Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you mean by "pars TSMC"?
On par with it as client fab
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Intel is dying and we can’t save it
81–90 of 268 posts
Re: Intel is dying and we can’t save it
#82How 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.
That'll sort itself out pretty quickly. TSMC is flush with cash from the premium pricing they've been able to charge for their 5nm fabs. Every day TSMC doesn't have enough capacity is a day they funnel easy money straight to their competitors at Samsung and Intel. Investing into increasing their fab capacity is the easiest business decision they'll ever make. And if they need finance they could get investors lining u…
TSMC's capacity problems have been directly caused by still ongoing covid shutdowns at ASML.
Re: Intel is dying and we can’t save it
#83I 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…
> The ratio of excellent to useless people I experienced there was 1:40 This has to be hyperbole but the rest of your comment makes me think you're being serious. I have only worked at small companies My guess is you thought those people were useless because you didn't understand the role they played in the company. However, I'll admin again that I don't have first hand experience. I'd genuinely love to hear from oth…
Oh it's reality. My experience at Sony was about 1:25, but other big dumb companies I have worked for have met and exceeded the 1:40 rule. It is amazing how process generates dead weight and worthless humans and nobody seems to care.
At one point I posited that Sony USA were merely a political pawn for Sony Japan. Hire a few tens of thousands of Americans, gain political capital -- and care not what they actually do all day. In our case, it was death by scrum and sticky notes.
Re: Intel is dying and we can’t save it
#84Let's all just come to a common agreement: there's no planet on which the US military allows Intel to die. Period. End of story.
Having a US based company with fabrication facilities on US soil is vital to national security and will be for the entirety of my lifetime and likely my grandchildren's lifetime (if I ever have any). For all the bluster of the investors wanting to chop Intel up: they will find a swift and full rejection from the government unless their plan includes selling the assets to another US firm.
TSMC building a fab in the US won't be "good enough" - the US military will not allow the security of our country to be in the hands of a foreign corporation.
Now whether Intel remains a dominant player? Who knows, but they aren't going anywhere. I wouldn't be even a little bit surprised if for instance the 3-letter agencies cloud contracts suddenly included a clause that all of their infrastructure must run on Intel CPUs.
I'm not saying it's right, I'm not saying it's fair, but I don't see any other outcome.
Re: Intel is dying and we can’t save it
#85I see Intel not being dominant, having to take a back seat, shrinking a bit. But dying?? Nup, I'm not seeing this at all. I mean AMD for years survived in a situation much worse then Intel currently is. Intel's productions nodes might be behind TSMC's but they are still quite valuable, not all chips need 5nm processes. Heck we could say most chips don't need it. Intel is still innovating, just because they currently…
Indeed, a similar situation happened in the mid 2000's before Intel moved to the Core architecture. I wouldn't be surprised if something like this happened again.
The Core Architecture in the mid 2000's was such an incredible shot back to the top. I remember seeing the benchmarks absolutely dominate AMD on every level, power, performance, TDP, Cost, etc. etc. This is almost immediately after Athlon 64 and the Athlon 64X2 started to gain market share, spanking Intel's Pentium 4 at the time. IIRC Intel ended up dropping the Prescott architecture, moving to the Pentium M architecture for development of the Core CPU's. Moving away from chasing max frequencies, and instead looking at IPC. Then Nehalem Dropped, (The first Core i CPU's) making the gap even larger. Q6600, Quad Core, Low power, decent cost. That was the CPU to have at the time. I miss the days reading about all of this.
Re: Intel is dying and we can’t save it
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I believe it is something like a 3 millions dollars lost per minute if they are idle. 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 te…
> Fab has lifetime of 2-3(?) years Many Intel fabs are from the early 2000s. Some are from the 90s. What do you mean 2-3 years? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_manufacturing_...
I think they're referring to each line as a new fab, rather than the complex of buildings they're in, which is pretty fair.
Re: Intel is dying and we can’t save it
#87I see Intel not being dominant, having to take a back seat, shrinking a bit. But dying?? Nup, I'm not seeing this at all. I mean AMD for years survived in a situation much worse then Intel currently is. Intel's productions nodes might be behind TSMC's but they are still quite valuable, not all chips need 5nm processes. Heck we could say most chips don't need it. Intel is still innovating, just because they currently…
Indeed, a similar situation happened in the mid 2000's before Intel moved to the Core architecture. I wouldn't be surprised if something like this happened again.
> Indeed, a similar situation happened in the mid 2000's before Intel moved to the Core architecture. I wouldn't be surprised if something like this happened again.
Though that may have been a bit easier for them to solve, because the main thing they had to do was scrap NetBurst (Pentium 4) and return to a derivative their old architecture (which they were still using for the notebook market).
Re: Intel is dying and we can’t save it
#88Any analysis that says that Intel's death is being precipitated by AMD and Apple rather than by TSMC is pretty much worth ignoring. The fact that they're almost equivalent to those two at 5nm when Intel is at 14nm+++++++++ shows how killer the RTL and tape out folk are at Intel. The real fight has always been at the fab layer.
Apple did poach a few of Intel's better architects and killed Intel's smartphone ambitions. But the damage occured two decades before that. Intel is dying because they should have entered the foundry business in the early 90's. Process was always their forte, they were never good at the CPU architecture design anyway as iAPX/i860/Itanium amply demonstrated. Instead they blew $100B getting into antivirus, network secu…
I'm curious about how Apple "killed Intel's smartphone ambitions"?
Otellini on the iPhone:
"We ended up not winning it or passing on it, depending on how you want to view it."
"At the end of the day, there was a chip that they were interested in that they wanted to pay a certain price for and not a nickel more and that price was below our forecasted cost. I couldn't see it. It wasn't one of these things you can make up on volume. And in hindsight, the forecasted cost was wrong and the volume was 100x what anyone thought."
Re: Intel is dying and we can’t save it
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed, a similar situation happened in the mid 2000's before Intel moved to the Core architecture. I wouldn't be surprised if something like this happened again.
I’m almost positive Intel have tech ready to deploy to be on top again. They will have been developing it... but not needed to use it until they came under competition pressure.
Jim Keller's apparent rage quit has me questioning that.
I was bullish on Intel until quite recently. I was able to convince myself that they were taking the L on 10nm to focus completely on a full, true EUV transition, in order to be at the top of the game just everyone else was hitting that wall in order to dominate again. That turned out to be overly optimistic.
Re: Intel is dying and we can’t save it
#90Intel 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…
Everything else is ruled by backwards compatibility
That's one of the biggest reasons to choose them. If Intel's "x86" stops being x86, they'll lose one of their biggest competitive advantages.
See the first comment here, for example: http://www.os2museum.com/wp/vme-broken-on-amd-ryzen/