11–20 of 268 posts
Any 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.
It almost seems like take a conspiracy or sabotage for Intel to fumble such a large lead in process. But all it takes it self-sabotage in forced retirements and financial engineering ahead of innovation. America really needs it's CEOs to re-learn the lessons of the global behemoths of manufacturing we used to have- that re-investing in your own future growth is just as or more important than growing your dividends.
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 fabbing for outsiders would probably be a good idea, but splitting the fabs out from the designers seems like a bad idea.
Any 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.
Anyone know who pars TSMC?
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…
> Intel will shift to a TSMC model. I think fabbing for outsiders would probably be a good idea, but splitting the fabs out from the designers seems like a bad idea.
I'd be cautious about the use of "We Can't Save It" in the title of this article. This industry has a history of big players losing steam and then making big comebacks.
Feels like Microsoft during the Balmer years. Instead of Linux and Mac ascendant, you have AMD and ARM... it doesn’t seem impossible to think a Satya Nadella could turn things around.
Realistically, Intel only have to get one process node right to either be right back in the game or buy themselves years more time to play with. They are currently somewhere between 3-5 times behind TSMC lithographically, but nowhere near that far behind in raw performance, which suggests that they could at very least knock AMD off their perch in single-threaded work. Obviously process nodes are much harder than pret…
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 analogous. But what’s 3nm between fabs? At that level, probably quite a lot. But if the 7nm node is more of a branding exercise than genuinely denoting the physical properties of that production process then you can understand why there’s supposedly not a lot in it."