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Intel grew revenues in Q2 2020, but key manufacturing upgrade delayed
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- coldtea 6y agoNot like they are under any pressure...
- nodesocket 6y agoCan't tell if you being sarcastic, but AMD is working Intel these days.
- totalZero 6y agoI'm still waiting for them to move to 10nm.
- hmottestad 6y agoHaha. Yeah, me too. Still no 10nm pro laptop cpus, desktop cpus or server cpus.
- jjoonathan 6y agoHave any insider accounts of the 10nm debacle emerged, or is it still too soon?
- snovv_crash 6y agoThis is 3rd hand, but I heard that the 14nm was rushed with a crazy schedule, and as a result the greybeards who actually knew everything all left. Intel is having to rebuild all that institutional knowledge from scratch again.
- stormbeard 6y agoAny idea where most of them went?
- ksec 6y agoLikely Retired.
- lallysingh 6y agoAre some of them making belt CPUs?
- lallysingh 6y agoSounds like they should've sent them "please take me back" bouquets with a stack of cash instead of fruit.
- rosywoozlechan 6y agoThey'd be stupid to accept it. Don't work at a place with a bad culture for the money. Unless it's life changing money for a very short duration, it's unlikely to be worth it. Value your quality of life.
- jjoonathan 6y agoEspecially if you have little time and enough money -- like a career-end engineer.
- thu2111 6y agoThe account I just read (linked from the other thread) suggested it was more just that they happened to set really ambitious targets and make a lot of big bets in 10nm, some of which simply did not pan out. Sounds like they may have ended up in a situation where diagnostic and investigation tooling also wasn't working properly due to the use of cobalt, so they'd have ended up with fabrication failures that were then difficult to investigate, as the debugging tools also weren't working. Painful.
- ksec 6y ago20% YoY Revenue increase, 43% YoY Growth in Datacenter Segment. 76% Growth in Non-Volatile Memory solution, another 7% YoY growth in Client Side computing. This is truly amazing results. I get stabbed over at Anandtech every time I made an argument for Intel as an AMD investor. The Internet is full of Intel bashing comments but reality is Intel has been making record revenue quarter after quarter. For the not so good part. >The company's 7nm-based CPU product timing is shifting approximately six months relative to prior expectations. The primary driver is the yield of Intel's 7nm process, which based on recent data, is now trending approximately twelve months behind the company's internal target. The most important bit is that last part, 12 months behind Internal target. To put this into perspective. Intel original 7nm, ( on the assumption it is still the same 7nm because Intel has already changed their 10nm spec) was suppose to be slightly better than TSMC 5nm+, but not as good as TSMC' 3nm. ( In terms of transistor density, by no means it is the only metric it should be judged on ). It was scheduled for 2019, pushed to 2020 then 2H 2021, and are now looking at 1H 2022, which means in terms of consumer getting their hands on it, it would be more like 2H 2022 assuming no further delay. Given TSMC has never missed a beat in their execution and has iPhone SoC production. It is highly likely by the end of Calendar year 2022, TSMC would have shipped more 3nm Wafer than Intel's 7nm for the whole year. I am waiting to see AMD's results.
- bhouston 6y agoWhy hasn't Intel given up on their internal process nodes? Their advantage is clearly not in owning their process nodes at this point. Dump them and adopt TSMC.
- jonplackett 6y agoProfit margin. They want that slice o pie.
- qppo 6y agoThey may be betting that a switchover to TSMC would take as long or longer as doing it themselves. As well there's hubris, sunken costs, and Uncle Sam taking a vested interest in semiconductor manufacturing to take into account.
- bhouston 6y agoAt some point Intel should just dump their own process nodes and go with TSMC. This is getting ridiculous.
- _1100 6y agoAs much as I enjoy seeing Intel falter for all of the anti-competitive practices it has employed in the past... I think them moving to outsourced foundries would be a huge move in the wrong direction for fab consolidation.
- sitkack 6y agoWe need to retain competition, otherwise AMD will be the new Intel and we will have gotten nowhere.
- coayer 6y agoI feel the same about Samsung's Exynos mobile SoCs. While they are definitely worse than Qualcomm's, if they went away Qualcomm would be the only chip maker for Android flagships (excluding Huawei, but without Google play services they don't really count).
- Iwan-Zotow 6y agoMTK anyone?
- bob1029 6y agoSeems like even if they went with TSMC, they are a little bit late to the party. AMD has been optimizing against TSMC's nodes for years. AMD is also an organization that has been operating with the 3rd party foundry model for 10+ years. How long would it take for Intel to undergo an org-chart/culture transition into a similar model? I have to believe this would be a fairly disruptive time for such a large organization. Not saying Intel can't pull it off, but it seems like their strategy will have to exist on a >5 year timeline at this point.
- samfisher83 6y ago
- pwarner 6y agoThis has got to be interesting for folks like AWS, Google, MS. Is this the opening for AMD? Or will we see things like AWS ARM chips take off? They should both be close to entering production on 5nm chips once TSMC gets enough Apple chips knocked out. Are we going to see more specialization in the form of custom chips as process nodes are stalled out?
- AaronFriel 6y agoI wonder to what extent a six month delay could influence hyperscaler decisions for compute purchasing. Every major cloud now offers AMD Epyc instances at a discount relative to Intel's 14nm(\+)* offerings. It seems unlikely Intel will be competitive until 2022. It seems unlikely any of the top three cloud providers would go all AMD for new instances but I could see the ratio shifting heavily in AMD's favor.
- jeffbee 6y agoNobody can flip their whole fleet suddenly -- the TCO-positive lifespan of a datacenter computer is way longer than most people assume -- but at least some of the hyperscalers operate a "machine of the day" process, where 100% of new machines are identical. In that sense, whoever gets the design win gets all of the orders.
- AnthonyMouse 6y agoBut that just means it's on a delay. If AMD gets the design win in 2020 or 2021 then it means more trouble for Intel even if they're competitive again in 2022, because then they're the ones waiting on the next redesign.
- grizzles 6y agoIntel is a company that's living on it's distribution legacy. Ask yourself - why do regular people still buy Intel PCs? Because they are easy to buy. A great non Intel hardware and software laptop+aio by AMD or someone else would be a mortal wound on $INTC.
- chrisseaton 6y ago> Ask yourself - why do regular people still buy Intel PCs? Regular people don’t buy PCs at all and haven’t for a couple of decades.
- smabie 6y agoRegular people didn't but PCs in 2000 that's just not true. I think most consumers buy laptops nowadays, but that shift started happening around 2005ish, not 2000.
- chrisseaton 6y ago> Regular people didn't but PCs in 2000 that's just not true. Sorry I've got no idea what this means.
- AnthonyMouse 6y agoYou said regular people haven't bought PCs for a couple of decades. A couple of decades ago PCs were still too expensive for regular people to buy, they were mostly owned by businesses and the upper middle class. Sales volume peaked somewhere in the mid 2000s. Since then the PC ownership rate hasn't really declined (it's still ~75%), but people haven't bought as many PCs because the rate of performance improvement has slowed so people haven't had as much of a need to replace their existing PCs. I think the phone makers are trying to avoid that fate now by discontinuing software updates for older phones or making it expensive to replace failed batteries, but eventually one of them is going to defect and offer a phone with in-kernel drivers and a replaceable battery and then win half the market when customers get wise to not having to lay out hundreds of dollars every three years instead of every five or ten.
- ogre_codes 6y agoApple's timing here is spot on. If Intel was firing on all cylinders, it would be a lot harder for them to pull off a processor change.
- paranoidrobot 6y agoIf all Apple cared about was faster chips, they could easily call up AMD and move their platform there. It'd be a lot less work for them. Moving to their own ARM chips lets them gain tighter control over the platform, and not be beholden to Intel or AMDs roadmap or desire to implement specific features Apple wants.
- OldHand2018 6y ago> If all Apple cared about was faster chips Everybody _wants_ faster chips, but for most people, the chip is in idle state 99% of the time. Outside of the data center and serious gamers, chip speed has been fairly irrelevant for years.
- jeromegv 6y agoThis hasn't been irrelevant for years on mobile.
- Grazester 6y agoIt absolutely is on phones.
- ogre_codes 6y ago> chip speed has been fairly irrelevant for years. When you are emulating another architecture, speed often becomes a much bigger factor. Particularly since Apple caters to a lot of markets where performance is more important. Developers, video & audio pros, animators, photographers, and other pro users are a big part of what makes Apple's higher end systems move. Even if your CPU is idle 90% of the time, when you run a build you want it to go fast.
- abraxas 6y agoAren’t these node sizes mostly marketing BS that can’t be compared across manufacturers anyway? If Intel’s products can compete on performance or price or power consumption then who cares what they call it?
- mdasen 6y agoSome of it is marketing BS, but it's hard to argue that AMD isn't benefitting hugely from TSMC's 7nm process. Likewise, Apple knows that they can get 5nm parts from TSMC this year for their phones and laptops and they know the kind of performance advantage they're going to be getting out of them. Intel has stumbled a lot here and it's showing.
- jiggawatts 6y agoThe objective metrics are things like: transistors per square millimetre, power per billion transistors, frequency, SRAM bit-cell size, etc... Marketing calls it "7nm+++super", engineers get graphs of power-vs-frequency. E.g.: comparing transistor densities: Intel 14nm 38 MTr/mm^2 TSMC 7nm 97 MTr/mm^2 Intel 10nm 100 MTr/mm^2 Samsung 5nm 127 MTr/mm^2 TSMC 5nm 173 MTr/mm^2 Intel 7nm "higher than TSMC 5nm" (planned for 2022) TSMC 3nm 290 MTr/mm^2 (risk production in 2021) This should make it pretty clear why Intel is going to struggle to be competitive: The majority of their products are stuck on 14nm, which has 22% of the transistor density of TSMC's bleeding edge product. They can't compete with the likes of AMD and Apple with such outdated tech. It should also make it clear that Intel's 10nm node is basically the same as TSMC's 7nm. However, from what I heard (I'm not an expert!), Intel's 10nm node is a "pain in the ass" to manufacture. The design phase is complex, the yields are low, etc... For comparison, TSMC's 7nm is supposed to be a relatively "straightforward" process, and 5nm is actually an improvement in manufacturability. That is, it's easier to design and make a 5nm TSMC chip than a 7nm TSMC chip. That's actually a pretty big advantage, something Intel doesn't talk about much...
- AgloeDreams 6y agoYou are spot on on 10nm fab, it's why Apple shipped an update with split 14 and 10nm chips on different models, it wasn't large enough or cheap enough to update all models. A notable thing about TSMC's 5nm is it is shipping in three months. Thats a massive gap and there is little proof that Intel 7nm is 'much' more than 5nm. And thats before you consider other upsides seen in the TSMC chips such as cost, or the incredible power management tactics seen in the Ax series chips that are easily generations ahead of Intel.
- JoshTko 6y agoIntel's 10% stock drop is all about losing investor confidence. They've been given a pass for delaying 10nm for years in part because there was no competition and assurances that it was a one-off thing and they have learned their lesson. This delay threatens that narrative and instead suggest that Intel hasn't learned from their 10nm debacle.
- perardi 6y agoIs there any reputable reporting, or even just wild gossip, about why Intel is behind? The cynical answer is “they were focused on profit margins and didn’t invest in process”, but is it possible they bet hard on some technology that didn’t pan out? Ultraviolet lithography? Some exotic indium gallium arsenide magic that didn’t work in mass production?
- wtallis 6y agoThere seems to be consensus about their 10nm failures: they were trying every trick in the book except switching to EUV lithography, betting that they could get ahead and stay ahead while EUV power levels creeped upward toward what's needed for volume manufacturing. But Intel bit off more than they could chew and ended up with a process that simply didn't work (cf. the disabled iGPU on Cannonlake). So Intel scaled back their ambitions and spent more time working out the kinks, and they're apparently still a year away from having a 10nm desktop CPU. I'm not sure if we have any good clues as to what's going wrong with Intel's 7nm efforts, but it seems reasonable to guess that they weren't putting as much effort as their competitors into getting ready for EUV. And given how long Intel's had these issues at this point, it seems pretty clear that they have some broader management issues.
- Symmetry 6y agoWell, SemiAccurate made some claims about some of the cultural problems Intel was having a bit ago. https://semiaccurate.com/2018/06/29/intels-firing-of-ceo-brian-krzanich-is-a-cover-for-deeper-problems/ https://semiaccurate.com/2018/06/29/intels-firing-of-ceo-bri... With regards to the specific technologies Intel was trying to do a lot of new things with 10nm. Initial rumors said that replacing copper with cobalt in some of the metal layers was causing problems. But later rumors were that Contact Over Active Gate (COAG) used mostly in the GPU section of a chip was the main culprit and why none of the early 10nm parts had working GPUs.
- madamelic 6y ago"Yes, we missed 10nm... and 7nm... but we assure, we will be ahead with 5nm" History says otherwise...
- AgloeDreams 6y agoTotally agree though 7nm brings them to UVL which will make that step much easier. But they will still be at least a year behind.
- edem 6y agoTo be honest Intel is always late with manufacturing updates (and manufacturing in general).