always been a vertically integrated shop (meaning that they usually fab and design their own chips), and that is starting to bite them because pure-play foundries are improving their tech at a faster rate. Intel has b…

Just skimming the first article, the TL;DR that I took away is that TSMC can get revenue from their old foundry nodes for much longer than Intel can. So the issue is not how fast TSMC improves, but more that Intel has to invest proportionally much more to keep up.

Note: the I/O chip on AMD Zen 2 / Zen 3 is a 14nm GloFo chip. Only the CPU-cores ("Zepplin" maybe, or whatever they call them now) are 7nm TSMC.

So AMD's strategy also leads to lower fabrication costs: because they can make a far cheaper 14nm chip to handle the slower portions of I/O (talking to RAM, or PCIe), while the expensive 7nm parts of TSMC are used only for the cores / L1 cache / L2 cache / L3 cache.

Re: Intel’s palpable desperation on display with Rocket Lake

#33

Post by ethbr0 »

tyingq wrote: post #9
nxc18 wrote: post #4

Is there good coverage of how Intel became so uncompetitive? My instinct is to say this is just the natural result of the presence of MBAs who are trained to focus _exclusively_ on this quarter's results so ignore R&D investment and also shit on employees by doing gimmicks like hotdesking to pinch pennies. I'm willing to bet my intuition is wrong, especially given my extremely deep bias against MBAs and 'this quarter…

Giving Jim Keller the boot is probably on Intel's list of regrets.

Chip architecture isn't current Intel's problem, process architecture is.

There's some overlap between the 2, but 100% of Intel's current struggles can be chalked up to dysfunction on their process side.

Given the lead time of chip arch (2-3 years?), the chip side of the house is arriving at manufacturing start day, and the process and specs they'd been optimizing for just aren't available.

Until Intel's process catches up, other parts of the company have limited options. (TSMC!)

Re: Intel’s palpable desperation on display with Rocket Lake

#34

Post by noch »

nxc18 wrote: post #4

Is there good coverage of how Intel became so uncompetitive? My instinct is to say this is just the natural result of the presence of MBAs who are trained to focus _exclusively_ on this quarter's results so ignore R&D investment and also shit on employees by doing gimmicks like hotdesking to pinch pennies. I'm willing to bet my intuition is wrong, especially given my extremely deep bias against MBAs and 'this quarter…

> Is there good coverage of how Intel became so uncompetitive?

François Piednoël, performance architect at Intel for 20 years, recently gave a presentation that covers a lot of the reasons behind Intel's decline in his presentation "How to Fix Intel" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiKjzeLco6c

Re: Intel’s palpable desperation on display with Rocket Lake

#35

Post by skavi »

nxc18 wrote: post #4

Is there good coverage of how Intel became so uncompetitive? My instinct is to say this is just the natural result of the presence of MBAs who are trained to focus _exclusively_ on this quarter's results so ignore R&D investment and also shit on employees by doing gimmicks like hotdesking to pinch pennies. I'm willing to bet my intuition is wrong, especially given my extremely deep bias against MBAs and 'this quarter…

Intel never stopped investing a huge amount into R&D.

Re: Intel’s palpable desperation on display with Rocket Lake

#37

Post by zinekeller »

dragontamer wrote: post #32
ckemere wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just skimming the first article, the TL;DR that I took away is that TSMC can get revenue from their old foundry nodes for much longer than Intel can. So the issue is not how fast TSMC improves, but more that Intel has to invest proportionally much more to keep up.

Note: the I/O chip on AMD Zen 2 / Zen 3 is a 14nm GloFo chip. Only the CPU-cores ("Zepplin" maybe, or whatever they call them now) are 7nm TSMC. So AMD's strategy also leads to lower fabrication costs: because they can make a far cheaper 14nm chip to handle the slower portions of I/O (talking to RAM, or PCIe), while the expensive 7nm parts of TSMC are used only for the cores / L1 cache / L2 cache / L3 cache.

Small nitpick: if I remeber correctly, AMD now uses 12nm process from GloFo now instead of 14nm (due to PCIe 4 requirements).

Re: Intel’s palpable desperation on display with Rocket Lake

#38

Post by simonh »

avmich wrote: post #20
DylanBohlender wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here are a couple good articles explaining it. https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/227720-how-intel-lost-10... https://semiwiki.com/semiconductor-manufacturers/intel/28919... The TL;DR is that Intel has always been a vertically integrated shop (meaning that they usually fab and design their own chips), and that is starting to bite them because pure-play foundries are improving their tech at a faster rate. Intel has b…

> The TL;DR is that Intel has always been a vertically integrated shop (meaning that they usually fab and design their own chips), and that is starting to bite them because pure-play foundries are improving their tech at a faster rate. Are you saying that vertically integrated companies are inherently disadvantaged because pure-play companies have a bigger list of orders and can spend more on evolving technology? The…

I think the point is if TSMC develops a new node they will find customers for it, and they compete with other foundries on node.

With intel their foundries only have internal customers, who can only go to their internal foundries. There’s no competitive pressure on the foundries, and if they are ready early that’s wasted capacity. So so capacity and technology planning is based on a common road map to meet the needs of their slowest (er, I mean only) customer.

Re: Intel’s palpable desperation on display with Rocket Lake

#39

Post by api »

The US needs to do whatever it takes to get TSMC to build not only top-tier fabs but centers of excellence here. As it stands TSMC on Taiwan, which is threatened by China, has damn near a monopoly on competitive fabrication. A single hit on Taiwan could terminally stall the entire global supply chain for top-tier chips.

Re: Intel’s palpable desperation on display with Rocket Lake

#40

Post by ethbr0 »

avmich wrote: post #20
DylanBohlender wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here are a couple good articles explaining it. https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/227720-how-intel-lost-10... https://semiwiki.com/semiconductor-manufacturers/intel/28919... The TL;DR is that Intel has always been a vertically integrated shop (meaning that they usually fab and design their own chips), and that is starting to bite them because pure-play foundries are improving their tech at a faster rate. Intel has b…

> The TL;DR is that Intel has always been a vertically integrated shop (meaning that they usually fab and design their own chips), and that is starting to bite them because pure-play foundries are improving their tech at a faster rate. Are you saying that vertically integrated companies are inherently disadvantaged because pure-play companies have a bigger list of orders and can spend more on evolving technology? The…

The balance likely comes down to volume. Specifically, total global chip sales.

If Intel builds Intel (I believe their contract fabing is a rounding error?), then they're directly tied to Intel chip sales.

This sets up a potential death spiral. Intel misses a process node deadline, Intel's products are uncompetitive, Intel sales decrease, less demand for Intel fab, less money for Intel fab improvement.

Intel can temporarily paper over this by shifting money from other areas of the company, but it's not a good path to be on.

Conversely, as you might expect, if Intel sales are increasing then the opposite, virtuous cycle holds.

So essentially, Intel's fortune is tied to the Intel_sales : (global_sales / number_of_leading_edge_non-Intel_fabs) ratio.

And with regards to that, two huge things happened in the marketplace recently: (1) mobile chip sales explosion, (2) GlobalFoundries exiting leading process race.

If Intel hadn't been screwed by a process engineering miss, longer term trends would still have hit them hard.

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