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Intel Problems

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Re: Intel Problems

#181

Post by lotsofpulp »

phcordner wrote: post #160

> And in that planning the fact that TSMC’s foundries — and Samsung’s — are within easy reach of Chinese missiles is a major issue. Are processor fabs analagous to auto factories and shipyards in World War II? Is the United States military's plan for a nuclear exchange with China dependent on a steady supply of cutting edge semiconductors? Even if it is, is that strategy really going to help? This article is mostly c…

> If semiconductors are the key to winning a war, why hasn't the U.S. won one lately?

Semiconductors aren’t going to help change people’s cultures or religion or tribal affiliations without decades of heavy investment in education and infrastructure, or other large scale wealth transfers.

But if “winning a war” means killing the opposing members while minimizing your own losses, surely electronic superiority will help.

Re: Intel Problems

#182

Post by tgtweak »

phcordner wrote: post #160

> And in that planning the fact that TSMC’s foundries — and Samsung’s — are within easy reach of Chinese missiles is a major issue. Are processor fabs analagous to auto factories and shipyards in World War II? Is the United States military's plan for a nuclear exchange with China dependent on a steady supply of cutting edge semiconductors? Even if it is, is that strategy really going to help? This article is mostly c…

I don't feel that there is a meaningful TSMC alternative today. Samsung, Intel and GlobalFoundries are not suitable replacements for TSMC with regards to throughput or technology.

The world does need some meaningful fabs outside of Taiwan/South Korea. All of the 10nm semiconductor fabrication takes place within a 750km/460mile radius circle today. That is risky.

Israel, Mexico, Germany, Canada, Japan (not that it would grow the circle much...) are all viable places to run a foundry. The fact that Intel is one of the few outside that circle doesn't inspire confidence in the security of the global supply chain.

Re: Intel Problems

#183

Post by kache_ »

thoughtsimple wrote: post #55

How does Moore's law figure into this? I suspect that TSMC runs into the wall that is quantum physics at around 1-2nm. Considering that TSMC has said that they will be in full production of 3nm in 2022, I can't see 1nm being much beyond 2026-2028. What happens then? Does a stall in die shrinks allow other fabs to catch up? It appears to me that Intel stalling at 14nm is what opened the door for TSMC and Samsung to ca…

moar coars

Re: Intel Problems

#184

Post by okl »

chaorace wrote: post #139
jng wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern process node designations (5nm, 3nm...) are not measurements any more, they are marketing terms. The actual measure of shrinking is a lot smaller than the name would mean to indicate, and not approaching the quantum limits as fast as it may seem.

I did not know that! Though, that answer raises its own questions... If the two are entirely unlinked, what's stopping Intel from slapping "Now 3nm!" on their next gen processors? Surely some components must be at the advertised size, even if it's no longer a clear cut all-or-nothing descriptor, right? What's actually being sized down and why is it seemingly posing so many challenges for Intel's supply chain?

There's a nice wiki where you can look up more detailed specs on the processes of each contender, e.g. 5nm: https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/5_nm_lithography_process

Re: Intel Problems

#185

Post by [deleted] »

me551ah wrote: post #86

I wonder how the move from x86 to arm is going to affect desktop apps. With the move to ARM apple is already pushing it's iOS apps into MacOS. Once it becomes commonplace on Windows, it would be super easy to run Android Apps on Windows via simulation(rather than emulation which is much slower). Given that mobile apps are more lightweight and consume far less resources than their electron counterparts, would people p…

[deleted]

Re: Intel Problems

#186

Post by UncleOxidant »

sf_rob wrote: post #172
skohan wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is kind of what should happen right? I'm not an expert, but my understanding is that one of the takeaways from the M1 success has been the weaknesses of x86 and CISC in general. It seems as if there is a performance ceiling which exists for x86 due to things like memory ordering requirements, and complexity of legacy instructions, which just don't exist for other instruction sets. My impression is that we have b…

Isn't most of M1's performance success due to being a SoC / increasing component locality/bandwidth? I think ARM vs x86 performance on its own isn't a disadvantage. Instead the disadvantages are a bigger competitive landscape (due to licensing and simplicity), growing performance parity, and SoCs arguable being contrary to x86 producers' business models.

ARM instructions are also much easier to decode than x86 instructions which allowed the M1 designers to have more instruction decoders and this, IIRC, is one of the important contributors to the M1's high performance.

Re: Intel Problems

#187

Post by ZeroCool2u »

Symmetry wrote: post #155
ZeroCool2u wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem here is not the success of AMD after splitting, but the complete retreat of Global Foundries from the SOTA process node. If this happens again with an Intel split then we have only TSMC left, off the coast of mainland China in Taiwan, in the middle of a game of thermonuclear tug of war between the West and China. While Capitalism will likely be part of the solution, through subsidizes for Intel or some ot…

The price of creating the fabs for a new node increases exponentially with every node. I remember when there were over 20 top node players. Now there are 3 if you aren't counting Intel out. If AMD had remained in the game there's no way they could have won.

I agree with respect to AMD's situation. I think that was the right decision for them then.

I'm saying that there is a difference between the two situations and there are geopolitical factors at play that mean the answer here is not as simple as splitting Intel into a foundry company and a chip design company, due to what we saw happen to AMD's foundry when they split.

I think it's a bit misleading to say that there are 3 top node players right now. Samsung, TSMC, and Intel, while from a business perspective do compete, from a technical perspective TSMC seems to have a fairly significant lead. Like you said, the price increases dramatically every node. If Intel were to split, why would that new foundry company bother investing a huge amount of money in nodes they can't yet produce at volume? Also, Samsung while close to TSMC in competition at this point, still produces an inferior product. There seems to be solid evidence of this in the power consumption comparison of AMD vs NVIDIA top end cards.[1]

My point being, if Intel were to follow the same road as AMD and split up, we could find ourselves in a situation that while better for Intel's business, would arguably leave the world worse off overall by leaving TSMC as the only viable manufacturer for high end chips.

1. https://www.legitreviews.com/amd-radeon-rx-6900-xt-video-car...

Re: Intel Problems

#188

Post by cbozeman »

This was a well-written article, but I don't think it came from someone with a deep understanding of semiconductor technology and fabrication.

Intel hasn't lost to Apple and AMD because they employ idiots, or because of their shitty company culture (in fact, they're doing surprisingly well in spite of their awful company culture). Intel lost because they made the wrong bet on the wrong type of process technology. 10 years ago (or thereabouts), Intel's engineers were certain that they had the correct type of process technology outlined to successfully migrate down from 22nm to 14nm, then down to 10nm and eventually 7, 5, and 3nm. They were betting on future advances in physics, chemistry, and semiconductor processes. Advances that didn't materialize.

EUV turned out to be the best way to make a wafer at lower transistor size.

So now Intel's playing catch up. Their 10nm process is still error-prone and far from stable. There are no high-performance 10nm desktop or server chips.

That's not going to continue forever though. Even on 14nm, Intel chips, while not as fast as Apple's M1 or AMD's Ryzen 5000 series, are still competitive in many areas. Intel's 14nm chips are over 6 years old. The first was Broadwell in October 2014. What do you think will happen when Intel solves the engineering problems on 10nm, and then 7nm? And then 5nm?

It took AMD 5 years to become competitive with Intel, and over 5 to actually surpass them.

If you think the M1 and 5950X are fast, then wait till we have an i9-14900K on 5nm. It'll make these offers look quaint by comparison.

EDIT: I say this as a total AMD fanboy by the way, who bought a 3900X and RX 5700 XT at MicroCenter on 7/7/2019 and stood in line for almost five hours to get them, and as someone who now has a Threadripper 3990X workstation. I love AMD for what they've done... they took us out of the quad-core paradigm and brought us into the octa-core paradigm of x86 computing.

But I am under no illusions that they're technically superior to Intel. Their process is what allows them to outperform Intel, not their design. I guarantee you that if Intel could mass produce their CPUs on their 7nm process (which is far, far more transistor dense than TSMC's 7nm), AMD would be 15-25% behind on performance.

It isn't so much that AMD is succeeding because they're technically superior... they're succeeding because Zen's design team made the right bet and because Intel's engineering process team made the wrong bet.

Re: Intel Problems

#189

Post by ZeroCool2u »

renewiltord wrote: post #129
ZeroCool2u wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem here is not the success of AMD after splitting, but the complete retreat of Global Foundries from the SOTA process node. If this happens again with an Intel split then we have only TSMC left, off the coast of mainland China in Taiwan, in the middle of a game of thermonuclear tug of war between the West and China. While Capitalism will likely be part of the solution, through subsidizes for Intel or some ot…

I feel like that disclosure isn't warranted since like two of them are in the S&P 500 and everyone here probably has some exposure to that.

Fair enough.

Re: Intel Problems

#190

Post by m3kw9 »

If individual companies developing their own chips is a trend, and it sure seem like it is starting to, intel has a lot more competition they have to contend with. Before is always a buy, now add build into the equation. That’s where intels problems are coming. That’s a lot of head winds, they can capture that by splitting and going the TSMC route, and specialize further on the design and use some form of licensing model like ARM.

This is like the Microsoft pivot into cloud to save itself.

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