61–70 of 268 posts
How is Intel dying if AMD can't even produce enough chips to avoid being out of stock the whole time? Production bottlenecks with TSMC are a thing.
Intel innovates in process. Everything else is ruled by backwards compatibility and frenetic management scared to stay the course. (The vast majority of projects are killed if they don't tape out in ~2 years.) Intel will shift to a TSMC model. They have the best fabs on the planet, and the best fab engineers. I believe it is something like a 3 millions dollars lost per minute if they are idle. They have already start…
I think that's overestimating, although you are right it is damn expensive.
Order of magnitude I would say it's more like: Fab has lifetime of 2-3(?) years, and costs $10B to build and amortize. So every minute of idled factory capital = $6,000 in pure cost of the facility.
(although, if you think of it in potential lost revenue terms, then you may be more correct.)
(Actually we can also do that arithmetic, according to https://www.forbes.com/sites/willyshih/2020/05/15/tsmcs-anno...
240,000 wafers per year * 500 chips per wafer * $100? = $12B per year revenue. Also is something like $22k per minute)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 3-5 times behind TSMC lithographically, I'm not entirely sure that is true. TSMC plays fast and loose with their definition of node. Any fab folks want to speak up? What I mean by that: https://www.pcgamesn.com/amd/tsmc-7nm-5nm-and-3nm-are-just-n... "And also goes some way to explaining why, despite TSMC offering a nominally 7nm process, the general consensus has been that Intel’s 10nm design is pretty much analogo…
Every fab plays loose and fast with the terms, including Intel these days. More or less TSMC 7nm := Intel 10nm, and TSMC 5nm := Intel 7nm. It's more complex than that, one has denser logic while the other has denser SRAM and what have you, but it's a good baseline. Since Intel is struggling with 10nm but is shipping, that puts TSMC about a node and a half ahead. If you want to dig in deeper, wikichip has most of the…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
IMO, China will be careful to crush Taiwan economically first so that no one cares when they roll tanks in. Well, no one other than Taiwan I guess.
Given how dependent high end computing is on TSMC (Amd, Apple, Nvidea, + more) it's quite unlikely to be a viable strategy. But given how messed up & fragmented the EU military is if the US stops military support for Taiwan china will likely directly declare War and Attack. (To be precise there is no EU military, just that of all members which makes it fragmented and in many cases is their military isn't in the best…
That's a temporary advantage for Taiwan, and pretty much their only one.
A silicon atom is only around 0.1nm wide, so the end of scaling is coming up like a brick wall. We've got maybe a half dozen nodes left.
After that, industrial espionage, pumping up SMIC or some other new Chinese domestic equivalent at the time, and literally just leaking info publicly so the EU, US, and ROK are viable replacements once chips become truly a commodity will cut the dependence on Taiwan. At that point it's not worth facing China's nukes to tell them that they can't have Crimea^H^H^H^H^H^H Taiwan.
Intel innovates in process. Everything else is ruled by backwards compatibility and frenetic management scared to stay the course. (The vast majority of projects are killed if they don't tape out in ~2 years.) Intel will shift to a TSMC model. They have the best fabs on the planet, and the best fab engineers. I believe it is something like a 3 millions dollars lost per minute if they are idle. They have already start…
I worked at Intel years ago. At that time, The ratio of excellent to useless people I experienced there was 1:40. That is way out of whack. I am certain it only got worse because all the 1/40’s I knew left. They are going to have to go and get people who have modern skillsets and mindsets and those people don’t want to live in Hillsboro. And it’s going to be expensive. And those people don’t tolerate dead weight. My…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Given how dependent high end computing is on TSMC (Amd, Apple, Nvidea, + more) it's quite unlikely to be a viable strategy. But given how messed up & fragmented the EU military is if the US stops military support for Taiwan china will likely directly declare War and Attack. (To be precise there is no EU military, just that of all members which makes it fragmented and in many cases is their military isn't in the best…
> Given how dependent high end computing is on TSMC (Amd, Apple, Nvidea, + more) it's quite unlikely to be a viable strategy. That's a temporary advantage for Taiwan, and pretty much their only one. A silicon atom is only around 0.1nm wide, so the end of scaling is coming up like a brick wall. We've got maybe a half dozen nodes left. After that, industrial espionage, pumping up SMIC or some other new Chinese domestic…
That's still something like a hundred thousand to a million times smaller that what we can actually fabricate, right?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Every fab plays loose and fast with the terms, including Intel these days. More or less TSMC 7nm := Intel 10nm, and TSMC 5nm := Intel 7nm. It's more complex than that, one has denser logic while the other has denser SRAM and what have you, but it's a good baseline. Since Intel is struggling with 10nm but is shipping, that puts TSMC about a node and a half ahead. If you want to dig in deeper, wikichip has most of the…
Intel can't get good yields at 10nm.
Intel has at least 20 more years and probably dozens of real chances to reclaim past market position and maybe even more so. Intel is a large company with a massive market cap. The bigger they are, the longer they fall. They just have so much runway and market gravity. For comparison, Apple shot itself in the foot repeatedly for at least 10 years before Steve Jobs rejoined, and it took 10 more years after that before…