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A contrary opinion is here by Ian Cutress: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaB1WuFUAtw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaB1WuFUAtw I think that Intel does have

A contrary opinion is here by Ian Cutress: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaB1WuFUAtw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaB1WuFUAtw I think that Intel does have two plays left. 1. Appeal to the government that they can't go beyond their current process node and the government preorders a bunch of processors to do this. 2. Intel abandons new process nodes and becomes a customer of TSMC. If Intel thinks about doing #2 I think the government would be forced to do #1 for the sole fact of keeping chip manufacturing knowledge in the US

SavantIdiot 6y ago
I see #1 happening, but I'm not sure how #2 would play out. Hundreds of billions of dollars spent on fabs, with close to 80% of their employees working in fabs 24/7. That would crater several towns in the US (Chandler, Santa Clara, Portland come time mind), and just be throwing away money. One hell of a capital loss! I think there are too many people high up at intel getting stinky rich to throw the company under the buss like that. But then again it might happen, you're not the first to suggest it.
- totalZero 6y ago
  Intel won't do option #2 as a full-on strategy, for the reasons you mentioned and because it ruins their unique value proposition for government subsidy. But they do need a little bit of option #2, if only for market share defense against competitors. TSMC obviously prioritizes long-term partnership, but in today's demand environment, every wafer that Intel buys is a wafer that AMD (or Nvidia) cannot.
  - SavantIdiot 6y ago
    Also: if China marches into Taiwan, TSMC is off the map and the world is fuckered. AliBaba has PinTouge fabs which are ramping like mad. Which means China could shut down TSMC and come out on top.
    - mcny 6y ago
      How do you think the US (and allies Japan and South Korea) would react if China PR marches into Taiwan? More importantly what do you think China PR thinks the US will do if it marches into Taiwan?
      - SavantIdiot 6y ago
        I think the allies would be immobilized with fear? The same way Russia annexed Crimea and nothing happened except stern finger wagging from allies. Little Donnie Dipshit tried to push China around and they laughed in his face. I'm pretty sure that emboldened them.
        Fnoord 6y ago
        Taiwan has a different strategic importance than Crimea or Eastern Ukraine.
      - totalZero 6y ago
        Totally depends. If destruction of fabs and infrastructure is a fait accompli, war is less likely than if there is still a chance to save the fabs.
    - emodendroket 6y ago
      The US strategy on China is also all about denying China cutting edge chips which makes the dependence on Taiwan a source of precarity.
    - throwaway6734 6y ago
      I imagine the TSMC fab would be destroyed before being allowed into Chinese hands
      - vkou 6y ago
        And then we'll get a decade-long global chip shortage, instead of a year-long one. It's a perfect example of cutting one's nose to spite one's face. Also, Taiwan will end up a large, long-term loser of that, as well. China's ambitions on Taiwan have nearly zero to do with TSMC's presence there. (And everything to do with the past 80 years of history - more specifically, its desire to 'conclude' the civil war. If Taiwan's didn't have a chip industry, the PRC would still have the same goals.)
- NegativeLatency 6y ago
  Intel is more of a Beaverton thing than Portland directly, not saying it wouldn’t have an impact but a lot of the semiconductor and hardware stuff isn’t in Portland proper but to the south or east towns.
  - SavantIdiot 6y ago
    D1X, the beast, is Hillsboro, there's also Aloha, which is technically Beaverton, but them's fightin words to the locals. ;)
- reducesuffering 6y ago
  Santa Clara will be just fine without Intel, guaranteed. Regarding #2: that would be the beginning of the end for Intel. Gelsinger is reminding me of bringing in Mayer to fix Yahoo. Intel is done on design. AMD, Nvidia, and Apple are all smoking them and the gap is only widening now. Intel would need a miracle to turn around their terrible inertia. Investing into being the US fab play, their only expertise, advantage, and existing massive facilities, seems like the only reasonable path forward.
  - MrBuddyCasino 6y ago
    What Intel is managing to pull off using outdated manufacturing tech is pretty impressive. The low-end and mid-end parts are excellent and well priced. They do not have a problem in the design department. They are behind on manufacturing and they missed the boat on chiplets, but this is not fatal - yet. Also consider that Intel manufacturing capacity is enourmous, and given the current IC shortage, they can probably sell anything to OEMs. If AMD could source more wafers, the situation might be different, but they can't.
  - thu2111 6y ago
    No, Intel's cores are still core-for-core beating AMDs as far as I'm aware, likewise for the new server ARM chips (Apple is not hugely relevant, their market share is price capped). That's design. The actual chips are slower because they don't have nearly as many cores, so for workloads that can be highly parallelized they're behind. But that's process.
SkyMarshal 6y ago
3. Intel does exactly what Gelsinger outlined in his recent presentation (did you even watch it?). They fix their process tech (by moving from Immersion to EUV) and catch up with TSMC, they move to a similar "system-on-a-package" design as AMD and catch up on design, they build their new fabs in Arizona and use those to compete against TSMC in the custom fab business.
helsinkiandrew 6y ago
Relying on government contracts doesn't sound like the behaviour of a growth company. Government processor technical requirements aren't likely to align with commercial requirements. And low risk government cheques tend to push out any higher risk commercial innovation.
- nr2x 6y ago
  It’s working for SpaceX.
  - helsinkiandrew 6y ago
    True, but rockets are rockets - and delivering a military satellite into orbit is much the same as delivering a commercial one. Delivering Military IC's to a contract is very different to creating commercial products suitable for laptops, phones, AI etc.
- epistasis 6y ago
  This is kind of ironic, because the only reason the semiconductor industry exists as it does today is because massive amounts of defense contracts in the early days of semiconductor manufacturing. The US's massive defense spending sometimes functions in a more productive way than one would guess.
  - carlmr 6y ago
    And arguably today's silicon valley was built on top of this. I mean it's still in the name "silicon".
    - epistasis 6y ago
      I'd be hard pressed to come with an argument that there's any other reason that today's software world is in the SF Bay Area. Government contracts attracted initial silicon startups, noncompetes ensured entrepreneurship, VC developed around the talent, eventually software became bigger than the hardware as the hardware was commoditized. Amazon and Microsoft were successful in the Seattle area, but otherwise the concentration of talent in the SF Bay is hard to beat

SavantIdiot 6y ago

I see #1 happening, but I'm not sure how #2 would play out. Hundreds of billions of dollars spent on fabs, with close to 80% of their employees working in fabs 24/7. That would crater several towns in the US (Chandler, Santa Clara, Portland come time mind), and just be throwing away money. One hell of a capital loss! I think there are too many people high up at intel getting stinky rich to throw the company under the buss like that. But then again it might happen, you're not the first to suggest it.

totalZero 6y ago
Intel won't do option #2 as a full-on strategy, for the reasons you mentioned and because it ruins their unique value proposition for government subsidy. But they do need a little bit of option #2, if only for market share defense against competitors. TSMC obviously prioritizes long-term partnership, but in today's demand environment, every wafer that Intel buys is a wafer that AMD (or Nvidia) cannot.
- SavantIdiot 6y ago
  Also: if China marches into Taiwan, TSMC is off the map and the world is fuckered. AliBaba has PinTouge fabs which are ramping like mad. Which means China could shut down TSMC and come out on top.
  - mcny 6y ago
    How do you think the US (and allies Japan and South Korea) would react if China PR marches into Taiwan? More importantly what do you think China PR thinks the US will do if it marches into Taiwan?
    - SavantIdiot 6y ago
      I think the allies would be immobilized with fear? The same way Russia annexed Crimea and nothing happened except stern finger wagging from allies. Little Donnie Dipshit tried to push China around and they laughed in his face. I'm pretty sure that emboldened them.
      - Fnoord 6y ago
        Taiwan has a different strategic importance than Crimea or Eastern Ukraine.
    - totalZero 6y ago
      Totally depends. If destruction of fabs and infrastructure is a fait accompli, war is less likely than if there is still a chance to save the fabs.
  - emodendroket 6y ago
    The US strategy on China is also all about denying China cutting edge chips which makes the dependence on Taiwan a source of precarity.
  - throwaway6734 6y ago
    I imagine the TSMC fab would be destroyed before being allowed into Chinese hands
    - vkou 6y ago
      And then we'll get a decade-long global chip shortage, instead of a year-long one. It's a perfect example of cutting one's nose to spite one's face. Also, Taiwan will end up a large, long-term loser of that, as well. China's ambitions on Taiwan have nearly zero to do with TSMC's presence there. (And everything to do with the past 80 years of history - more specifically, its desire to 'conclude' the civil war. If Taiwan's didn't have a chip industry, the PRC would still have the same goals.)
NegativeLatency 6y ago
Intel is more of a Beaverton thing than Portland directly, not saying it wouldn’t have an impact but a lot of the semiconductor and hardware stuff isn’t in Portland proper but to the south or east towns.
- SavantIdiot 6y ago
  D1X, the beast, is Hillsboro, there's also Aloha, which is technically Beaverton, but them's fightin words to the locals. ;)
reducesuffering 6y ago
Santa Clara will be just fine without Intel, guaranteed. Regarding #2: that would be the beginning of the end for Intel. Gelsinger is reminding me of bringing in Mayer to fix Yahoo. Intel is done on design. AMD, Nvidia, and Apple are all smoking them and the gap is only widening now. Intel would need a miracle to turn around their terrible inertia. Investing into being the US fab play, their only expertise, advantage, and existing massive facilities, seems like the only reasonable path forward.
- MrBuddyCasino 6y ago
  What Intel is managing to pull off using outdated manufacturing tech is pretty impressive. The low-end and mid-end parts are excellent and well priced. They do not have a problem in the design department. They are behind on manufacturing and they missed the boat on chiplets, but this is not fatal - yet. Also consider that Intel manufacturing capacity is enourmous, and given the current IC shortage, they can probably sell anything to OEMs. If AMD could source more wafers, the situation might be different, but they can't.
- thu2111 6y ago
  No, Intel's cores are still core-for-core beating AMDs as far as I'm aware, likewise for the new server ARM chips (Apple is not hugely relevant, their market share is price capped). That's design. The actual chips are slower because they don't have nearly as many cores, so for workloads that can be highly parallelized they're behind. But that's process.

SkyMarshal 6y ago

3. Intel does exactly what Gelsinger outlined in his recent presentation (did you even watch it?). They fix their process tech (by moving from Immersion to EUV) and catch up with TSMC, they move to a similar "system-on-a-package" design as AMD and catch up on design, they build their new fabs in Arizona and use those to compete against TSMC in the custom fab business.

helsinkiandrew 6y ago

Relying on government contracts doesn't sound like the behaviour of a growth company. Government processor technical requirements aren't likely to align with commercial requirements. And low risk government cheques tend to push out any higher risk commercial innovation.

nr2x 6y ago
It’s working for SpaceX.
- helsinkiandrew 6y ago
  True, but rockets are rockets - and delivering a military satellite into orbit is much the same as delivering a commercial one. Delivering Military IC's to a contract is very different to creating commercial products suitable for laptops, phones, AI etc.
epistasis 6y ago
This is kind of ironic, because the only reason the semiconductor industry exists as it does today is because massive amounts of defense contracts in the early days of semiconductor manufacturing. The US's massive defense spending sometimes functions in a more productive way than one would guess.
- carlmr 6y ago
  And arguably today's silicon valley was built on top of this. I mean it's still in the name "silicon".
  - epistasis 6y ago
    I'd be hard pressed to come with an argument that there's any other reason that today's software world is in the SF Bay Area. Government contracts attracted initial silicon startups, noncompetes ensured entrepreneurship, VC developed around the talent, eventually software became bigger than the hardware as the hardware was commoditized. Amazon and Microsoft were successful in the Seattle area, but otherwise the concentration of talent in the SF Bay is hard to beat