8 ms·

Can someone explain how this works? We've got the following chip companies: Intel, AMD, Samsung. And we've got a bunch of "fab" companies: Intel, TSMC, Global

by jkabrg 8y ago

Can someone explain how this works? We've got the following chip companies: Intel, AMD, Samsung. And we've got a bunch of "fab" companies: Intel, TSMC, Global Foundries, Samsung. What's the difference between the two sets of companies? Why can't Intel just buy a "7nm" processor from TSMC? And what exactly is "7nm"? The distance between the closest transistors in a chip? Just guessing. [edit] From browsing Wikipedia, I gather that: - A chip company designs a processor. The design is in the form of a circuit diagram(?) - A fab company turns that diagram into a physical product. So for example, ARM designs a chip, which then gets built by Samsung. ARM is strictly responsible for design, and Samsung provides a factory.

baybal2 8y ago
Short and to the point answers: >And what exactly is "7nm"? The size of pixel in an IC, or it used to be so. For convenience, just think that it still is. >Why can't Intel just buy a "7nm" processor from TSMC? Intel can dual source fab capacity, (they make part of Atom line at TSMC, part in house) and did so in the past. Besides technicalities, a lot has to do with pride.
- dbcurtis 8y ago
  At my time at Intel, the company was fab-constrained. Intel ran some parts on outside fabs. The decision as to which ones was easily made by sorting projects in order of gross margin per wafer. Highest margin parts ran on Intel fab, when the fab was full, the project had to hunt down fab capacity elsewhere.
CryoLogic 8y ago
It's not a concrete distance, but moreso a range. I think 7nm is the bottom of the range so the distance would be 7nm-14nm. 10nm chips have distance ranges of 10nm to 20nm. I think at that size it is very difficult to get exacts. Fab refers to a plant than manufactures the chips, versus designs them. I think Intel does both?
btouellette 8y ago
The first set is doing chip design and layout (think of this like the circuit diagram for the CPU). The second set is doing the actual manufacturing after being delivered a complete layout. Intel can buy a "7nm" processor from TSMC and in fact for products that aren't their processors they actually do get other companies to manufacture their products occasionally. They don't want to release the complete design of their processor to external suppliers for IP reasons and have been leveraging their manufacturing advantage to sell more CPUs. Intel could build AMD chips in their fab but then Intel CPUs have to compete with AMD on architecture alone and lose any performance edge attributable to the manufacturing. Technically this is the gate length of the transistor (https://nptel.ac.in/courses/103106075/Courses/Lecture21.html https://nptel.ac.in/courses/103106075/Courses/Lecture21.html) but it's becoming mostly a marketing term to refer to the generation of manufacturing tech since the transistor density depends on enough other factors now that gate length alone isn't a good measure. Intel's 14nm ~= TSMC/GF 10nm and Intel's 10nm ~= TSMC/GF 7nm.
sliken 8y ago
Well for decades Intel's competitive advantage was the fabs. They executed well and it was hard to compete. There's been dozens of projects to compete with Intel that failed to deliver, largely because they couldn't compete with Intel's fabs. I always felt bad for AMD, they often ended up competing with Intel using fabs that were a generation behind. However the latest stumble does show the weakness of that approach. Nothing is stopping Intel from using a 3rd party fab, however every chip they farm out is one less to amortize their fab related R&D over.
- dzhiurgis 8y ago
  Is there any chance Apple would switch from Intel to AMD or it’s own x86 design made by TSMC? Do they need to licence x86 fiest or some sort of other good nuff reason?
  - sliken 8y ago
    Seems pretty much impossible for anyone but AMD and Intel to make an x86 without causing IP related issues, at least in the USA. AMD did recently try to subvert this with a complex setup of partnerships for a CPU that will only be sold inside of China. Not sure what x86 has to offer Apple though. Their control of their platform would allow them to switch architectures, just like they have twice before. It's widely rumored that Apple will migrate their x86 products to Arm based products. They have invested pretty heavily in Arm.
    - monocasa 8y ago
      I mean, x86_64 came out in 2000. The basic patents behind it should be expiring right about now.
      - bonzini 8y ago
        There are many patents around microarchitectural optimizations and also features like performance monitoring, virtualization, etc. It happened a few times to me to see a new, still undocumented, feature mentioned in Intel slides, and consult the patent to learn more about it.
jdietrich 8y ago
Intel have historically been very good at fabrication, which represented a considerable competitive advantage. Outsourcing fabrication is much less capital-intensive and can be more flexible, but it's potentially less profitable because the foundry needs to make a profit. The relationship between a chip design company and their foundry partner is fairly complex (especially at cutting-edge nodes), with the foundry providing considerable expertise and design support. Node size names have become fairly arbitrary, with no direct connection to any particular feature size. Intel's 10nm is effectively the same as everyone else's 7nm. In either case, the actual pitch between transistor gates is about 54nm. There are ostensibly standards set through the IRDS, but there's a clear marketing imperative to advertise a smaller node size.
mih 8y ago
Intel, Samsung - They design chips as well as fabricate them. Design starts from a very high level specification down to individual transistors. Fabs such as TSMC, Global Foundries etc.: They manufacture chips in addition to specifying the rules to be followed when laying out the logical design (circuits) on silicon. Rules differ by the given node (7nm, 10nm, 14nm etc.) and specify things such as the width of a gate, thickness of a metal wire on the chip, spacing and tolerances etc. The actual number just indicates technology advancement. 7nm means the manufacturing process is more advanced than the 10nm process and has little to do with physical reality. Hence Intel's 10nm process might not be the same as TSMC's 10nm. While Intel can in principle adhere to TSMC's 7nm process, they already have their own R&D and develop their process in-house. Switching to a different foundry's node would involve redoing a number of steps before the chip can be manufactured. Besides, fabs guard their process jealously and are very protective of their IP. Design companies such as AMD, Qualcomm, Broadcom etc. just design the circuits and adhere to the specification of their chosen fab and node to layout the design on silicon. Source: I worked in the EDA[1] industry. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_design_automation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_design_automation
InclinedPlane 8y ago
The design of the processor is specific to the fabrication technology. Notably Intel has been the industry leader in fab technology and capacity for some time. It's simply very difficult to compete with their ability to crank out CPUs at their volume and performance levels. Intel could "simply" crank out CPUs via TSMC but it wouldn't be to their advantage.
rayiner 8y ago
There is a little more complexity that bears on why companies like Intel would have their own fab. In practice, a processor design isn’t just a circuit diagram (or a netlist: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netlist https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netlist). A circuit diagram is an idealized model that hardware does not totally reflect. For example, wires have capacitance and transistors leak current. In fact the smaller the process node, the less the real circuits reflect idealized circuits. High-performance designs thus are tuned for the specific properties of the process. Historically, Intel has not only led in process technology, but has reaped benefits from having the process engineers next door to the processor designers. Intel CPUs have been tuned for the exact process that will be used to make them, including by laying out transistors by hand to maximize performance. Custom design happens with foundaries as well, of course, but there have historically been synergies from putting processor design and process design under the same roof.
- dnautics 8y ago
  I have heard the argument? Rumors? that Intel has suffered from the closeness of the chip designers to the process engineers... for a long time if the process is not robust, the designers could workaround, but that made it hard for non-in-house designers to develop. The need for robustness has forced a discipline in the tsmc process engineers to be more disciplined, which scales well downward.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
manigandham 8y ago
I highly recommend watching this, it's one of the best videos available on how chips are actually built and gives a great overview: "Indistinguishable From Magic: Manufacturing Modern Computer Chips" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGFhc8R_uO4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGFhc8R_uO4
- bumholio 8y ago
  It's just incredible how complex and advanced the hardware got, but at the same time, how crappy and inefficient the software on top of it is. I know it's simple economics and the chip foundry has an economy of scale that the Electron developer lacks. But it still feels like we're all eating garbage out of golden plates. By the end of the next decade we will probably reach the end of what is physically possible in device fabrication, so competition will have to move to design and software efficiency.
  - brian-armstrong 8y ago
    I thought at first you were going to talk about how EDA software sucks. Now /that's/ garbage
    - bumholio 8y ago
      It's a good example of the same underlying economic incentives. An EDA title is used by a few tens of thousands of professionals, at best. Large investments into making it more user-friendly and stable is not really worth it in the grand scheme of things. It needs to be just the minimal viable product that can get the chip out the door; it will be complex and feature packed rather than usable, and the engineers will learn to navigate around it's idiosyncrasies and bugs just like they solve other technical problems, it's what engineers do. The chip itself though, that's a whole nother thing. Especially the process that works across multiple designs and becomes an asset for the company. Any nanosecond shaved here improves the capacity of the foundry to compete and helps a billion people complete the task 1% faster or have 1% more memory. The customers have no reason to work around a less performing product, they will just buy from the competition. So you get this strange combo of supernatural hardware assembled with atomic precision by garbage software written in Perl by an outsourcing guy with 6 months total programming experience.

by jkabrg 8y ago

baybal2 8y ago

Short and to the point answers: >And what exactly is "7nm"? The size of pixel in an IC, or it used to be so. For convenience, just think that it still is. >Why can't Intel just buy a "7nm" processor from TSMC? Intel can dual source fab capacity, (they make part of Atom line at TSMC, part in house) and did so in the past. Besides technicalities, a lot has to do with pride.

dbcurtis 8y ago
At my time at Intel, the company was fab-constrained. Intel ran some parts on outside fabs. The decision as to which ones was easily made by sorting projects in order of gross margin per wafer. Highest margin parts ran on Intel fab, when the fab was full, the project had to hunt down fab capacity elsewhere.

CryoLogic 8y ago

It's not a concrete distance, but moreso a range. I think 7nm is the bottom of the range so the distance would be 7nm-14nm. 10nm chips have distance ranges of 10nm to 20nm. I think at that size it is very difficult to get exacts. Fab refers to a plant than manufactures the chips, versus designs them. I think Intel does both?

btouellette 8y ago

The first set is doing chip design and layout (think of this like the circuit diagram for the CPU). The second set is doing the actual manufacturing after being delivered a complete layout. Intel can buy a "7nm" processor from TSMC and in fact for products that aren't their processors they actually do get other companies to manufacture their products occasionally. They don't want to release the complete design of their processor to external suppliers for IP reasons and have been leveraging their manufacturing advantage to sell more CPUs. Intel could build AMD chips in their fab but then Intel CPUs have to compete with AMD on architecture alone and lose any performance edge attributable to the manufacturing. Technically this is the gate length of the transistor (https://nptel.ac.in/courses/103106075/Courses/Lecture21.html https://nptel.ac.in/courses/103106075/Courses/Lecture21.html) but it's becoming mostly a marketing term to refer to the generation of manufacturing tech since the transistor density depends on enough other factors now that gate length alone isn't a good measure. Intel's 14nm ~= TSMC/GF 10nm and Intel's 10nm ~= TSMC/GF 7nm.

sliken 8y ago

Well for decades Intel's competitive advantage was the fabs. They executed well and it was hard to compete. There's been dozens of projects to compete with Intel that failed to deliver, largely because they couldn't compete with Intel's fabs. I always felt bad for AMD, they often ended up competing with Intel using fabs that were a generation behind. However the latest stumble does show the weakness of that approach. Nothing is stopping Intel from using a 3rd party fab, however every chip they farm out is one less to amortize their fab related R&D over.

dzhiurgis 8y ago
Is there any chance Apple would switch from Intel to AMD or it’s own x86 design made by TSMC? Do they need to licence x86 fiest or some sort of other good nuff reason?
- sliken 8y ago
  Seems pretty much impossible for anyone but AMD and Intel to make an x86 without causing IP related issues, at least in the USA. AMD did recently try to subvert this with a complex setup of partnerships for a CPU that will only be sold inside of China. Not sure what x86 has to offer Apple though. Their control of their platform would allow them to switch architectures, just like they have twice before. It's widely rumored that Apple will migrate their x86 products to Arm based products. They have invested pretty heavily in Arm.
  - monocasa 8y ago
    I mean, x86_64 came out in 2000. The basic patents behind it should be expiring right about now.
    - bonzini 8y ago
      There are many patents around microarchitectural optimizations and also features like performance monitoring, virtualization, etc. It happened a few times to me to see a new, still undocumented, feature mentioned in Intel slides, and consult the patent to learn more about it.

jdietrich 8y ago

Intel have historically been very good at fabrication, which represented a considerable competitive advantage. Outsourcing fabrication is much less capital-intensive and can be more flexible, but it's potentially less profitable because the foundry needs to make a profit. The relationship between a chip design company and their foundry partner is fairly complex (especially at cutting-edge nodes), with the foundry providing considerable expertise and design support. Node size names have become fairly arbitrary, with no direct connection to any particular feature size. Intel's 10nm is effectively the same as everyone else's 7nm. In either case, the actual pitch between transistor gates is about 54nm. There are ostensibly standards set through the IRDS, but there's a clear marketing imperative to advertise a smaller node size.

mih 8y ago

Intel, Samsung - They design chips as well as fabricate them. Design starts from a very high level specification down to individual transistors. Fabs such as TSMC, Global Foundries etc.: They manufacture chips in addition to specifying the rules to be followed when laying out the logical design (circuits) on silicon. Rules differ by the given node (7nm, 10nm, 14nm etc.) and specify things such as the width of a gate, thickness of a metal wire on the chip, spacing and tolerances etc. The actual number just indicates technology advancement. 7nm means the manufacturing process is more advanced than the 10nm process and has little to do with physical reality. Hence Intel's 10nm process might not be the same as TSMC's 10nm. While Intel can in principle adhere to TSMC's 7nm process, they already have their own R&D and develop their process in-house. Switching to a different foundry's node would involve redoing a number of steps before the chip can be manufactured. Besides, fabs guard their process jealously and are very protective of their IP. Design companies such as AMD, Qualcomm, Broadcom etc. just design the circuits and adhere to the specification of their chosen fab and node to layout the design on silicon. Source: I worked in the EDA[1] industry. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_design_automation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_design_automation

InclinedPlane 8y ago

The design of the processor is specific to the fabrication technology. Notably Intel has been the industry leader in fab technology and capacity for some time. It's simply very difficult to compete with their ability to crank out CPUs at their volume and performance levels. Intel could "simply" crank out CPUs via TSMC but it wouldn't be to their advantage.

rayiner 8y ago

There is a little more complexity that bears on why companies like Intel would have their own fab. In practice, a processor design isn’t just a circuit diagram (or a netlist: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netlist https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netlist). A circuit diagram is an idealized model that hardware does not totally reflect. For example, wires have capacitance and transistors leak current. In fact the smaller the process node, the less the real circuits reflect idealized circuits. High-performance designs thus are tuned for the specific properties of the process. Historically, Intel has not only led in process technology, but has reaped benefits from having the process engineers next door to the processor designers. Intel CPUs have been tuned for the exact process that will be used to make them, including by laying out transistors by hand to maximize performance. Custom design happens with foundaries as well, of course, but there have historically been synergies from putting processor design and process design under the same roof.

dnautics 8y ago
I have heard the argument? Rumors? that Intel has suffered from the closeness of the chip designers to the process engineers... for a long time if the process is not robust, the designers could workaround, but that made it hard for non-in-house designers to develop. The need for robustness has forced a discipline in the tsmc process engineers to be more disciplined, which scales well downward.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

manigandham 8y ago

I highly recommend watching this, it's one of the best videos available on how chips are actually built and gives a great overview: "Indistinguishable From Magic: Manufacturing Modern Computer Chips" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGFhc8R_uO4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGFhc8R_uO4

bumholio 8y ago
It's just incredible how complex and advanced the hardware got, but at the same time, how crappy and inefficient the software on top of it is. I know it's simple economics and the chip foundry has an economy of scale that the Electron developer lacks. But it still feels like we're all eating garbage out of golden plates. By the end of the next decade we will probably reach the end of what is physically possible in device fabrication, so competition will have to move to design and software efficiency.
- brian-armstrong 8y ago
  I thought at first you were going to talk about how EDA software sucks. Now /that's/ garbage
  - bumholio 8y ago
    It's a good example of the same underlying economic incentives. An EDA title is used by a few tens of thousands of professionals, at best. Large investments into making it more user-friendly and stable is not really worth it in the grand scheme of things. It needs to be just the minimal viable product that can get the chip out the door; it will be complex and feature packed rather than usable, and the engineers will learn to navigate around it's idiosyncrasies and bugs just like they solve other technical problems, it's what engineers do. The chip itself though, that's a whole nother thing. Especially the process that works across multiple designs and becomes an asset for the company. Any nanosecond shaved here improves the capacity of the foundry to compete and helps a billion people complete the task 1% faster or have 1% more memory. The customers have no reason to work around a less performing product, they will just buy from the competition. So you get this strange combo of supernatural hardware assembled with atomic precision by garbage software written in Perl by an outsourcing guy with 6 months total programming experience.