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The most likely cause of Intel's lagging is a wall of cost/benefit to being both designer and fab. This hit AMD earlier by being smaller(and arguably, with a di

by veebat 8y ago

The most likely cause of Intel's lagging is a wall of cost/benefit to being both designer and fab. This hit AMD earlier by being smaller(and arguably, with a different management style, AMD could have held on to their fabs longer) but each node only gets more expensive and harder to keep busy with orders which in turn means a greater need for external customers to fund R&D. Intel had a reprieve of almost a decade with a weak AMD that let them coast along with the desktop monopoly and extract a yawn-worthy 5-10% improvement per generation, but now that they have the incentive to compete again they're struggling to get their house in order - the chip design hasn't had a major refresh in a long time and they have been very late with their version of 10nm. So they're really at a crossroads now where they can't rely on old tactics and their long-term prospects are in serious doubt, since they didn't position themselves to counter the efficient small-core/big-package architecture that AMD is pushing with the Zen chips. For now, they can still put out competitive flagship product launches simply by binning extremely expensive parts and running them hot(e.g. compare i9 and Threadripper) but that advantage might erode within one more generation.

dogma1138 8y ago
Intel's biggest mistake over the past 10 years was not to open it's foundry services sooner now it's custom foundry services are nearly irrelevant outside of a few niche markets. Mobile SoC design and being answerable to a huge number of very large customers forced fabs to evolve their processes in a way where market forces and customer demand forces requirements rather than office politics. Intel has still an edge on many parts of the manufacturing process but as far as the lithography goes they've lost this round. Luckily for them their 10nm was much more ambitious than any of the 7nm designs and they are facing problems that other fabs will not face until their 5nm and beyond processes. Intel is also fighting a much tougher fight now TSMC was always good (better than AMD/GloFo) but now you also have the Alliance which is IBM/Samsung/GloFo which combine resources on process R&D. GloFo botched their 20/22nm process and had to scrap it completely and if they couldn't use Samsung's 20nm process and call it 14nm AMD's Zen would likely would never have materialized because of the WSA. And this is essentially the gist of things GloFo/Samsung/IBM are essentially a united front, TSMC is as capable as ever and what all of these 4 (and more) share in common is that they answer to external customers so if something doesn't work there is a much bigger pressure to drop it and find something that would instead of sinking more and more cost into it because of internal politics.
- rbinv 8y ago
  Aren't all manufacturers dependent on ASML's stuff, anyway? As far as I know, none of the big guys are developing their own EUV tech. Where's the edge?
  - ylk 8y ago
    Got told once* that they have specific teams working with Intel, etc. with pretty strict rules, where if you ever work for one of those teams you can't ever work for one of the others. So if I got it right ASML develops their EUV tech, etc and then those teams build things on top of that with Intel, TSMC and so on. *at an ASML booth at a kind of job fair at my uni
  - dogma1138 8y ago
    The litography is just one part of the manufacturing process and there are many ways to apply the same tech. Also the development as mentioned below is completely segregated between teams.
- kingosticks 8y ago
  Last time we were vendor shopping we considered Intel and had an in-person meeting. I'm not sure why they bothered turning up as they were nowhere near competitive. It was pretty clear they were not interested in any thing that involved any work from them. If only someone else could offer EMIB technology...
- Symmetry 8y ago
  I'm not sure that's true. Intel has managed to have a higher performance process than their competitors in part by accepting more restrictive design rules. Because their architects can work hand-in-glove with their process engineers as a new node comes up they can have two-way feedback on this and to some extent design their process around their architecture's requirements. But it's very hard for third parties to work with their main process. They do have a separate relaxed rules process for use when acting as a foundry. Pursuing the foundry route seriously would have meant Intel giving up one of its largest advantages.
- 8y ago
mtgx 8y ago
Intel has already given a reason for the lagging: trying to improve density by 2.7x instead of 2.4x. Other foundries were able to improve density by 2.7x for their 7nm nodes compared to their 14/16nm nodes, so I'm not sure what exactly Intel is doing there.
ksec 8y ago
>The most likely cause of Intel's lagging is a wall of cost/benefit to being both designer and fab. This hit AMD earlier by being smaller(and arguably, with a different management style, AMD could have held on to their fabs longer) but each node only gets more expensive and harder to keep busy with orders which in turn means a greater need for external customers to fund R&D. I have been struggling to explain this better, and those words describe the exact problem. Scale. Apple alone ship more CPU unit then Intel. And that is all going to TSMC. Just a reminder, the "original" original schedule, was that we have 10nm in 2016, 7nm in 2018, and 5nm in 2020. After the delay in 14nm, everything being pushed 1 year later. 2017 come and gone and we don't have 10nm, now 2018 we still won't have it, and as pointed out in various investor conference call. 10nm is now Scheduled for 2019. They "were" miles ahead, but lack of competition and incentives meant 10nm didn't work out. They have been milking whatever they have for far too long. And waited a little too long to decide to enter the GPU market.
yaschobob 8y ago
This misses the point of where Intel is going. Intel does not see the PC market as a growth sector as a whole. It may grow for individual companies, like AMD, as they take up part of the share, however. That doesn't mean the PC market as a whole is growing. It's actually shrinking. Intel recognizes this and is focusing on data centric use-cases like supercomputers and clouds. For example, Intel is leading "Pathforward" with the US Government to develop very high-end solutions to large-scale problems; https://www.ecpannualmeeting.com/ https://www.ecpannualmeeting.com/ In summary, Intel doesn't care that much about the PC sector because it's shrinking as a whole.

by veebat 8y ago

dogma1138 8y ago

Intel's biggest mistake over the past 10 years was not to open it's foundry services sooner now it's custom foundry services are nearly irrelevant outside of a few niche markets. Mobile SoC design and being answerable to a huge number of very large customers forced fabs to evolve their processes in a way where market forces and customer demand forces requirements rather than office politics. Intel has still an edge on many parts of the manufacturing process but as far as the lithography goes they've lost this round. Luckily for them their 10nm was much more ambitious than any of the 7nm designs and they are facing problems that other fabs will not face until their 5nm and beyond processes. Intel is also fighting a much tougher fight now TSMC was always good (better than AMD/GloFo) but now you also have the Alliance which is IBM/Samsung/GloFo which combine resources on process R&D. GloFo botched their 20/22nm process and had to scrap it completely and if they couldn't use Samsung's 20nm process and call it 14nm AMD's Zen would likely would never have materialized because of the WSA. And this is essentially the gist of things GloFo/Samsung/IBM are essentially a united front, TSMC is as capable as ever and what all of these 4 (and more) share in common is that they answer to external customers so if something doesn't work there is a much bigger pressure to drop it and find something that would instead of sinking more and more cost into it because of internal politics.

rbinv 8y ago
Aren't all manufacturers dependent on ASML's stuff, anyway? As far as I know, none of the big guys are developing their own EUV tech. Where's the edge?
- ylk 8y ago
  Got told once* that they have specific teams working with Intel, etc. with pretty strict rules, where if you ever work for one of those teams you can't ever work for one of the others. So if I got it right ASML develops their EUV tech, etc and then those teams build things on top of that with Intel, TSMC and so on. *at an ASML booth at a kind of job fair at my uni
- dogma1138 8y ago
  The litography is just one part of the manufacturing process and there are many ways to apply the same tech. Also the development as mentioned below is completely segregated between teams.
kingosticks 8y ago
Last time we were vendor shopping we considered Intel and had an in-person meeting. I'm not sure why they bothered turning up as they were nowhere near competitive. It was pretty clear they were not interested in any thing that involved any work from them. If only someone else could offer EMIB technology...
Symmetry 8y ago
I'm not sure that's true. Intel has managed to have a higher performance process than their competitors in part by accepting more restrictive design rules. Because their architects can work hand-in-glove with their process engineers as a new node comes up they can have two-way feedback on this and to some extent design their process around their architecture's requirements. But it's very hard for third parties to work with their main process. They do have a separate relaxed rules process for use when acting as a foundry. Pursuing the foundry route seriously would have meant Intel giving up one of its largest advantages.
8y ago

mtgx 8y ago

Intel has already given a reason for the lagging: trying to improve density by 2.7x instead of 2.4x. Other foundries were able to improve density by 2.7x for their 7nm nodes compared to their 14/16nm nodes, so I'm not sure what exactly Intel is doing there.

ksec 8y ago

>The most likely cause of Intel's lagging is a wall of cost/benefit to being both designer and fab. This hit AMD earlier by being smaller(and arguably, with a different management style, AMD could have held on to their fabs longer) but each node only gets more expensive and harder to keep busy with orders which in turn means a greater need for external customers to fund R&D. I have been struggling to explain this better, and those words describe the exact problem. Scale. Apple alone ship more CPU unit then Intel. And that is all going to TSMC. Just a reminder, the "original" original schedule, was that we have 10nm in 2016, 7nm in 2018, and 5nm in 2020. After the delay in 14nm, everything being pushed 1 year later. 2017 come and gone and we don't have 10nm, now 2018 we still won't have it, and as pointed out in various investor conference call. 10nm is now Scheduled for 2019. They "were" miles ahead, but lack of competition and incentives meant 10nm didn't work out. They have been milking whatever they have for far too long. And waited a little too long to decide to enter the GPU market.

yaschobob 8y ago

This misses the point of where Intel is going. Intel does not see the PC market as a growth sector as a whole. It may grow for individual companies, like AMD, as they take up part of the share, however. That doesn't mean the PC market as a whole is growing. It's actually shrinking. Intel recognizes this and is focusing on data centric use-cases like supercomputers and clouds. For example, Intel is leading "Pathforward" with the US Government to develop very high-end solutions to large-scale problems; https://www.ecpannualmeeting.com/ https://www.ecpannualmeeting.com/ In summary, Intel doesn't care that much about the PC sector because it's shrinking as a whole.