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I don't think Intel's manufacturing problem is purely that of incentive which will be fixed by a split. That's massive oversimplification. The approach Intel i

I don't think Intel's manufacturing problem is purely that of incentive which will be fixed by a split. That's massive oversimplification. The approach Intel is taking - outsource cutting edge products to TSMC while continuing to invest in their fabs making their lower end stuff and other people's stuff like automotive chips in-house is the best strategy to buy some time to advance their fabs while letting them earn money to support R&D investments. It's a huge problem and nobody except TSMC has succeeded at it. Besides there is years of lack of focus, incentives and interest in specialized education and manufacturing processes that'll take time for Intel to fix. Meanwhile they will be competitive in consumer markets by going TSMC 3nm and continue to improve on the side by taking on outside fab orders. Seems reasonable to me.

dannyw 5y ago
Intel is already competitive on 10nm (Intel 7) with Alder Lake on desktop against AMD; I'm frankly impressed to see what Intel's designs on TSMC 3nm will do.
- saberience 5y ago
  Only competitive if you don't look at energy usage, Intel relies on cranking the energy usage in order to get their chips almost to compete with AMD.
  - api 5y ago
    That may depend substantially on process node. 3nm would use less power.
    - the_duke 5y ago
      Sure, but so would AMD chips, which aren't even on 5nm yet.
    - phkahler 5y ago
      Sure, but it's not Intel 3nm. AMD is moving to TSMC 5nm and will go to 3nm in the future as well. It really bothers me when either side compares tomorrows products to competitors todays products.
  - dannyw 5y ago
    Not really: https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/qwn1j9/core_i912900k_performance_efficiency_at_various/ https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/qwn1j9/core_i9129... The holistic efficiency comparison definitely favours Intel on desktop, as Ryzen has heavy idle power usage, due to its 12nm I/O die from GloFo.
    - thereddaikon 5y ago
      idle power draw on desktop isn't a major concern. When people talk about power draw in a desktop context its really an indirect way to measure heat. Managing thermals at heavy load is the most important consideration. And if your chip manages to win benchmarks by creating massively more heat in the process then that is worth noting. In laptops idle power draw and heat are far more important because they effect system endurance. In fact most gains in mobile device power management are with lowering idle consumption not load consumption.
      - e4e78a06 5y ago
        > idle power draw on desktop isn't a major concern It certainly is if you're a major corporate entity deploying tens of thousands of desktops idling 24/7. The 30-40W IO die idle cost adds up. If you're doing distributed rendering you're better off buying Ampere Arm CPUs anyways as they're more power efficient than any x86 offering.
        thereddaikon 5y ago
        That's just moving the goalposts. Businesses aren't buying loads of gaming desktops with K sku cpus though. They are getting i5s or Ryzen 5s that do have low idle power usage. We were talking about performance chips.
  - PixyMisa 5y ago
    The high-end Alder Lake parts - particularly the 12900K - are terrible energy hogs. But as you move down the stack, efficiency improves a lot while performance remains very competitive with AMD parts in the same price bracket.
    - jeffbee 5y ago
      My 12700K has core power usage under 1W and package power under 4W when it's just sitting there, which is does a heck of a lot of. When it's running flat out compiling C++ projects on all performance cores, package power is ~90W. Single-threaded performance is much better than any Ryzen and even beats my M1 Pro. I'm not really seeing the energy argument for desktop/workstation usage. For datacenter TCO AMD is probably still the champ.
      - monocasa 5y ago
        I guess I weight datacenter workloads much higher for perf/watt because the higher margins there is what funds next gen's R&D. Cranking up power to get perf under load is a move that cuts off funding streams in one of the most capital intensive industries.
        jeffbee 5y ago
        Intel still sells 85% of the server market including 75% of the megascale cloud market, so at this point it does not appear to me that Intel has been strategically wounded. I'm sure they have more than enough cash to fund R&D at this time.
        monocasa 5y ago
        It was 98% of the datacenter market in 2017, and apparently the rate of decrease is accelerating, and that's even before taking into account that the datacenter chip equivalent to your 12700k doesn't come out until later this year and that's where you'd expect to see the real fall off in DC marketshare. That money can dry up very quickly.
  - khyryk 5y ago
    Alder Lake is more power efficient under low to moderate loads, which includes all gaming. It's only less efficient under loads pushing it at 100% on all cores when it's on a high power limit.
    - wtallis 5y ago
      Ironically, Alder Lake is only efficient when it doesn't have to use the E-cores.
      - khyryk 5y ago
        Intel's (literally) doubling down on the Atom cores in Raptor Lake so they'll have to get it right for them to have a Zen 2-esque progression. CPU advances beyond the old +5% per generation are pretty exciting.
  - GeekyBear 5y ago
    I'm suspicious that reliability issues stemming from an extreme power draw and level of heat generated when you run AVX-512 instructions was the reason for those instructions being disabled recently. >One of the big takeaways from our initial Core i7-11700K review was the power consumption under AVX-512 modes, as well as the high temperatures. Even with the latest microcode updates, both of our Core i9 parts draw lots of power. The Core i9-11900K in our test peaks up to 296 W, showing temperatures of 104ºC, before coming back down to ~230 W and dropping to 4.5 GHz. The Core i7-11700K is still showing 278 W in our ASUS board, tempeartures of 103ºC, and after the initial spike we see 4.4 GHz at the same ~230 W. There are a number of ways to report CPU temperature. We can either take the instantaneous value of a singular spot of the silicon while it’s currently going through a high-current density event, like compute, or we can consider the CPU as a whole with all of its thermal sensors. While the overall CPU might accept operating temperatures of 105ºC, individual elements of the core might actually reach 125ºC instantaneously. So what is the correct value, and what is safe? https://www.anandtech.com/show/16495/intel-rocket-lake-14nm-review-11900k-11700k-11600k/5 https://www.anandtech.com/show/16495/intel-rocket-lake-14nm-...
    - celrod 5y ago
      In that particular benchmark (3d particle movement), the 11700K performed about 4x better than the AMD 5900X. Performance/watt clearly wasn't suffering. Perhaps it could downlock more to address the wattage while still coming well ahead in terms of performance, although some older CPUs doing this gave AVX512 a bad reputation. Few workloads are as well optimized to take advantage of AVX512 as the 3d particle movement benchmark, so both the increases in performance and wattage seen in that benchmark are atypical. If they were typical, then AVX512 would be much more popular. FWIW, I'm a big fan of wide CPU vector instructions. The real reason it was disabled is probably to push people like me to buy Saphire Rapids, which I would've favored anyway for the extra FMA unit. Although I'll also be waiting to see if Zen4 brings AVX512, which some rumors have claimed (and others have contradicted).
      - GeekyBear 5y ago
        One of the failure modes for chips as they move to smaller process nodes is electromigration. >Electromigration is the movement of atoms based on the flow of current through a material. If the current density is high enough, the heat dissipated within the material will repeatedly break atoms from the structure and move them. This will create both ‘vacancies’ and ‘deposits’. The vacancies can grow and eventually break circuit connections resulting in open-circuits, while the deposits can grow and eventually close circuit connections resulting in short-circuit. Chips that get very hot are expected to be the first to show this sort of failure. >In Black’s equation, which is used to compute the mean time to failure of metal lines, the temperature of the conductor appears in the exponent https://www.synopsys.com/glossary/what-is-electromigration.html https://www.synopsys.com/glossary/what-is-electromigration.h...
- marricks 5y ago
  Clearly Intel has huge issues or they wouldn’t be making such a drastic turn. For some people whatever happens to intel the picture is always extremely rosey.
ryan93 5y ago
They had profit of 20B last year. The bean counters are the reason they wont invest in cutting edge fabs not a lack of capital.
- blinkingled 5y ago
  Sure, but does it sound more challenging to invest in a spin off company than an integrated arm that will deliver revenue from inside and outside business? I am sure the shareholders would be more agreeable to the latter. Especially when there is enough demand for chip making to be almost certain that it will not be a huge money loser. To invest Intel's money in a spinoff fab company while losing strategic control over its direction and have little to gain from its success doesn't feel all that attractive to me.
  - ryan93 5y ago
    I think they should pay what it takes to attract physics and EE talent from finance and facebook. Dont know what you are talking about with a spinoff fab.
    - blinkingled 5y ago
      Oh for sure - and that's kind of what I meant in my original post - years of lack of focus, incentives and interest in specialized education and manufacturing processes.

dannyw 5y ago

Intel is already competitive on 10nm (Intel 7) with Alder Lake on desktop against AMD; I'm frankly impressed to see what Intel's designs on TSMC 3nm will do.

saberience 5y ago
Only competitive if you don't look at energy usage, Intel relies on cranking the energy usage in order to get their chips almost to compete with AMD.
- api 5y ago
  That may depend substantially on process node. 3nm would use less power.
  - the_duke 5y ago
    Sure, but so would AMD chips, which aren't even on 5nm yet.
  - phkahler 5y ago
    Sure, but it's not Intel 3nm. AMD is moving to TSMC 5nm and will go to 3nm in the future as well. It really bothers me when either side compares tomorrows products to competitors todays products.
- dannyw 5y ago
  Not really: https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/qwn1j9/core_i912900k_performance_efficiency_at_various/ https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/qwn1j9/core_i9129... The holistic efficiency comparison definitely favours Intel on desktop, as Ryzen has heavy idle power usage, due to its 12nm I/O die from GloFo.
  - thereddaikon 5y ago
    idle power draw on desktop isn't a major concern. When people talk about power draw in a desktop context its really an indirect way to measure heat. Managing thermals at heavy load is the most important consideration. And if your chip manages to win benchmarks by creating massively more heat in the process then that is worth noting. In laptops idle power draw and heat are far more important because they effect system endurance. In fact most gains in mobile device power management are with lowering idle consumption not load consumption.
    - e4e78a06 5y ago
      > idle power draw on desktop isn't a major concern It certainly is if you're a major corporate entity deploying tens of thousands of desktops idling 24/7. The 30-40W IO die idle cost adds up. If you're doing distributed rendering you're better off buying Ampere Arm CPUs anyways as they're more power efficient than any x86 offering.
      - thereddaikon 5y ago
        That's just moving the goalposts. Businesses aren't buying loads of gaming desktops with K sku cpus though. They are getting i5s or Ryzen 5s that do have low idle power usage. We were talking about performance chips.
- PixyMisa 5y ago
  The high-end Alder Lake parts - particularly the 12900K - are terrible energy hogs. But as you move down the stack, efficiency improves a lot while performance remains very competitive with AMD parts in the same price bracket.
  - jeffbee 5y ago
    My 12700K has core power usage under 1W and package power under 4W when it's just sitting there, which is does a heck of a lot of. When it's running flat out compiling C++ projects on all performance cores, package power is ~90W. Single-threaded performance is much better than any Ryzen and even beats my M1 Pro. I'm not really seeing the energy argument for desktop/workstation usage. For datacenter TCO AMD is probably still the champ.
    - monocasa 5y ago
      I guess I weight datacenter workloads much higher for perf/watt because the higher margins there is what funds next gen's R&D. Cranking up power to get perf under load is a move that cuts off funding streams in one of the most capital intensive industries.
      - jeffbee 5y ago
        Intel still sells 85% of the server market including 75% of the megascale cloud market, so at this point it does not appear to me that Intel has been strategically wounded. I'm sure they have more than enough cash to fund R&D at this time.
        monocasa 5y ago
        It was 98% of the datacenter market in 2017, and apparently the rate of decrease is accelerating, and that's even before taking into account that the datacenter chip equivalent to your 12700k doesn't come out until later this year and that's where you'd expect to see the real fall off in DC marketshare. That money can dry up very quickly.
- khyryk 5y ago
  Alder Lake is more power efficient under low to moderate loads, which includes all gaming. It's only less efficient under loads pushing it at 100% on all cores when it's on a high power limit.
  - wtallis 5y ago
    Ironically, Alder Lake is only efficient when it doesn't have to use the E-cores.
    - khyryk 5y ago
      Intel's (literally) doubling down on the Atom cores in Raptor Lake so they'll have to get it right for them to have a Zen 2-esque progression. CPU advances beyond the old +5% per generation are pretty exciting.
- GeekyBear 5y ago
  I'm suspicious that reliability issues stemming from an extreme power draw and level of heat generated when you run AVX-512 instructions was the reason for those instructions being disabled recently. >One of the big takeaways from our initial Core i7-11700K review was the power consumption under AVX-512 modes, as well as the high temperatures. Even with the latest microcode updates, both of our Core i9 parts draw lots of power. The Core i9-11900K in our test peaks up to 296 W, showing temperatures of 104ºC, before coming back down to ~230 W and dropping to 4.5 GHz. The Core i7-11700K is still showing 278 W in our ASUS board, tempeartures of 103ºC, and after the initial spike we see 4.4 GHz at the same ~230 W. There are a number of ways to report CPU temperature. We can either take the instantaneous value of a singular spot of the silicon while it’s currently going through a high-current density event, like compute, or we can consider the CPU as a whole with all of its thermal sensors. While the overall CPU might accept operating temperatures of 105ºC, individual elements of the core might actually reach 125ºC instantaneously. So what is the correct value, and what is safe? https://www.anandtech.com/show/16495/intel-rocket-lake-14nm-review-11900k-11700k-11600k/5 https://www.anandtech.com/show/16495/intel-rocket-lake-14nm-...
  - celrod 5y ago
    In that particular benchmark (3d particle movement), the 11700K performed about 4x better than the AMD 5900X. Performance/watt clearly wasn't suffering. Perhaps it could downlock more to address the wattage while still coming well ahead in terms of performance, although some older CPUs doing this gave AVX512 a bad reputation. Few workloads are as well optimized to take advantage of AVX512 as the 3d particle movement benchmark, so both the increases in performance and wattage seen in that benchmark are atypical. If they were typical, then AVX512 would be much more popular. FWIW, I'm a big fan of wide CPU vector instructions. The real reason it was disabled is probably to push people like me to buy Saphire Rapids, which I would've favored anyway for the extra FMA unit. Although I'll also be waiting to see if Zen4 brings AVX512, which some rumors have claimed (and others have contradicted).
    - GeekyBear 5y ago
      One of the failure modes for chips as they move to smaller process nodes is electromigration. >Electromigration is the movement of atoms based on the flow of current through a material. If the current density is high enough, the heat dissipated within the material will repeatedly break atoms from the structure and move them. This will create both ‘vacancies’ and ‘deposits’. The vacancies can grow and eventually break circuit connections resulting in open-circuits, while the deposits can grow and eventually close circuit connections resulting in short-circuit. Chips that get very hot are expected to be the first to show this sort of failure. >In Black’s equation, which is used to compute the mean time to failure of metal lines, the temperature of the conductor appears in the exponent https://www.synopsys.com/glossary/what-is-electromigration.html https://www.synopsys.com/glossary/what-is-electromigration.h...
marricks 5y ago
Clearly Intel has huge issues or they wouldn’t be making such a drastic turn. For some people whatever happens to intel the picture is always extremely rosey.

ryan93 5y ago

They had profit of 20B last year. The bean counters are the reason they wont invest in cutting edge fabs not a lack of capital.

blinkingled 5y ago
Sure, but does it sound more challenging to invest in a spin off company than an integrated arm that will deliver revenue from inside and outside business? I am sure the shareholders would be more agreeable to the latter. Especially when there is enough demand for chip making to be almost certain that it will not be a huge money loser. To invest Intel's money in a spinoff fab company while losing strategic control over its direction and have little to gain from its success doesn't feel all that attractive to me.
- ryan93 5y ago
  I think they should pay what it takes to attract physics and EE talent from finance and facebook. Dont know what you are talking about with a spinoff fab.
  - blinkingled 5y ago
    Oh for sure - and that's kind of what I meant in my original post - years of lack of focus, incentives and interest in specialized education and manufacturing processes.