Something about giving a multibillion dollar company government grants rubs me the wrong way. Most of the money probably goes into hiring useless consulting firms to “do the leg work”.
Nah, this is intel. They'll spend it on a dividend.
Intel to Receive $8.5B in Grants to Build Chip Plants
311–320 of 657 posts
Re: Intel to Receive $8.5B in Grants to Build Chip Plants
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not saying INTC isn't valuable - just saying they seem to have missed the boat in a big way and changes are in order. The US does of course need on-shore chip foundries for strategic reasons.
Pat Gelsinger only returned 3 years ago, it just takes a while for changes to propagate through an org as large as Intel.
+1 this.
Intel let MBA-think drive too many decisions (ie EUV). Maybe there was some misperception there, even cultural bias.
Pat's biggest real change has been to push the company towards process leadership. They always had good designs, though perhaps also damaged by MBA-think there too.
Still not sure about the decision to get out of non-volatile memory, though perhaps that was just a scope decision. Obviously, you could make a pretty amazing AI device with a whole bunch of NVM in-package...
Re: Intel to Receive $8.5B in Grants to Build Chip Plants
#313It's frustrating that Intel is being given truckloads of taxpayer money after spending decades falling behind their competitors due to arrogance and complacency.
Re: Intel to Receive $8.5B in Grants to Build Chip Plants
#314Right now one of the biggest blockers in on-shoring semiconductor fab at any kind of reasonable price-point and timescale is the lack of a skilled workforce. This legislation has dual objectives: train new people to get into sophisticated manufacturing AND to build out the actual infrastructure itself. That almost guarantees it won't be the most efficient way to actually get these chips on American soil. Whether we l…
Or we are going to be training Junior engineers with outdated skill sets and build outdated infrastructure. Sometimes top down planning works, but I think I would personally need to trust the leadership and the incentives. Unfortunately incentives on these are typically to do bare-minimum so you can meet the criteria to get subsidies. Sure the chips will be usable, but you spent a multiplier of the cost it takes to g…
> and the chips aren't cutting edge.
Intel is building two 20A in Arizona and one 18A fab in Ohio. If they aren't cutting edge, what is?
Re: Intel to Receive $8.5B in Grants to Build Chip Plants
#315Re: Intel to Receive $8.5B in Grants to Build Chip Plants
#316Earlier quoted context omitted.
A baby can't be made in one month just because you had the money to hire 9 surrogates. Many processes do not scale just because a money spigot turned on. What most often does scale as quickly as monetary availability is fraud, waste and abuse.
There are thousands of items on the agenda in the present day, everything from better open source LLMs to moon-base railway designs, so even if 99% of these turn out to be duds that can’t be budged, there are still sufficiently many remaining to absorb all bonafide super-geniuses on Earth several times over.
In this particular item on the agenda, chip fabs, it is not clear spending more money one time will produce a result, much less a faster result by attracting "bonafide super-geniouses." One might respond that "you can't win if you don't play" which would lay bare the gamble.
Re: Intel to Receive $8.5B in Grants to Build Chip Plants
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having seen a few 'high tech' places myself: there's high tech, and then there's _high tech_. Assembling a motherboard is to semiconductor fabs as flying a toy drone is to landing a Boeing 747. One you can learn in an afternoon; the other takes years to learn.
> Assembling a motherboard is to semiconductor fabs as flying a toy drone is to landing a Boeing 747. I disagree. I live next to a fab and have coworkers that have worked the fabs. Humans in fabs are taken out of the loop as much as possible. That's because when dealing with nanoscale structures, human error is simply too common. One of my coworkers worked at the fab during a period where they had humans running the…
> Humans in fabs are taken out of the loop as much as possible.
This. We are talking about Atom scale here. I have as much admiration for skilled mechanics as the next guy. I heard about a lathe operator at Patek Phillip who could turn an arbor to within 1 micron precision, just by listening to the pitch the cutting tool made when trimming it down.
And when chip features were on the micron scale, humans in the loop made sense. But chip feature are ten thousand times smaller than that now--4 orders of magnitude. Anything that doesn't need a Ph.D. in solid state physics to do is going to be automated.
Re: Intel to Receive $8.5B in Grants to Build Chip Plants
#318Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> Globalization is breaking down quickly. Food. Fuel. Renewables is shifting one of these, but the other will not go backwards, its that or billions will starve.
Billions are already starving. You just never hear about them. Millions are starving today on American streets. Yet we do nothing but sit on our hands, play hot potato between generations, point fingers, start culture wars, start class wars. It’s all quite boring. Nobody is interested in solving the issue. Only a rat race to see who can con the next person(s). Some days this monologue from Westworld rings true: “ I t…
> Millions are starving today on American streets
Millions of Americans suffer from "food insecurity" i.e. "reduced food intake and disrupted eating patterns at some time during the year." [1] This is very bad, but, there are also food stamps, soup kitchens, food banks, school lunches, family members, and random good samaritans that prevent actual famine amongst those populations because there is no shortages of food present. This is very distinct from real mass starvation where millions of people are dying of hunger in a famine where there is insufficient food available which is what I believe the GP is referring to.
1. https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/fo...
Re: Intel to Receive $8.5B in Grants to Build Chip Plants
#319Something about giving a multibillion dollar company government grants rubs me the wrong way. Most of the money probably goes into hiring useless consulting firms to “do the leg work”.
Its a faction of the money you'll spend defending East China from reunification.
/s/s/s//s/s/s/s (because a lot of you struggle)
Re: Intel to Receive $8.5B in Grants to Build Chip Plants
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a silly anecdote and I have a hard time believing chip fab line workers are too much different from those in other types of high-tech (where I spent 15 years working on test automation & quality systems). Some smart folks, for sure, but almost zero roles required even actual engineering background. A lot of management had strong technical education, but the vast majority of line workers are just following simp…
> but almost zero roles required even actual engineering background Small anecdote: pat gelsinger, intel ceo, started as a technician at intel (iirc) at like years old or something like that. That entry level job paid enough that he could have a roof on his head and i guess covered his university tuition? I’m not making this up: it’s all in his book he wrote about his life (not sure I recommend the book)
True, but Pat Gelsinger isn't a good example of what public policy we should pursue to help Joe six-packs enjoy a middle-class life. Gelsinger is one of the few people I would follow blindly into the maws of hell itself; his intellect is exceeded only by his ability to lead.