161–170 of 426 posts
Did I misunderstand or did the author advocate a world where the only high-end chip manufacturer in the entire world is TMSC? Just the one single company, located in a politically unstable area? And putting aside the politics, if they become a monopoly what do you think will happen next?
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How could we get a council of a half-dozen visionaries to own a city-sized chunk of land and design a utopia, communist party-style but done right? I really think this is not possible without it being a private parcel where there aren't thousands of individual property owners in the loop for decision making.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_utopian_commu... People try this thing on a fairly regular basis. You're thinking "wouldn't it be great if there was a community led by an absolute authority which agrees with me" and, uh, that kind of thing doesn't scale, last, or continue agreeing with you for a particularly long amount of time. >I really think this is not possible without it being a private parcel whe…
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Some of the issues are way downstream of those NIMBYs: Non-housing costs are quite low in Taiwan. Food and childcare, in particular, are so much cheaper than California that it’s hard to believe. But the NIMBYs aren’t totally in the clear. Rental housing with 3+ bedrooms (for families) is severely lacking in much of the US. Maybe fire codes are to blame. Taiwan is full of very nice new high-rise development that cont…
> Non-housing costs are quite low in Taiwan. Food and childcare, in particular, are so much cheaper than California that it’s hard to believe. That statement is the problem. Nobody wants to rent. There are too many rental properties, and not enough affordable housing. The reason you need rental properties is because you're already trying to make a living from families having a home. You're not supposed to do that. Th…
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…
I think the company always paid "industry standard" compared to other companies paying actually well. And it was a terrible place to work by most objective measures - people got let go quite freely, etc. When Andy Grove writes a book called "Only The Paranoid Survive", he's not committing to employee loyalty.
I think the way Intel got good people, and they did get good people, was by a combination of the opportunity to build something that gets widely used and a cult-like spirit of "are you good and tough enough to survive the bullshit".
But yeah, seems there's no recovery when that approach stops working. And it's disturbing that many of America's "crown jewels" (Intel, Boeing, etc) are basically constructed that way.
The Altera merger pain is maybe enlightening. Altera 10-series FPGAs were massively delayed due to Intel's 10 nm fab problems. But I speculate that there was also a big difference in toolchains, does anyone know for sure? I mean Altera was using TSMC previously, and I presume were using industry standard tools: Cadance / Synopsis. But I would guess Intel was running their fab on home-grown tools... what is the status…
Historically Intel did use non-standard EDA tools which is one reason they had trouble getting outside customers onto 10 nm (besides the fact that 10 nm didn't work). Some Intel acquisitions like Fulcrum and Barefoot never used Intel fabs. I think they're supporting a more standard toolchain starting with 18A.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/21504/intel-18a-status-update...
"For Intel, getting an external PDK out for a leading-edge process node is no small feat, as the company has spent decades operating its fabs for the benefit of its internal product design teams. A useful PDK for external customers – and really, a useful fab environment altogether – not only needs process nodes that stick to their specifications rather than making bespoke adjustments, but it means that Intel needs to document and define all of this in a useful, industry standard fashion. One of the major failings of Intel’s previous efforts to get into the contract foundry business, besides being half-hearted efforts overall, is that they didn’t author PDKs that external companies could easily use. "
But some bad news today:
https://www.reuters.com/technology/intel-manufacturing-busin...
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 rockets are insanely simple compared to silicon. The amount of research and development it takes to build a light source (hot tin plasma[1]) is extraordinary, and fabs are also probably the most complicated manufacturing facilities in the world. Tesla struggled mightily with integrating disparate auto parts manufacturers some years ago. SpaceX and Tesla benefited from being helmed by a crazy person (in their…
another good example of this is how VLSI in particular disrupted the mini-computer/mainframe market and made CPU's cheap enough to put them into smaller and far cheaper machines. This really shook up the old guys who where used to being total system vendors. (IBM, DEC etc). Suddenly, you could get a computer for much cheaper compared to the decade prior, and by the early to mid nineties you had guys like sun eating their lunch completely.
IBM pivoted to being a services company and DEC just imploded.
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 lack of focus on US domestic chip capability is semi-intentional and is an eventuality. Semiconductor industry, and many other manufacturing industries too, seem to flourish at very outer edges of the free world. It could be simple as the free world not wanting manufacturing capability at home. It could be wanting only grain farms and money printers.
Also, manufacturing has a massive impact on the environment, this includes semiconductor manufacturing. It has politically been impopular for a while now.
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In addition, SMIC in China managed to get to 7 nm without the use of EUV. Also early EUV yields were actually quite low.
Did SMIC get 7nm to yield or is it limping but propped up for PR purposes like Intel 7?
How they will get to 3nm is another question but back when Intel made its decision, 7nm was on the horizon so choosing to not go the EUV route is not as dumb as it may look now.
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So, out of the seven billion people on the planet, only Elon Musk could have made these companies what they are? No other person on Earth (given access to equivalent capital) could do it?
That's not remotely saying the same thing. Just because someone could do it doesn't mean it will happen. These things require MUCH more then just the possibility of it happening. For example I could go out right now and murder someone. Doesn't mean I will do it. I'm certainly capable of it. In fact most people are in this exact situation yet there are only a tiny amount of murders happening each day compared to the p…
We'll never know, though, because no bank or investor just hands out start-up capital to nobodies.
(I also happen to believe, and HN is going to hate this, that the high percentage of businesses that fail is a testament to how thoroughly misallocated capital is. So much capital goes to people who end up demonstrating they are incapable of deploying it. The trick that hasn't been solved yet is consistently finding who those many capable people are beforehand.)
The OP makes a compelling case that Intel's foundry operations have fallen so far behind that they are no longer economically viable on their own, in the face of current market forces, i.e., Intel's foundry business may not be able to earn a positive return on the tens of billions of dollars of capex now required to catch up with TSMC. If the US truly views having a domestic foundry as critical to national security,…