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I found the news of Intel releasing this chip quite encouraging. If they have enough capacity on their 10nm node to put it into production then they have tamed

I found the news of Intel releasing this chip quite encouraging. If they have enough capacity on their 10nm node to put it into production then they have tamed many of the problems that were holding them back. My hope is that Gelsinger's renewed attention to engineering excellence will allow the folks who know how to iron out a process to work more freely than they did under the previous leadership. That said, fixing Intel is a three step process right? First they have to get their process issues under control (seems like they are making progress there). Second, they need to figure out the third party use of that process so that they can bank some some of revenue that is out there from the chip shortage. And finally, they need to answer the "jelly bean" market, and by that we know that "jelly bean" type processors have become powerful enough to be the only processor in a system so Intel needs to play there or it will lose that whole segment to Nvidia/ARM.

judge2020 6y ago
Production for a datacenter CPU is not the same as production for datacenter + enthusiast-grade consumer CPUs like Zen 3 currently achieves, unfortunately. Rocket lake being backported to 14nm is still not a good sign for actual production volume, although it probably means next generation will be 10nm all the way.
- willis936 6y ago
  Datacenter CPUs are much larger than consumer parts and yield goes down with the square of the die area. They start with these because the margins go up faster than square of the die area.
  - Robotbeat 6y ago
    But modern techniques exist to deal with problems in a large die (ie testing and then segmenting off cores with mistakes on them), so the fact they’re starting with large chip die sizes doesn’t really tell you much, no?
    - erik 6y ago
      The top end most profitable SKUs are fully enabled dies. That they are now able to ship dies this large is a good sign. The 10nm laptop chips they have produced so far were rumored to have atrocious yield.
      - JudasGoat 6y ago
        "The top end most profitable SKUs are fully enabled dies." If you take a part that would be discarded because it didn't make "top end" binning, and sell it as a lesser(core count or clock speed) chip. Isn't that profit from what would otherwise be scrap?
        bradleyjg 6y ago
        Yes. But that’s a silver lining to a black cloud not the best case scenario.
        Robotbeat 6y ago
        My impression is the vast, vast majority of chips have at least part of the chip disabled to help solve yield problems. So it seems to be the status quo?
    - Tuna-Fish 6y ago
      Die harvesting is not perfect. If there is an error in a logic transistor, they can turn off that cpu core and use the rest of the chip. If there is a short between ground and power, the whole chip is useless because it will melt when you plug it in. Yields on larger chips are still substantially worse than smaller chips, even with harvesting.
      - Robotbeat 6y ago
        Interesting, that’s informative. Well that sounds like a big advantage for the chiplet approach.
  - 29083011397778 6y ago
    And here I always thought it was because, should your large die have an issue, you can likely sell it as a lower-binned SKU with the failed area gated off. This way you end up with more inventory of a chip you intend to sell, or you have a high margin chip - win-win!
- bushbaba 6y ago
  I assume for intel, they make more server CPUs per year than the entirety of AMDs output.
  - ryan_j_naughton 6y ago
    There is a slow but seismic shift to AMD within data centers right now.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - mhh__ 6y ago
      They still have something like 40% to go to even reach parity with Intel though
      - aoeusnth1 6y ago
        It’s harder to go from 0.1% to 10% than it is to go from 10% to 50%.
        bushbaba 6y ago
        Yes and no. It’s harder to convince folks to switch going from 0.1% to 10%. But you are also talking about winning the low hanging fruits. once you get those easy wins the rest take a bit to chip away at. while initial growth was 100x, that pace is going to slow down as marketshare increases.
    - csunbird 6y ago
      Why not ARM? ARM is now penetrating the consumer development devices (M1), why not mirror that in the servers as well?
      - dTal 6y ago
        Because M1s are light years ahead of anything else, and you can't buy M1s outside of a Mac.
- totalZero 6y ago
  > Rocket lake being backported to 14nm is still not a good sign for actual production volume I'm genuinely having trouble understanding what you mean by this. Rocket Lake being backported to 14nm means that 10nm can be allocated in greater proportion toward higher-priced chips like Alder Lake and Ice Lake SP. Seems like it would be good for production volume.
  - rincebrain 6y ago
    I think they mean that the fact that they needed to backport Rocket Lake, versus just having all their production on 10nm, implies a much more limited production capacity than the other situation.
  - zamadatix 6y ago
    Production volume referring to production volume of the node still being low as a whole not risks to the being able to get volume of these particular SKUs using the node.
  - jlawer 6y ago
    I was under the impression the issue with 10nm is frequency, which lead to the rocket lake backport. Unfortunately it seems that the 10nm node's efficiency point is lower on the frequency curve. The reviewed ice lake processor was 300mhz lower then the previous generation (though with much higher core count), despite higher power draw and the process node shrink. In laptop processors they can easily show efficiency gains from the 10nm process and IPC improvement, It appears most laptop processors end up running a power envelope lower then the ideal performance per watt efficiency. Server Processors with higher core counts means you can run more workloads per server, again providing efficiency gains. However desktop / gaming tends to be smaller core count + higher frequency with little concern of efficiency outside of quality of life factors (i.e. don't make me use a 1KW chiller). Intel has been pushing 5ghz processor frequency for years, and rocket lake continues that push (5.3ghz boost), when they drop frequency to move to 10nm, its hard to see an IPC improvement that is able to paper over that. However alder lake CPUs will have a thread count advantage, so at least with 24 threads it should be able to show generational improvement over the current 8c/16 rocket lake parts. That will allow them to at least argue their value with select benchmarks and intel only features. Those 8 efficiency cores will likely be a BIG win on laptop, but on desktop I doubt they will compare favourably to the full fat cores on a current Ryzen 5900x (i.e. a currently available 24 core processor). Intel is going to have at least 1 more BAD mainstream desktop generation before they can truely compete on the mainstream high end, however there is a chance they have something like a HEDT part that would allow them to at least save face. That being said, given a choice, Intel will give up desktop market share for the faster growing laptop and server markets.
- knz_ 6y ago
  > Rocket lake being backported to 14nm is still not a good sign for actual production volume, I'm not seeing a good reason for thinking this is the case. Server CPUs are harder to fab (much larger die area) and they need to fab more of them (desktop CPUs are relatively niche compared to mobile and server CPUs). If anything this is a sign that 10nm is fully ready.
sitkack 6y ago
If they price it right, it could be amazing. Computing is mostly about economics. The new node sizes greatly increase the production capacity. Half the dimension in x and y gets you 4x the transistors on the same wafer. It is like making 4x the number of fabs. It also has speed and power advantages. I think this release is excellent news on many levels.
- Retric 6y ago
  Intel 10nm is really just a marketing term at this point and has nothing to do with transistor density.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - taejavu 6y ago
    I know there is some truth to what you're saying, but if that really was the full story, why wouldn't it be "Intel 2nm"?
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - Retric 6y ago
      Presumably because people aren’t buying chips based on the node size used and they would get bad press from calling it 2nm. My guess is it simply relates to the node refreshes in the old pattern of old node / ~1.414 = new node size. With different companies picking different arbitrarily differences in nodes aka intel’s 14nm++ was better than it’s initial 10nm process. That said you can read some interesting details here: https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/7_nm_lithography_process https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/7_nm_lithography_process
buu700 6y ago
What's a "jelly bean" processor? Trying to search for that just gets a bunch of hits about Android 4.1.
- madsushi 6y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17376874 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17376874 > [1] Jelly Bean chips are those that are made in batches of 1 - 10 million with a set of functions that are fairly specific to their application.
  - foobarian 6y ago
    Is that the chip-on-board packaging like described here: https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/9137/what-kind-of-components-are-black-blobs-on-a-pcb https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/9137/what-ki... ?
- ChuckMcM 6y ago
  Sometimes referred to as "applications specific processor" (ASP) or "System on chip" (SoC). These are the bulk of semiconductor sales these days as they have replaced all of the miscellaneous gate logic on devices with a single programmable block that has a bunch of built in peripherals. Think Atmel AtMega parts, there are trillions of these in various roles. When you think of something like a 555 timer[1] that is now more cost effectively and capably replaced with an 8 pin micro-processor you can get an idea of the shift. While these are rarely built on the "leading edge" process node, when a process node takes over for high margin chips, the previous node gets used for lower margin chips, which effectively does a shrink on their die increasing their cost (most of these chips seem to keep their performance specs fairly constant, preferring cost reduction over performance improvement.) Anyway, the zillions of these chips in lots of different "flavors" are colloquially referred to as "jelly bean" chips.
- dragontamer 6y ago
  http://sparks.gogo.co.nz/assets/_site_/downloads/smd-discrete-jellybeans.pdf http://sparks.gogo.co.nz/assets/_site_/downloads/smd-discret... > Jellybean is a common term for components that you keep in your parts inventory for when your project just needs “a transistor” or “a diode” or “a mosfet” ----------- For many hobbyists, a Raspberry Pi or Arduino is a good example of a Jellybean. You buy 10x Raspberry Pis and stuff your drawer full of them, because they're cheap enough to do most tasks. You don't really know what you're going to use all 10x Rasp. Pi for, but you know you'll find a use of it a few weeks from now. --------- At least, in my Comp. Engineering brain, I think N2222 transistors or 3904-transistors, or the 741 Op-amp. There are better op-amps and better transistors for any particular job. But I chose these parts because they're familiar, comfortable, cheap and well understood by a wide variety of engineers. Well, not the 741 OpAmp anymore anyway. 741 was a jellybean back in the 12V days. Today I think 5V compatibility has become the standard voltage (because of USB). So 5V op-amps are a more important "jellybean".
carlhjerpe 6y ago
What I don't understand is: ASML is building these machines for making ICs. Why can TSMC use them for 7nm but Intel can only use them for 10 right now? Doesn't ASML make the lenses as well so that you're "only" stuck making the etching thingy (forgot what it's called, but the reflective template of a CPU). It seems like nobody is talking about this, could anyone shine some light?
- dragontamer 6y ago
  Consider that the wavelength of red light is 700 nm, and the wavelength of UV-C is 100nm to 280nm. And immediately, we see the problem about dropping to 10nm: that's literally smaller than the distance that photons vibrate on their way to the final target. And yeah, 10nm and 7nm is a marketing term, but that doesn't change the fact that these processes are all smaller than the wavelength of light. ------- So there are two ways to get around this problem. 1. Use smaller light: "Extreme UV" is even smaller than normal UV at 13.5nm. Kind of the obvious solution, but higher energy and changes the chemistry slightly, since the light is a different color. Things are getting mighty close to literal "X-Ray Lasers" as they are, so the power requirements are getting quite substantial. 2. Multipatterning -- Instead of developing the entire thing in one shot, do it in multiple shots, and "carefully line up" the chips between different shots. As difficult as it sounds, its been done before at 40nm and other processes. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_patterning#EUV_Multiple_Patterning_Possibilities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_patterning#EUV_Multip...) 3. Do both at the same time to reach 5nm, 4nm, or 3nm. Either way, 10nm and 7nm is the point where the various companies had to decide to do #1 first or #2 first. Either way, your company needs to learn to do both in the long term. TSMC and Samsung went with #1 EUV, and I think Intel though that #2 multi-patterning would be easier. And the rest is history. Seems like EUV was easier after all, and TSMC / Samsung's bets paid off. Mind you, I barely know any of the stuff I'm talking about. I'm not a physicist or chemist. But the above is my general understanding of the issues. I'm sure Intel had their reasons to believe why multipatterning would be easier. Maybe it was easier, but other company issues drove away engineers and something unrelated caused Intel to fall behind.
  - carlhjerpe 6y ago
nickysielicki 6y ago
Forget all the technical problems, fixing Intel is mostly about figuring out how they let a bunch of MBAs mismanage the company to the point that they squandered a two-decade long global monopoly on computing, in an era where computing absolutely dominated global economic development. I mean, when you put it that way, it's genuinely astounding that they managed to find themselves technically so far behind, and so quickly. This was not a minor mismanagement fuck up, this is complete incompetence. Things clearly need to be burnt to the ground, they need a lot of churn. If they can get back to being engineering-driven rather than financially driven, it will all fall into place.
- foobiekr 6y ago
  Once you invite the vampire into the house should you really be surprised that you find it sucking your blood? The answer is that like most large companies they decided technologist leadership no longer mattered. It’s a pattern that repeats again and again and that is because the people who need to learn the lesson most are counter-incentivized to do so.
  - bcrl 6y ago
    Several conversations on this topic have brought up that pay rates at Intel are now less than the median of the industry. This would be fallout from actions by the MBAs in charge, but I don't think it's just an MBA issue. Something is clearly rotten in middle management in Intel. Either the people investigating the problems with their process weren't given the freedom to experiment to narrow down the scope of the problem, or they lost all their competent process engineers and are left with insufficient clue to fix the problem. If Intel has to rebuild their process group from scratch, they could be in for additional years of pain as new people come up to speed. Given that the United States is no longer a leader in bleeding edge process technology, this could take far longer than expected. How long will it take Intel to poach enough talent from TSMC to make a difference? And will they be able to integrate into Intel's culture?
    - headgasket 6y ago
DCKing 6y ago
The Amlogic S905X3/4 are "jelly bean" chips under this definition - you can buy full computers with those including a motherboard of sorts, RAM and standard USB/HDMI/Ethernet/eMMC/Wifi for under $30 bulk in China. They're branded as "TV boxes". The S905X3 is also the SoC of the $55 Odroid C4 SBC. Yet those chips are apparently made on either TSMC's or GloFo's 12nm nodes (which one I can't find). Whilst Intel's 14nm is still superior to either TSMC/GloFo 12nm by all accounts, they're definitely the same ballpark. Competition for Intel even looks rough for cheaper high volume chips. You'd need to consider that Intel still needs some time to adapt to being a third party foundry too.
- ChuckMcM 6y ago
  Good analysis, I didn't say it would be easy :-).
  - shasheene 6y ago
    Why do you think Intel will succeed in selling leading edge fab services to fabless companies when GlobalFoundries (the chip making business of AMD) was unable to compete? To me, it seems like the same story is playing out again.
    - ChuckMcM 6y ago
      One could easily flip that question around right? "Why would Intel try to sell fab services like Global Foundry which didn't work out well?" But more importantly, Intel actually has way more foundry expertise than Global did/does. In the case of AMD selling off Global it was more like cutting loose an under performing part of the company rather than empowering the a significant asset of the company.
nrp 6y ago
Intel tried and failed at jelly beans at least once in recent history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Quark https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Quark I'm not sure that is a worthwhile segment for them to try to compete in though. It's high mix, has a ton of competition, and doesn't necessarily leverage their fab strength.
csunbird 6y ago
Forgive me for my ignorance, but what is a "jelly bean" processor? Do you mean the "extremely cheap, almost no power consuming" processors?

judge2020 6y ago

Production for a datacenter CPU is not the same as production for datacenter + enthusiast-grade consumer CPUs like Zen 3 currently achieves, unfortunately. Rocket lake being backported to 14nm is still not a good sign for actual production volume, although it probably means next generation will be 10nm all the way.

willis936 6y ago
Datacenter CPUs are much larger than consumer parts and yield goes down with the square of the die area. They start with these because the margins go up faster than square of the die area.
- Robotbeat 6y ago
  But modern techniques exist to deal with problems in a large die (ie testing and then segmenting off cores with mistakes on them), so the fact they’re starting with large chip die sizes doesn’t really tell you much, no?
  - erik 6y ago
    The top end most profitable SKUs are fully enabled dies. That they are now able to ship dies this large is a good sign. The 10nm laptop chips they have produced so far were rumored to have atrocious yield.
    - JudasGoat 6y ago
      "The top end most profitable SKUs are fully enabled dies." If you take a part that would be discarded because it didn't make "top end" binning, and sell it as a lesser(core count or clock speed) chip. Isn't that profit from what would otherwise be scrap?
      - bradleyjg 6y ago
        Yes. But that’s a silver lining to a black cloud not the best case scenario.
        Robotbeat 6y ago
        My impression is the vast, vast majority of chips have at least part of the chip disabled to help solve yield problems. So it seems to be the status quo?
  - Tuna-Fish 6y ago
    Die harvesting is not perfect. If there is an error in a logic transistor, they can turn off that cpu core and use the rest of the chip. If there is a short between ground and power, the whole chip is useless because it will melt when you plug it in. Yields on larger chips are still substantially worse than smaller chips, even with harvesting.
    - Robotbeat 6y ago
      Interesting, that’s informative. Well that sounds like a big advantage for the chiplet approach.
- 29083011397778 6y ago
  And here I always thought it was because, should your large die have an issue, you can likely sell it as a lower-binned SKU with the failed area gated off. This way you end up with more inventory of a chip you intend to sell, or you have a high margin chip - win-win!
bushbaba 6y ago
I assume for intel, they make more server CPUs per year than the entirety of AMDs output.
- ryan_j_naughton 6y ago
  There is a slow but seismic shift to AMD within data centers right now.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - mhh__ 6y ago
    They still have something like 40% to go to even reach parity with Intel though
    - aoeusnth1 6y ago
      It’s harder to go from 0.1% to 10% than it is to go from 10% to 50%.
      - bushbaba 6y ago
        Yes and no. It’s harder to convince folks to switch going from 0.1% to 10%. But you are also talking about winning the low hanging fruits. once you get those easy wins the rest take a bit to chip away at. while initial growth was 100x, that pace is going to slow down as marketshare increases.
  - csunbird 6y ago
    Why not ARM? ARM is now penetrating the consumer development devices (M1), why not mirror that in the servers as well?
    - dTal 6y ago
      Because M1s are light years ahead of anything else, and you can't buy M1s outside of a Mac.
totalZero 6y ago
> Rocket lake being backported to 14nm is still not a good sign for actual production volume I'm genuinely having trouble understanding what you mean by this. Rocket Lake being backported to 14nm means that 10nm can be allocated in greater proportion toward higher-priced chips like Alder Lake and Ice Lake SP. Seems like it would be good for production volume.
- rincebrain 6y ago
  I think they mean that the fact that they needed to backport Rocket Lake, versus just having all their production on 10nm, implies a much more limited production capacity than the other situation.
- zamadatix 6y ago
  Production volume referring to production volume of the node still being low as a whole not risks to the being able to get volume of these particular SKUs using the node.
- jlawer 6y ago
  I was under the impression the issue with 10nm is frequency, which lead to the rocket lake backport. Unfortunately it seems that the 10nm node's efficiency point is lower on the frequency curve. The reviewed ice lake processor was 300mhz lower then the previous generation (though with much higher core count), despite higher power draw and the process node shrink. In laptop processors they can easily show efficiency gains from the 10nm process and IPC improvement, It appears most laptop processors end up running a power envelope lower then the ideal performance per watt efficiency. Server Processors with higher core counts means you can run more workloads per server, again providing efficiency gains. However desktop / gaming tends to be smaller core count + higher frequency with little concern of efficiency outside of quality of life factors (i.e. don't make me use a 1KW chiller). Intel has been pushing 5ghz processor frequency for years, and rocket lake continues that push (5.3ghz boost), when they drop frequency to move to 10nm, its hard to see an IPC improvement that is able to paper over that. However alder lake CPUs will have a thread count advantage, so at least with 24 threads it should be able to show generational improvement over the current 8c/16 rocket lake parts. That will allow them to at least argue their value with select benchmarks and intel only features. Those 8 efficiency cores will likely be a BIG win on laptop, but on desktop I doubt they will compare favourably to the full fat cores on a current Ryzen 5900x (i.e. a currently available 24 core processor). Intel is going to have at least 1 more BAD mainstream desktop generation before they can truely compete on the mainstream high end, however there is a chance they have something like a HEDT part that would allow them to at least save face. That being said, given a choice, Intel will give up desktop market share for the faster growing laptop and server markets.
knz_ 6y ago
> Rocket lake being backported to 14nm is still not a good sign for actual production volume, I'm not seeing a good reason for thinking this is the case. Server CPUs are harder to fab (much larger die area) and they need to fab more of them (desktop CPUs are relatively niche compared to mobile and server CPUs). If anything this is a sign that 10nm is fully ready.

sitkack 6y ago

If they price it right, it could be amazing. Computing is mostly about economics. The new node sizes greatly increase the production capacity. Half the dimension in x and y gets you 4x the transistors on the same wafer. It is like making 4x the number of fabs. It also has speed and power advantages. I think this release is excellent news on many levels.

Retric 6y ago
Intel 10nm is really just a marketing term at this point and has nothing to do with transistor density.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- taejavu 6y ago
  I know there is some truth to what you're saying, but if that really was the full story, why wouldn't it be "Intel 2nm"?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - Retric 6y ago
    Presumably because people aren’t buying chips based on the node size used and they would get bad press from calling it 2nm. My guess is it simply relates to the node refreshes in the old pattern of old node / ~1.414 = new node size. With different companies picking different arbitrarily differences in nodes aka intel’s 14nm++ was better than it’s initial 10nm process. That said you can read some interesting details here: https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/7_nm_lithography_process https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/7_nm_lithography_process

buu700 6y ago

What's a "jelly bean" processor? Trying to search for that just gets a bunch of hits about Android 4.1.

madsushi 6y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17376874 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17376874 > [1] Jelly Bean chips are those that are made in batches of 1 - 10 million with a set of functions that are fairly specific to their application.
- foobarian 6y ago
  Is that the chip-on-board packaging like described here: https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/9137/what-kind-of-components-are-black-blobs-on-a-pcb https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/9137/what-ki... ?
ChuckMcM 6y ago
Sometimes referred to as "applications specific processor" (ASP) or "System on chip" (SoC). These are the bulk of semiconductor sales these days as they have replaced all of the miscellaneous gate logic on devices with a single programmable block that has a bunch of built in peripherals. Think Atmel AtMega parts, there are trillions of these in various roles. When you think of something like a 555 timer[1] that is now more cost effectively and capably replaced with an 8 pin micro-processor you can get an idea of the shift. While these are rarely built on the "leading edge" process node, when a process node takes over for high margin chips, the previous node gets used for lower margin chips, which effectively does a shrink on their die increasing their cost (most of these chips seem to keep their performance specs fairly constant, preferring cost reduction over performance improvement.) Anyway, the zillions of these chips in lots of different "flavors" are colloquially referred to as "jelly bean" chips.
dragontamer 6y ago
http://sparks.gogo.co.nz/assets/_site_/downloads/smd-discrete-jellybeans.pdf http://sparks.gogo.co.nz/assets/_site_/downloads/smd-discret... > Jellybean is a common term for components that you keep in your parts inventory for when your project just needs “a transistor” or “a diode” or “a mosfet” ----------- For many hobbyists, a Raspberry Pi or Arduino is a good example of a Jellybean. You buy 10x Raspberry Pis and stuff your drawer full of them, because they're cheap enough to do most tasks. You don't really know what you're going to use all 10x Rasp. Pi for, but you know you'll find a use of it a few weeks from now. --------- At least, in my Comp. Engineering brain, I think N2222 transistors or 3904-transistors, or the 741 Op-amp. There are better op-amps and better transistors for any particular job. But I chose these parts because they're familiar, comfortable, cheap and well understood by a wide variety of engineers. Well, not the 741 OpAmp anymore anyway. 741 was a jellybean back in the 12V days. Today I think 5V compatibility has become the standard voltage (because of USB). So 5V op-amps are a more important "jellybean".

carlhjerpe 6y ago

What I don't understand is: ASML is building these machines for making ICs. Why can TSMC use them for 7nm but Intel can only use them for 10 right now? Doesn't ASML make the lenses as well so that you're "only" stuck making the etching thingy (forgot what it's called, but the reflective template of a CPU). It seems like nobody is talking about this, could anyone shine some light?

dragontamer 6y ago
Consider that the wavelength of red light is 700 nm, and the wavelength of UV-C is 100nm to 280nm. And immediately, we see the problem about dropping to 10nm: that's literally smaller than the distance that photons vibrate on their way to the final target. And yeah, 10nm and 7nm is a marketing term, but that doesn't change the fact that these processes are all smaller than the wavelength of light. ------- So there are two ways to get around this problem. 1. Use smaller light: "Extreme UV" is even smaller than normal UV at 13.5nm. Kind of the obvious solution, but higher energy and changes the chemistry slightly, since the light is a different color. Things are getting mighty close to literal "X-Ray Lasers" as they are, so the power requirements are getting quite substantial. 2. Multipatterning -- Instead of developing the entire thing in one shot, do it in multiple shots, and "carefully line up" the chips between different shots. As difficult as it sounds, its been done before at 40nm and other processes. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_patterning#EUV_Multiple_Patterning_Possibilities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_patterning#EUV_Multip...) 3. Do both at the same time to reach 5nm, 4nm, or 3nm. Either way, 10nm and 7nm is the point where the various companies had to decide to do #1 first or #2 first. Either way, your company needs to learn to do both in the long term. TSMC and Samsung went with #1 EUV, and I think Intel though that #2 multi-patterning would be easier. And the rest is history. Seems like EUV was easier after all, and TSMC / Samsung's bets paid off. Mind you, I barely know any of the stuff I'm talking about. I'm not a physicist or chemist. But the above is my general understanding of the issues. I'm sure Intel had their reasons to believe why multipatterning would be easier. Maybe it was easier, but other company issues drove away engineers and something unrelated caused Intel to fall behind.
- carlhjerpe 6y ago

nickysielicki 6y ago

Forget all the technical problems, fixing Intel is mostly about figuring out how they let a bunch of MBAs mismanage the company to the point that they squandered a two-decade long global monopoly on computing, in an era where computing absolutely dominated global economic development. I mean, when you put it that way, it's genuinely astounding that they managed to find themselves technically so far behind, and so quickly. This was not a minor mismanagement fuck up, this is complete incompetence. Things clearly need to be burnt to the ground, they need a lot of churn. If they can get back to being engineering-driven rather than financially driven, it will all fall into place.

foobiekr 6y ago
Once you invite the vampire into the house should you really be surprised that you find it sucking your blood? The answer is that like most large companies they decided technologist leadership no longer mattered. It’s a pattern that repeats again and again and that is because the people who need to learn the lesson most are counter-incentivized to do so.
- bcrl 6y ago
  Several conversations on this topic have brought up that pay rates at Intel are now less than the median of the industry. This would be fallout from actions by the MBAs in charge, but I don't think it's just an MBA issue. Something is clearly rotten in middle management in Intel. Either the people investigating the problems with their process weren't given the freedom to experiment to narrow down the scope of the problem, or they lost all their competent process engineers and are left with insufficient clue to fix the problem. If Intel has to rebuild their process group from scratch, they could be in for additional years of pain as new people come up to speed. Given that the United States is no longer a leader in bleeding edge process technology, this could take far longer than expected. How long will it take Intel to poach enough talent from TSMC to make a difference? And will they be able to integrate into Intel's culture?
  - headgasket 6y ago

DCKing 6y ago

The Amlogic S905X3/4 are "jelly bean" chips under this definition - you can buy full computers with those including a motherboard of sorts, RAM and standard USB/HDMI/Ethernet/eMMC/Wifi for under $30 bulk in China. They're branded as "TV boxes". The S905X3 is also the SoC of the $55 Odroid C4 SBC. Yet those chips are apparently made on either TSMC's or GloFo's 12nm nodes (which one I can't find). Whilst Intel's 14nm is still superior to either TSMC/GloFo 12nm by all accounts, they're definitely the same ballpark. Competition for Intel even looks rough for cheaper high volume chips. You'd need to consider that Intel still needs some time to adapt to being a third party foundry too.

ChuckMcM 6y ago
Good analysis, I didn't say it would be easy :-).
- shasheene 6y ago
  Why do you think Intel will succeed in selling leading edge fab services to fabless companies when GlobalFoundries (the chip making business of AMD) was unable to compete? To me, it seems like the same story is playing out again.
  - ChuckMcM 6y ago
    One could easily flip that question around right? "Why would Intel try to sell fab services like Global Foundry which didn't work out well?" But more importantly, Intel actually has way more foundry expertise than Global did/does. In the case of AMD selling off Global it was more like cutting loose an under performing part of the company rather than empowering the a significant asset of the company.

nrp 6y ago

Intel tried and failed at jelly beans at least once in recent history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Quark https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Quark I'm not sure that is a worthwhile segment for them to try to compete in though. It's high mix, has a ton of competition, and doesn't necessarily leverage their fab strength.

csunbird 6y ago

Forgive me for my ignorance, but what is a "jelly bean" processor? Do you mean the "extremely cheap, almost no power consuming" processors?