Intel Honesty
stratechery.com
Intel Honesty
1–10 of 426 posts
Re: Intel Honesty
#2Brutal. Intel processors will be the equivalent of government cheese. Not what anyone wants, but it's what you get with your government dollars.
Re: Intel Honesty
#3They are building a huge fab in Ohio but I don't see Intel as a going concern that will be around at the date of completion. I fully expect the project to be abandoned.
Re: Intel Honesty
#4Brutal. Intel processors will be the equivalent of government cheese. Not what anyone wants, but it's what you get with your government dollars.
I never thought of it that way. Are they going the way of Raythoen/Boeing?
Re: Intel Honesty
#5The geopolitical bit of all this is the real wild card. No one really knows what's going to happen there.
Re: Intel Honesty
#6US chip production really needs its SpaceX moment, but it seems like it will never happen, and we're left with the crumbling empire of Intel.
By "SpaceX moment", I mean a startup entering an impossible market, where the barrier to entry is billions of dollars of research and manufacturing, a market dominated by industry giants from the 60s, and yet still coming out on top somehow.
Re: Intel Honesty
#7Brutal. Intel processors will be the equivalent of government cheese. Not what anyone wants, but it's what you get with your government dollars.
I see the semiconductor industry becoming a bit like the auto industry. A geopolitical pawn, heavily dependent on subsidies and in turmoil due to market forces (switch to electric in cars vs. switch to ARM/RISC in semiconductors)
Re: Intel Honesty
#8I like the proposed approach of purchase guarantees here. Directly injecting cash into Intel just creates a moral hazard where they spend the money dealing with organizational inertia than innovating in the space. Plus, the government could even turn a profit reselling its purchased semiconductors to various US companies!
The US ecosystem badly needs a serious Intel competitor -- because they just ain't it.
Re: Intel Honesty
#9US chip production really needs its SpaceX moment, but it seems like it will never happen, and we're left with the crumbling empire of Intel. By "SpaceX moment", I mean a startup entering an impossible market, where the barrier to entry is billions of dollars of research and manufacturing, a market dominated by industry giants from the 60s, and yet still coming out on top somehow.
[flagged]
Re: Intel Honesty
#10> in the late 2010’s Intel got stuck trying to move to 10nm, thanks in part to their reluctance to embrace the vastly more expensive EUV lithography process
TBH, it's easy to say this with the benefit of hindsight. Throughout most of the 2010s, EUV lithography was like the "year of the Linux desktop" - i.e., this year will be the year where EUV was suitable for high volume manufacturing. I don't really blame Intel for deciding to go with self-aligned quadruple patterning for 10 nm, but combining it with cobalt interconnects was probably biting off more than they could chew.
FWIW, Intel was funding EUV R&D since 1997: https://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/1997/CN0911...
That press release had an interesting prediction:
> Intel projects that the microprocessor of the year 2011 will contain one billion transistors, operating at over 10 gigahertz and delivering 100,000 MIPS (millions of instructions per second).
They weren't that far off in estimating the transistor count and MIPS: the i7-2600k released in January 2011 had 1.16 billion transistors [0] and delivered 117k MIPS [1] @ 3.4 GHz. The clock speed prediction was way off due to the failure of Dennard scaling in the early-mid 00s.
[0] https://www.anandtech.com/show/14043/upgrading-from-an-intel...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructions_per_second#CPU_re...