21–30 of 426 posts
Brutal. Intel processors will be the equivalent of government cheese. Not what anyone wants, but it's what you get with your government dollars.
US 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.
US 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]
Remember that Elon was the overlords' darling up until he decided to spit in their face and buy their favorite mind programming toy from under them.
US 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.
I think semiconductors is a difficult space for a SpaceX. SpaceX was relatively cheap - the company itself only raised 2 billion dollars, and according to Musk, the cost to develop Falcoln Heavy was "only" $500M. I think the "thesis" behind SpaceX is moreso that the technology to develop rockets had come down massively, but the market had gotten fat and lazy on government contracts. The market only seemed impossible because everyone just assumed so.
On the other hand ASML's EUV machine costs $300M and that's only a small part of what you need build your own Fab and barring some massive research breakthrough that isn't coming down any time soon.
US 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.
I think the issue is that TSMC exists, which takes up a lot of oxygen and opportunity. Whereas in space, there wasn't a high quality opportunity, so SpaceX had a lower hurdle to being the best (even though that still wasn't easy!).
It is prudent, possibly even critical, to have foundries on US shores, and the US will have to pay for it.
> 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 fo…
In addition, SMIC in China managed to get to 7 nm without the use of EUV. Also early EUV yields were actually quite low.
US 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.
The thing is, the SpaceX moment occurred because of a rare opportunity where the industry incumbents were insulated from any competition or need for innovation for ~30 years. Some domestic industries still operate in an environment somewhat like this (e.g. the steel industry), but still face modernized global competition (albeit whose effects are kept at bay via import tariffs reaching as high as 266%).
The semiconductor industry... while there are magnificent barriers to entry and not "enough" competition, they have absolutely not been wholly insulated from innovation or competition. And innovation in fabrication is driven at a very rapid pace! So there aren't huge outsized profits to be found like there was for SpaceX. And even SpaceX needed to invent what was almost an entirely new industry (Starlink) to become truly profitable.
And even trying to pull a "SpaceX" on domestic steel manufacturing would fall flat because you wouldn't capture the global market, and would still be dependent on some (potentially much lower) tariffs to compete against the very modernized factories in China, which are innovative/competitive/efficient, unlike our domestic industry.
SpaceX took advantage of a very rare situation where there truly was no competition or innovation anywhere on the planet for a very long period. I'm not aware of any other industries which are quite as far "behind" today as space launch systems were in 2010. But if anyone else is, please mention those industries here!
> 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 fo…
> 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. We need to learn to recognize the difference between something that's never going to happen for either physical or economic/social/structural reasons, and something that is just really difficult and takes a long time. I always think of this w…
My personal rabbit-hole conspiracy is that AI is driving a fire under the national security apparatus, and we're going to see a restriction on AI-chip technology being exported or manufactured overseas. Intel will be in prime position to onshore that manufacturing.
Intel is trapped. Its debt repayments alone are massive. The poor performance in stock has encouraged 20years of wage stagnation to the point where you can literally earn over 50% more at amd or nvidia or even an startup for equivalent roles so they aren’t hiring the best. Their pay in the Bay Area is double tsmc in taiwan for equivalent roles in raw dollar terms but the ppp differences means your better off working…
Whereas if I were joining a company such as Nvidia I'd honestly be kind of worried.
Historical performance isn't really a great indicator here.