16 ms·

Intel’s Turnaround and the Future of Chipmaking

142 points by martincmartin 5y ago

atlgator 5y ago
Personally, I think Gelsinger ran VMWare into the ground. He completely missed the boat on cloud. Now he's taking over a company steeped in bureaucracy that's several generations behind on chip fabrication. They are still trying to ramp up 10 nm while TSMC is unveiling 4 nm any day now. I want to see Intel succeed because we need large US-based fabricator if China gets more aggressive on Taiwan, but it's going to take a lot of housecleaning.
- gruez 5y ago
  >that's several generations behind on chip fabrication. They are still trying to ramp up 10 nm while TSMC is unveiling 4 nm any day now. It's worth noting that Intel 10nm can't be directly compared with TSMC 4nm. AFAIK Intel 10nm approximately equals TSMC 7nm. TSMC 4nm sounds like an iterative refinement on 5nm, so intel is only really one to two generations behind, not "several".
  - tux3 5y ago
    Worth noting that TSMC is relentlessly incremental. While Intel wanted to make a bigger, slower jump from 14 to 10, TSMC did an N7, an N7+ (not to be confused with N7P), an N6, N5, and N5P, and later this year, N4 is on the roadmap. So counting "generations" is a little abstract anyways. You should probably look at the PPA numbers and the kind of scaling boosters they've managed to ship, if you want to compare fairly.
  - discordance 5y ago
    1 - 2 generations in the silicon world is 5 - 10 years
    - wmf 5y ago
      No? TSMC has a new "full node" (whatever that means now) every 2 years. And Intel 4 should be released the same year as TSMC N4.
  - chithanh 5y ago
    > AFAIK Intel 10nm approximately equals TSMC 7nm. I don't think so, TSMC 7nm is ahead in many ways. For example, Intel 10nm power efficiency is much worse. https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-epyc-journey-continues-to-milan-in-cloudflares-11th-generation-edge-server/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-epyc-journey-continues-to-mi... Intel 10nm is maybe more comparable with Samsung 8nm.
    - Traster 5y ago
      TSMC 7nm = Intel 10nm is a crazy old trope that dates back to before everyone realised that Intel couldn't deliver 10nm. I don't know why people keep repeating it.
      - mensetmanusman 5y ago
        Any node after they stopped measuring gate dimensions is a trope. We need a better metric, a marketing term doesn’t work.
    - gruez 5y ago
      >TSMC 7nm is ahead in many ways. For example, Intel 10nm power efficiency is much worse. Is this based on the lithography process, or because of the uarch? The 7nm = 10nm was from https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/File:7nm_densities.svg https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/File:7nm_densities.svg, which looked at the density. Based comparison tables of lithography processes, it doesn't even look like power is something that they compare (eg. https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/7_nm_lithography_process https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/7_nm_lithography_process)
      - sct202 5y ago
        In your second link there's Power @ iso-speed comparisons within TSMC's nodes and TSMC has 3 revisions of their N7 with 3 different power usages. Presumably, Intel can do similar things within their generations too.
  - dragonelite 5y ago
    The industry should really use a different metric like "transistor count / area" because in 5 years TSMC will need to either go negative NM or 0.99 to 0.001 nm to keep the marketing slogans going.
    - frant-hartm 5y ago
      Ever heard of picometer?
    - eeiac928 5y ago
      Hasn't Intel put 10A on the roadmap? I guess 10A means 10 Atoms wide.
      - MereInterest 5y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angstrom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angstrom
    - zsmi 5y ago
      That would only make sense if all transistors were the same size. They're not. Not even close. Especially, in combinational logic they're all over the place. When verilog is being turned into gates there are many arguments the engineer can give the tool and they will give very different results. It's kinda like picking which optimizations get turned on during compile, like picking speed or binary size, although not exactly like that. The industry tried using bit/area, because an important advantage of small transistors is more memory/area, but that has basically all the same complications as well so it doesn't really work like one wants. So just counting transistors can be totally unfair when two designs are made for totally different applications. In the end picking a node is a complicated, multi-dimensional, decision. Often, and more often than the public thinks, the smallest one is the wrong decision. Note: Google's TPU is at least a generation behind the bleeding edge, if not two, and not because Google can't afford it if they want to. So, basically expect the marking names to continue for process node names for the foreseeable future. For the more EE minded, see this deck: http://www.cse.psu.edu/~kxc104/class/cmpen411/14f/lec/C411L12LogicEffort.pdf http://www.cse.psu.edu/~kxc104/class/cmpen411/14f/lec/C411L1... If you don't want to go through the whole thing note slide 17 especially. Those are all the same boolean function but they have very different areas, speeds, and power. Which one the tool picks will be (mostly) controlled by the designer.
  - garbagetime 5y ago
    Several is inclusive of two.
    - gruez 5y ago
      Only to a tiny minority of people: https://github.com/zonination/perceptions https://github.com/zonination/perceptions
      - garbagetime 5y ago
        The figure in your linked page looks like it is based on data from a survey in which participant were asked which number they thought of when they heard the word 'several'. Even if everyone taking the survey was aware that the word 'several' is inclusive of two, I'm not sure we would expect a different result. So, the results can't be used as evidence that anybody taking the survey did not think several is inclusive of two.
- Covzire 5y ago
  Now that you mention it, it's a little odd that VMware isn't used by any of the major cloud providers while they also haven't created their own Cloud Provider. It seems like they are very few hires away from a core competency in competing with at least GCP or Azure. Makes me wonder why, is it because they see a big future yet in on-prem and can't really embrace cloud computing until that future looks less certain?
  - streetcat1 5y ago
    The cloud is a capex game not a tech game. Also, the layer that VMware compete in, is fully commoditized (this is the infra as a service layer). The game is moving to higher layer (e.g. ML/ DB). I think that for on-prem they faced a treat from containers, which they are embracing by betting the company on Kubernetes.
  - wmf 5y ago
    Once you start charging enterprise prices you can't stop, but public clouds can't pay enterprise prices. It would have appeared to be financial suicide for VMware to move downmarket into public cloud.
    - amluto 5y ago
      Enterprise costs are negotiable. I can easily imagine Google paying VMware several billion per year for a product they want. I can’t imagine Google using ESX — they want a product they fully control.
      - fomine3 5y ago
        I don't believe any bigger cloud providers want to adopt closed unmodifiable products as a core. Windows/Hyper-V is similar from outside but it's in house for Azure(MS).
      - wmf 5y ago
        Even second-tier clouds that can't afford to develop their own hypervisor don't use ESX though. Literally no public clouds use it.
- bg24 5y ago
  IMHO, VMware did the best it could under Gelsinger's leadership. They evolved their cash cow (vcenter) better than other on-prem vendors. - NSX (via Nicira) - VMware in the cloud through all hyperscalers - Tanzu (via Heptio) Also made security as a core successful pillar for their offering. They did not have the DNA to build a hyperscaler. They tried vcloud, but it was a failure.
  - hirako2000 5y ago
    I've sufered their virtual cloud solution professionally, I concur. And not only they failed, while they focused on providing Software Defined Data Center solutions to enterprises, the enterprises were already trying to figure out how to actually kill the infrastructure cost. It wasn't too much of a software feature problem than it was a hardware cohesion problem, which VMware weren't even very good at providing support for to make their software actually be somewhat on par with say AWS which itself isn't particularly shiny in term of performance. We were getting sub ms latency between applications on the same DC site, across all layers up to application. With VM were we were well over 2ms and at the virtualised network level. With marginal improvements on that front observed after 2 years of back and forth support projects.
- dylan604 5y ago
  >we need large US-based fabricator if China gets more aggressive on Taiwan So take that concept further of what happens if/when China makes that move. What happens if TSMC's fabs are sabotaged/destroyed during this scenario? This would make today's chip shortage seem like just a blip. Would that be the thing that makes Intel relevant again? If this current shortage actually motivates US based chip manufacturing equal to TSMC, the loss of TSMC would obviously not be as severe. How much would China benefit from being the sole customer of TSMC at that point? Time to crowd source a new scifi/techfi plot
- initplus 5y ago
  What is blocking this industry in the US? If it's staff, surely some kind of special visa program combined with tax breaks could be a pretty generous offer to TSMC to setup shop onshore.
  - wonnage 5y ago
    TSMC is one of Taiwan's biggest strategic assets, they will never manufacture the most cutting-edge products offshore.
  - dragonelite 5y ago
    The Taiwanese industry people want to go to China because that is where the market will go. So much so that Taiwan had to block Chinese recruitment centers and if I'm not mistaken restricting travel on some of those key people.
- lvl100 5y ago
  Did he run that into the ground? Or the tech just became obsolete for modern environment?
  - specialp 5y ago
    That is very much like running it into the ground. They could have had a strong platform to pivot existing customers to cloud solutions or made on premises better. Instead a book retailer pivoted to that.
rektide 5y ago
honestly it's 100% AMD that's going to turn this around for intel. AMD has stopped selling mid-market & down-market. their new affordable 5300G chip is unpurchaseable. their gpus are unobtainable in extreme, or radically overpriced. amd still has a good presence in affordable, good performing latpops. but that's it. everywhere else, they're basically only courting the high end. they got better & immediately stopped trying to serve the mainstream markets. for example, go try to buy a business class small PC. there was a brief second where one could buy a 1L sized Lenovo with a 4850ge chip, and it was awesome, way better than intel. but AMD very very very quickly withdrew from price-competitive markets.
- stefan_ 5y ago
  It's amazing how Intel with exclusive access to their own massive fabs has utterly squandered this chips shortage, even in the midst of it all hitching its wagon to the shortest of all TSMC. Stock is just down down down and in 2024 they'll announce another far behind energy guzzler - some turnaround..
  - tkojames 5y ago
    The problem is Intel makes chips for Intel and nobody else. Sure they are starting to open up again.. but there are only so many use cases for x86 cpus. Like literally every single chip that is in shortage is something Intel does not and will not make.. well they do have Altera but still..
  - pwarner 5y ago
    I think Intel is shipping every chip they can make at 14 nm? They are selling more chips than ever before. If they could get newer designs and processes out that would be nice, to but I don't think they are sitting on production capacity. I don't have a source, other than their financials. Well and this: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-cpu-shortage-tsmc-outsource,37769.html https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-cpu-shortage-tsmc-ou...
  - Dylan16807 5y ago
    Intel's been deep into their own shortage for years, because 10nm was almost unusable for most of its life. 2020 just brought everyone to their level, it didn't give them an advantage.
infofarmer 5y ago
https://archive.is/1F9uj https://archive.is/1F9uj
h2odragon 5y ago
"This time for sure, Rocky!" Every time Intel has a "revolution" they wind up pointed the same way, with less reason for hope. They've lived off blocking competition and stomping innovation for so long they have no idea how to do anything else. Kill the rotted zombie corpse and let people with ideas do shit.
- mananaysiempre 5y ago
  Unfortunately, the most convincing of those people are Apple, who are manifestly trying to kill the personal computer as a (more or less) open software system even if they left themselves some space to backtrack. Though Intel are far from blameless in that department as well, they look far less likely to actually succeed. I find it hard to cheer for any of the players here.
  - techrat 5y ago
    Apple is one of the last companies I would consider 'open' on any front.
    - SkyMarshal 5y ago
      That was his point.
matthewfcarlson 5y ago
I'm quite bullish on Intel. Their upcoming products are awesome (at least according to rumors/what they've announced) and heterogenous computing is a bigger deal than most realize. AMD Ryzen 3 and Apple's M1 get a lot of love and many speculate on what's coming next. I think there's space for several players in the space.
- neogodless 5y ago
  To clarify, you mean AMD's Zen 3 architecture. Ryzen 3 is a low-end product line (currently 4-core APUs).
- techrat 5y ago
  Intel's hubris is still getting in the way. When companies like Cloudflare are openly announcing that none of their upcoming servers will use Intel, you have to admit something's wrong. https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/01/cloudflare_picks_amd_again/ https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/01/cloudflare_picks_amd_... > "We evaluated Intel's latest generation of 'Ice Lake' Xeon processors," Howells wrote. "Although Intel's chips were able to compete with AMD in terms of raw performance, the power consumption was several hundred watts higher per server – that's enormous." Lake has turned out to be Intel's decline into Bulldozer chip style design issues. They might perform fine but they're too hot, too outdated and too expensive.
  - xadhominemx 5y ago
    I think people know Ice Lake is going to be a flop; they are more excited about Sapphire Rapids
    - celrod 5y ago
      On paper, saphire rapids is a large step forward. Compute tiles to offer larger core counts (while maintaining a monolithic topology), 512 reorder buffer entries (up from 354), 6 decode (up from 4), 2 more execution units, chips with HBM memory... AMX might be interesting, too, although I currently stick to `Float32`+ precision, so I don't have use at the moment for <=16-bit FLOPS. Overall, saphire rapids looks very interesting to me. Of course, being built on an upgrade of the same node as Ice Lake means heat/energy use aren't getting better, so perf/watt gains will probably mostly have to happen on the perf side of things. Tiger Lake clocks much higher than Ice Lake, but I'm not sure how their energy use compares at the same clock speeds. Saphire Rapids is another node upgrade on top of Tiger Lake.
skynetv2 5y ago
I worked at Intel for several years. The problems are self made, through years of control in the hands of number crunchers, complacency, and arrogance. I sat through leadership meetings where the only strategy discussed was - we're Intel, they would be fools to not listen to us. There is talent but it is working with its hands shackled to its feet and keys thrown away. There is zero morale. During the years i was there, my memories are marked with bigwigs threatening people to leave with the offered severance lest they are forced to leave empty handed, while the bigwigs cashed out in tens of millions. Egos stoked at the expense of the company's future, short term metrics tied to substantial bonuses, that clearly paid a few top execs 10s of millions optimizing for those and leaving the ruins for others to clean up
- dmead 5y ago
  whos bright idea was it for intel to buy smartwatch companies?
  - nikanj 5y ago
    Someone who wanted to hang around fitness people, instead of datacenter people. Depressingly often strategy is based on personal preferences of upper management
    - xiphias2 5y ago
      I didn't understand why Google aquired Boutiques.com in 2010, but now it makes so much more sense. A lot of hot people joined the company with designer clothes, even though they didn't have to go through the usual interview process.
      - yourapostasy 5y ago
        > A lot of hot people joined the company with designer clothes, even though they didn't have to go through the usual interview process. That sounds ludicrous. If true, it has to count up there as among the most expensive way to get at "OPP" (in the Naughty By Nature sense). I don't see how the BoD and all sorts of DD processes could have signed off on it. Then again, I simply don't know how politics and power works at those levels, so I'd certainly welcome enlightenment.
baybal2 5y ago
Microsoft is a very bad comparison given in the article. Microsoft haven't found a radically better way to sell MS Office, or Windows. It's just leveraged what Mr. Balmer built, an extensive sales network, and monster salesmen who make car salesmen look nice, to upsell big, fat clients into buying grossly overpriced web hosting (Azura.) The best direct comparison would be if Intel starts force selling their corporate buyers an extremely overpriced Windows clone. We had a visit by one MS salesman trying to forcefeed us 365, and cloud AD, instead of out self-hosted AD. We almost had him escorted out.
- nikanj 5y ago
  You open by saying MS hasn’t found a better way to sell Office, but then do mention 365 aka the new way to buy Office.
abainbridge 5y ago
Isn't Intel's loss of the lead largely because their fabs don't produce as many square metres of chips as TSMC and Samsung's fabs? Once those guys had more scale it was only a matter of time until their fabs became better than Intel's. Once they took the lead, the problem only compounds, since people are switching to AMD or ARM based chips and that moves even more of Intel's scale to TSMC and Samsung. It seems like a vicious circle for Intel. Admittedly Intel having its own fabs looks good while everyone else is struggling for capacity, but I assume that will be fixed eventually. When it is, I expect Intel's decline to hasten. Intel are already experimenting with using other people's fabs. I think this is their best path.
boynamedsue 5y ago
I can't believe that there's no mention of AWS Graviton in the article or in the comments on HN. AWS-designed silicon has Intel running scared. Ampere is working with the other cloud providers on comparable initiatives. Intel being obviated in the cloud is a real possibility.
xyzzy21 5y ago
NOTHING has changed at Intel. They have grand plans. They've tried these exact same grand plans a decade ago and failed badly. The culture hasn't changed. In fact the minority that warned of exactly what has happened to Intel - the Cassandras who got it right - have all already been driven out of the company. It's now just one single group-think of fail. The proof is in the results which we will NOT KNOW for at least 10, maybe 20 years. The signs so far are not encouraging.
gabthinking2017 5y ago
Excellent range of commentary on this topic - no matter where one stands regarding Intel, it is an important player in the great game of semiconductor strategy, given the supply chain logistics mess due to the pandemic and the ongoing US/China rivalry. A lot at stake here.

142 points by martincmartin 5y ago

Personally, I think Gelsinger ran VMWare into the ground. He completely missed the boat on cloud. Now he's taking over a company steeped in bureaucracy that's several generations behind on chip fabrication. They are still trying to ramp up 10 nm while TSMC is unveiling 4 nm any day now. I want to see Intel succeed because we need large US-based fabricator if China gets more aggressive on Taiwan, but it's going to take a lot of housecleaning.

gruez 5y ago
>that's several generations behind on chip fabrication. They are still trying to ramp up 10 nm while TSMC is unveiling 4 nm any day now. It's worth noting that Intel 10nm can't be directly compared with TSMC 4nm. AFAIK Intel 10nm approximately equals TSMC 7nm. TSMC 4nm sounds like an iterative refinement on 5nm, so intel is only really one to two generations behind, not "several".
- tux3 5y ago
  Worth noting that TSMC is relentlessly incremental. While Intel wanted to make a bigger, slower jump from 14 to 10, TSMC did an N7, an N7+ (not to be confused with N7P), an N6, N5, and N5P, and later this year, N4 is on the roadmap. So counting "generations" is a little abstract anyways. You should probably look at the PPA numbers and the kind of scaling boosters they've managed to ship, if you want to compare fairly.
- discordance 5y ago
  1 - 2 generations in the silicon world is 5 - 10 years
  - wmf 5y ago
    No? TSMC has a new "full node" (whatever that means now) every 2 years. And Intel 4 should be released the same year as TSMC N4.
- chithanh 5y ago
  > AFAIK Intel 10nm approximately equals TSMC 7nm. I don't think so, TSMC 7nm is ahead in many ways. For example, Intel 10nm power efficiency is much worse. https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-epyc-journey-continues-to-milan-in-cloudflares-11th-generation-edge-server/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-epyc-journey-continues-to-mi... Intel 10nm is maybe more comparable with Samsung 8nm.
  - Traster 5y ago
    TSMC 7nm = Intel 10nm is a crazy old trope that dates back to before everyone realised that Intel couldn't deliver 10nm. I don't know why people keep repeating it.
    - mensetmanusman 5y ago
      Any node after they stopped measuring gate dimensions is a trope. We need a better metric, a marketing term doesn’t work.
  - gruez 5y ago
    >TSMC 7nm is ahead in many ways. For example, Intel 10nm power efficiency is much worse. Is this based on the lithography process, or because of the uarch? The 7nm = 10nm was from https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/File:7nm_densities.svg https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/File:7nm_densities.svg, which looked at the density. Based comparison tables of lithography processes, it doesn't even look like power is something that they compare (eg. https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/7_nm_lithography_process https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/7_nm_lithography_process)
    - sct202 5y ago
      In your second link there's Power @ iso-speed comparisons within TSMC's nodes and TSMC has 3 revisions of their N7 with 3 different power usages. Presumably, Intel can do similar things within their generations too.
- dragonelite 5y ago
  The industry should really use a different metric like "transistor count / area" because in 5 years TSMC will need to either go negative NM or 0.99 to 0.001 nm to keep the marketing slogans going.
  - frant-hartm 5y ago
    Ever heard of picometer?
  - eeiac928 5y ago
    Hasn't Intel put 10A on the roadmap? I guess 10A means 10 Atoms wide.
    - MereInterest 5y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angstrom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angstrom
  - zsmi 5y ago
    That would only make sense if all transistors were the same size. They're not. Not even close. Especially, in combinational logic they're all over the place. When verilog is being turned into gates there are many arguments the engineer can give the tool and they will give very different results. It's kinda like picking which optimizations get turned on during compile, like picking speed or binary size, although not exactly like that. The industry tried using bit/area, because an important advantage of small transistors is more memory/area, but that has basically all the same complications as well so it doesn't really work like one wants. So just counting transistors can be totally unfair when two designs are made for totally different applications. In the end picking a node is a complicated, multi-dimensional, decision. Often, and more often than the public thinks, the smallest one is the wrong decision. Note: Google's TPU is at least a generation behind the bleeding edge, if not two, and not because Google can't afford it if they want to. So, basically expect the marking names to continue for process node names for the foreseeable future. For the more EE minded, see this deck: http://www.cse.psu.edu/~kxc104/class/cmpen411/14f/lec/C411L12LogicEffort.pdf http://www.cse.psu.edu/~kxc104/class/cmpen411/14f/lec/C411L1... If you don't want to go through the whole thing note slide 17 especially. Those are all the same boolean function but they have very different areas, speeds, and power. Which one the tool picks will be (mostly) controlled by the designer.
- garbagetime 5y ago
  Several is inclusive of two.
  - gruez 5y ago
    Only to a tiny minority of people: https://github.com/zonination/perceptions https://github.com/zonination/perceptions
    - garbagetime 5y ago
      The figure in your linked page looks like it is based on data from a survey in which participant were asked which number they thought of when they heard the word 'several'. Even if everyone taking the survey was aware that the word 'several' is inclusive of two, I'm not sure we would expect a different result. So, the results can't be used as evidence that anybody taking the survey did not think several is inclusive of two.
Covzire 5y ago
Now that you mention it, it's a little odd that VMware isn't used by any of the major cloud providers while they also haven't created their own Cloud Provider. It seems like they are very few hires away from a core competency in competing with at least GCP or Azure. Makes me wonder why, is it because they see a big future yet in on-prem and can't really embrace cloud computing until that future looks less certain?
- streetcat1 5y ago
  The cloud is a capex game not a tech game. Also, the layer that VMware compete in, is fully commoditized (this is the infra as a service layer). The game is moving to higher layer (e.g. ML/ DB). I think that for on-prem they faced a treat from containers, which they are embracing by betting the company on Kubernetes.
- wmf 5y ago
  Once you start charging enterprise prices you can't stop, but public clouds can't pay enterprise prices. It would have appeared to be financial suicide for VMware to move downmarket into public cloud.
  - amluto 5y ago
    Enterprise costs are negotiable. I can easily imagine Google paying VMware several billion per year for a product they want. I can’t imagine Google using ESX — they want a product they fully control.
    - fomine3 5y ago
      I don't believe any bigger cloud providers want to adopt closed unmodifiable products as a core. Windows/Hyper-V is similar from outside but it's in house for Azure(MS).
    - wmf 5y ago
      Even second-tier clouds that can't afford to develop their own hypervisor don't use ESX though. Literally no public clouds use it.
bg24 5y ago
IMHO, VMware did the best it could under Gelsinger's leadership. They evolved their cash cow (vcenter) better than other on-prem vendors. - NSX (via Nicira) - VMware in the cloud through all hyperscalers - Tanzu (via Heptio) Also made security as a core successful pillar for their offering. They did not have the DNA to build a hyperscaler. They tried vcloud, but it was a failure.
- hirako2000 5y ago
  I've sufered their virtual cloud solution professionally, I concur. And not only they failed, while they focused on providing Software Defined Data Center solutions to enterprises, the enterprises were already trying to figure out how to actually kill the infrastructure cost. It wasn't too much of a software feature problem than it was a hardware cohesion problem, which VMware weren't even very good at providing support for to make their software actually be somewhat on par with say AWS which itself isn't particularly shiny in term of performance. We were getting sub ms latency between applications on the same DC site, across all layers up to application. With VM were we were well over 2ms and at the virtualised network level. With marginal improvements on that front observed after 2 years of back and forth support projects.
dylan604 5y ago
>we need large US-based fabricator if China gets more aggressive on Taiwan So take that concept further of what happens if/when China makes that move. What happens if TSMC's fabs are sabotaged/destroyed during this scenario? This would make today's chip shortage seem like just a blip. Would that be the thing that makes Intel relevant again? If this current shortage actually motivates US based chip manufacturing equal to TSMC, the loss of TSMC would obviously not be as severe. How much would China benefit from being the sole customer of TSMC at that point? Time to crowd source a new scifi/techfi plot
initplus 5y ago
What is blocking this industry in the US? If it's staff, surely some kind of special visa program combined with tax breaks could be a pretty generous offer to TSMC to setup shop onshore.
- wonnage 5y ago
  TSMC is one of Taiwan's biggest strategic assets, they will never manufacture the most cutting-edge products offshore.
- dragonelite 5y ago
  The Taiwanese industry people want to go to China because that is where the market will go. So much so that Taiwan had to block Chinese recruitment centers and if I'm not mistaken restricting travel on some of those key people.
lvl100 5y ago
Did he run that into the ground? Or the tech just became obsolete for modern environment?
- specialp 5y ago
  That is very much like running it into the ground. They could have had a strong platform to pivot existing customers to cloud solutions or made on premises better. Instead a book retailer pivoted to that.

rektide 5y ago

honestly it's 100% AMD that's going to turn this around for intel. AMD has stopped selling mid-market & down-market. their new affordable 5300G chip is unpurchaseable. their gpus are unobtainable in extreme, or radically overpriced. amd still has a good presence in affordable, good performing latpops. but that's it. everywhere else, they're basically only courting the high end. they got better & immediately stopped trying to serve the mainstream markets. for example, go try to buy a business class small PC. there was a brief second where one could buy a 1L sized Lenovo with a 4850ge chip, and it was awesome, way better than intel. but AMD very very very quickly withdrew from price-competitive markets.

stefan_ 5y ago
It's amazing how Intel with exclusive access to their own massive fabs has utterly squandered this chips shortage, even in the midst of it all hitching its wagon to the shortest of all TSMC. Stock is just down down down and in 2024 they'll announce another far behind energy guzzler - some turnaround..
- tkojames 5y ago
  The problem is Intel makes chips for Intel and nobody else. Sure they are starting to open up again.. but there are only so many use cases for x86 cpus. Like literally every single chip that is in shortage is something Intel does not and will not make.. well they do have Altera but still..
- pwarner 5y ago
  I think Intel is shipping every chip they can make at 14 nm? They are selling more chips than ever before. If they could get newer designs and processes out that would be nice, to but I don't think they are sitting on production capacity. I don't have a source, other than their financials. Well and this: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-cpu-shortage-tsmc-outsource,37769.html https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-cpu-shortage-tsmc-ou...
- Dylan16807 5y ago
  Intel's been deep into their own shortage for years, because 10nm was almost unusable for most of its life. 2020 just brought everyone to their level, it didn't give them an advantage.

infofarmer 5y ago

https://archive.is/1F9uj https://archive.is/1F9uj

h2odragon 5y ago

"This time for sure, Rocky!" Every time Intel has a "revolution" they wind up pointed the same way, with less reason for hope. They've lived off blocking competition and stomping innovation for so long they have no idea how to do anything else. Kill the rotted zombie corpse and let people with ideas do shit.

mananaysiempre 5y ago
Unfortunately, the most convincing of those people are Apple, who are manifestly trying to kill the personal computer as a (more or less) open software system even if they left themselves some space to backtrack. Though Intel are far from blameless in that department as well, they look far less likely to actually succeed. I find it hard to cheer for any of the players here.
- techrat 5y ago
  Apple is one of the last companies I would consider 'open' on any front.
  - SkyMarshal 5y ago
    That was his point.

matthewfcarlson 5y ago

I'm quite bullish on Intel. Their upcoming products are awesome (at least according to rumors/what they've announced) and heterogenous computing is a bigger deal than most realize. AMD Ryzen 3 and Apple's M1 get a lot of love and many speculate on what's coming next. I think there's space for several players in the space.

neogodless 5y ago
To clarify, you mean AMD's Zen 3 architecture. Ryzen 3 is a low-end product line (currently 4-core APUs).
techrat 5y ago
Intel's hubris is still getting in the way. When companies like Cloudflare are openly announcing that none of their upcoming servers will use Intel, you have to admit something's wrong. https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/01/cloudflare_picks_amd_again/ https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/01/cloudflare_picks_amd_... > "We evaluated Intel's latest generation of 'Ice Lake' Xeon processors," Howells wrote. "Although Intel's chips were able to compete with AMD in terms of raw performance, the power consumption was several hundred watts higher per server – that's enormous." Lake has turned out to be Intel's decline into Bulldozer chip style design issues. They might perform fine but they're too hot, too outdated and too expensive.
- xadhominemx 5y ago
  I think people know Ice Lake is going to be a flop; they are more excited about Sapphire Rapids
  - celrod 5y ago
    On paper, saphire rapids is a large step forward. Compute tiles to offer larger core counts (while maintaining a monolithic topology), 512 reorder buffer entries (up from 354), 6 decode (up from 4), 2 more execution units, chips with HBM memory... AMX might be interesting, too, although I currently stick to `Float32`+ precision, so I don't have use at the moment for <=16-bit FLOPS. Overall, saphire rapids looks very interesting to me. Of course, being built on an upgrade of the same node as Ice Lake means heat/energy use aren't getting better, so perf/watt gains will probably mostly have to happen on the perf side of things. Tiger Lake clocks much higher than Ice Lake, but I'm not sure how their energy use compares at the same clock speeds. Saphire Rapids is another node upgrade on top of Tiger Lake.

skynetv2 5y ago

I worked at Intel for several years. The problems are self made, through years of control in the hands of number crunchers, complacency, and arrogance. I sat through leadership meetings where the only strategy discussed was - we're Intel, they would be fools to not listen to us. There is talent but it is working with its hands shackled to its feet and keys thrown away. There is zero morale. During the years i was there, my memories are marked with bigwigs threatening people to leave with the offered severance lest they are forced to leave empty handed, while the bigwigs cashed out in tens of millions. Egos stoked at the expense of the company's future, short term metrics tied to substantial bonuses, that clearly paid a few top execs 10s of millions optimizing for those and leaving the ruins for others to clean up

dmead 5y ago
whos bright idea was it for intel to buy smartwatch companies?
- nikanj 5y ago
  Someone who wanted to hang around fitness people, instead of datacenter people. Depressingly often strategy is based on personal preferences of upper management
  - xiphias2 5y ago
    I didn't understand why Google aquired Boutiques.com in 2010, but now it makes so much more sense. A lot of hot people joined the company with designer clothes, even though they didn't have to go through the usual interview process.
    - yourapostasy 5y ago
      > A lot of hot people joined the company with designer clothes, even though they didn't have to go through the usual interview process. That sounds ludicrous. If true, it has to count up there as among the most expensive way to get at "OPP" (in the Naughty By Nature sense). I don't see how the BoD and all sorts of DD processes could have signed off on it. Then again, I simply don't know how politics and power works at those levels, so I'd certainly welcome enlightenment.

baybal2 5y ago

Microsoft is a very bad comparison given in the article. Microsoft haven't found a radically better way to sell MS Office, or Windows. It's just leveraged what Mr. Balmer built, an extensive sales network, and monster salesmen who make car salesmen look nice, to upsell big, fat clients into buying grossly overpriced web hosting (Azura.) The best direct comparison would be if Intel starts force selling their corporate buyers an extremely overpriced Windows clone. We had a visit by one MS salesman trying to forcefeed us 365, and cloud AD, instead of out self-hosted AD. We almost had him escorted out.

nikanj 5y ago
You open by saying MS hasn’t found a better way to sell Office, but then do mention 365 aka the new way to buy Office.

abainbridge 5y ago

Isn't Intel's loss of the lead largely because their fabs don't produce as many square metres of chips as TSMC and Samsung's fabs? Once those guys had more scale it was only a matter of time until their fabs became better than Intel's. Once they took the lead, the problem only compounds, since people are switching to AMD or ARM based chips and that moves even more of Intel's scale to TSMC and Samsung. It seems like a vicious circle for Intel. Admittedly Intel having its own fabs looks good while everyone else is struggling for capacity, but I assume that will be fixed eventually. When it is, I expect Intel's decline to hasten. Intel are already experimenting with using other people's fabs. I think this is their best path.

boynamedsue 5y ago

I can't believe that there's no mention of AWS Graviton in the article or in the comments on HN. AWS-designed silicon has Intel running scared. Ampere is working with the other cloud providers on comparable initiatives. Intel being obviated in the cloud is a real possibility.

xyzzy21 5y ago

NOTHING has changed at Intel. They have grand plans. They've tried these exact same grand plans a decade ago and failed badly. The culture hasn't changed. In fact the minority that warned of exactly what has happened to Intel - the Cassandras who got it right - have all already been driven out of the company. It's now just one single group-think of fail. The proof is in the results which we will NOT KNOW for at least 10, maybe 20 years. The signs so far are not encouraging.

gabthinking2017 5y ago

Excellent range of commentary on this topic - no matter where one stands regarding Intel, it is an important player in the great game of semiconductor strategy, given the supply chain logistics mess due to the pandemic and the ongoing US/China rivalry. A lot at stake here.