231–240 of 761 posts
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I'm not into hardware but I remember when AMD was sneered at, and all real CPUs were Intel. Then Ryzen happened. My meta conclusion is that its super hard to tell when someone is done, and it can change quickly. Or not. Sometimes it if looks like terminal decline, it simply is terminal decline.
That has happened like 4 times with AMD already since I've been buying PCs
What I really want to know, from someone who does know: Is Intel cooked? Like, will they be able to manufacture chips that compete with TSMC? They used to be a crown-jewel of US tech. But it seems like every time I read the news, they are announcing a delay or shutting down some product.
Intel's fab issues are overstated in my opinion. They were stuck on 14nm for a very long time because they bit off too much with 10nm. People act like that means ALL research in nodes smaller than 10nm must have stopped, but that's simply not true as research into tech and materials needed for smaller nodes happens in parallel. It's also noteworthy that GAAFET being a complete redesign of major parts of the manufactu…
I would be very surprised if 14a and 10a comes out soon enough to be competitive with TSMC.
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Right but at some point does Nvidia use their muscle and block TSMC from making chips for anyone else? The demand for GPUs is just increasing too rapidly for this to make sense.
That will 100% never happen. Nvidia is big, but not even close to a majority of TSMC revenue or loading. Apple, Intel, Qualcomm, etc... In this case...TSMC is holding all the cards, not Nvidia
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> used to be a crown-jewel of US tech I feel like x86 itself is kinda legacy tech. So while AMD has made advancements, they're somewhat in the same boat as Intel. It seems like NVIDIA and Micron are the real "crown jewels" of US tech
modern x86 chips (for a long time really) are hybrid CISC/RISC at the hardware level. It's at the microcode that the ISA lives and that's changeable.
No, it's not. In modern high-speed CPUs, many instructions are decoded directly, without going through the microcode engine. In fact, on several modern Intel CPUs, only one of the instruction decoders can run microcode ("complex") instructions, while all the other decoders can only run non-microcode ("simple") instructions.
It would be more precise to say that it's at the "front-end" part of the core (where the decoders are) that the ISA lives, but even that's not quite true; many ISAs have peculiarities which affect beyond that, like flags on x86.
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Shipping the chips back to Taiwan to be packaged so they can then be shipped back to the United States for sale is a positive? What are you talking about?
Ocean shipping is very very cheap. Less cost in money and energy to ship a chip across the ocean than for you to drive to best buy to buy the phone its in.
What I really want to know, from someone who does know: Is Intel cooked? Like, will they be able to manufacture chips that compete with TSMC? They used to be a crown-jewel of US tech. But it seems like every time I read the news, they are announcing a delay or shutting down some product.
Intel is a great example of the fact that between stupidity and low-integrity behavior as a default, the people in charge fuck up in ways that the man on the street would get right. Defense is starting to get a blank check with fairly bipartisan support for the first time in at least 30-40 years and it's centered on semiconductor supply chains . There has never been a better time to secure the fucking funding, have A…
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How does this scale? TSMC can't literally be the only fab in the world...
They aren't. Samsung comes in a close second in terms of tech. GloFo is also still floating around though lagging pretty bad AFAIK. Micron has it's own fabs that they are actively developing (in fact, they are building new facilities right now). What TSMC is is cutting edge. That's why everyone that needs top performance uses them.
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Intel made mistakes. TSMC can make mistakes. TSMC is also in geopolitically risky Taiwan. I'm not counting out Intel yet. They're also very unpopular online so it's tough to find solid unbiased info about them. Like is the stink about 18A true or do people just want to hate on Intel?
Yeah, TSMC reliance may look crazy by 2030
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If you have that what's the VLIW getting you?
Fewer transistors and pipeline stages required for the decode unit, which is a real but moderate advantage. And it turned out the window was very narrow and the relative win got smaller and smaller over time. And other externalities where VLIW loses moderately, like total instruction size (i.e. icache footprint) turned out to be more important.
Isn't having fixed-size naturally-aligned instructions (like on 64-bit ARM) enough to get that advantage?
What I really want to know, from someone who does know: Is Intel cooked? Like, will they be able to manufacture chips that compete with TSMC? They used to be a crown-jewel of US tech. But it seems like every time I read the news, they are announcing a delay or shutting down some product.
Intel needs to course correct. I live in the area and know a LOT of intel fab workers. The issue is not the workers: Intel has been captured by corporate raiders and toxic management. They aren't interested in making chips or an innovative company. They just want to squeeze the juice out of the company until it is dry. That is why it is so bad.
Instead of investing in the future and paying top dollar for top employees, the Board paid the shareholders (even 20 years ago). They never even tried to compete for the best employees, and instead let them all go to Alphabet/Apple/Amazon/Meta/Microsoft/Nvidia/Netflix.
This includes the employees in management.