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Indeed, there is no free lunch. Just look at Intel's missteps on their 10nm process. There's a company with decades of experience building semiconductors and
by bcrl 5y ago
Indeed, there is no free lunch. Just look at Intel's missteps on their 10nm process. There's a company with decades of experience building semiconductors and $77 billion in revenue last year that took close to 4 years to recover from initial mistakes with their transition from their 14nm process to a 10nm class process. If Intel has that much difficulty, just imagine how many orders of magnitude harder it is for a small upstart without all of that institutional experience and resources to recreate that process step from scratch.
- kurthr 5y agoWell, to be fair their 10nm is everyone else's 7nm and they were trying to do it without DUV litho, for reasons? However, their style of process/chip design is very hierarchical with HUGE teams to get the implementation out in the 3-4year cycles (there are multiple overlapping teams). This was driven over the successes of decades of scaling. Then it failed. Now they are behind. If they had been able to pivot early they might be parallel with rather than behind TSMC, but they couldn't admit it wasn't working. The large group structure got in the way. We'll see if they can fix it.
- bcrl 5y agoI do wonder at what point Intel will no longer be able to function being the sole source of products running through their own fabs. Companies like TSMC can amortize the cost of fab construction and process development over a much larger swath of the electronics industry. Combined with the fact that Intel no longer has Apple as a customer for new products, they could be facing enormous change by 2030. AMD couldn't support their own fab, and I think that's still a risk factor (albeit much smaller than it was for AMD) for Intel if the cost of new fabs keeps going up by factors of 10 or more every generation.