6 ms·

This means that Intel manufacturing is used where it makes sense and vice versa isn't used where it doesn't make sense. I can see those general outcomes: * In

This means that Intel manufacturing is used where it makes sense and vice versa isn't used where it doesn't make sense. I can see those general outcomes: * Intel manufacturing is soon again better than other manufacturers in all aspects as it has been a long time. All Intel business goes to Intel manufacturing and things return to what they were. * Intel manufacturing is better in some aspects and continues to outcompete other manufacturers in some areas. Most Intel business goes to Intel manufacturing but some special business goes to other manufacturers. Some other companies use Intel where they have an advantage. Everybody wins. * Intel manufacturing cannot keep up with the market leader. Most Intel business goes to the leading Fab. Intel manufacturing cannot catch up as they don't earn enough money to do so. They start cutting costs and compete downmarket with lower tier fabs. In the long run Intel becomes fabless.

chasil 5y ago
The problem that the industry faces is that the economics and reliability of these chips have been undermined on the recent nodes. Sophie Wilson has said that cost-per-transistor is rising since we shrank below 22nm, and that a 7nm die cannot run more than half of its transistors at the same time without melting. Sophie addresses the cost rise at 22:00. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zX4ZNfvw1cw https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zX4ZNfvw1cw Heat is more of a problem because finfet can't dissipate as well as planar, and reliability is declining at smaller nodes. "With a planar device, you do not have to bother about self-heating. There are a lot of ways to dissipate heat with a planar device, but with finFETs that is not the case. The heat gets trapped and there are few chances for that heat to get dissipated." https://semiengineering.com/chip-aging-becomes-design-problem/ https://semiengineering.com/chip-aging-becomes-design-proble... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29889951 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29889951 If I needed a 20-year service life, I would not choose 7nm. Edit: I did not realize that ARM1 had fewer transistors (~25k) than the 8086 (29k), and over ten times less than the 80386 (275k). Intel should have bought ARM in the 80s; instead Olivetti got them.
- threatripper 5y ago
  This problem is not specific to Intel. Many chips are not using the smallest node sizes and old fabs get a second life producing those chips instead of CPUs. That could soon be the future for Intel fabs.
  - monocasa 5y ago
    That's where a fab goes to die. It needs to be fully capitalized at that point or else you don't have the money for R&D on leading edge. Intel going this direction is the direction of GloFo and no longer even attempting leading edge node production in the US anymore.
- monocasa 5y ago
  > Sophie Wilson has said that cost-per-transistor is rising since we shrank below 22nm The data has been saying otherwise. 5nm is the only node that increased $/transistor beyond it's previous node (7nm), and that's at a time when Apple payed out the ass for a monopoly on the node except testing shuttle runs from competitors but isn't a sign of a fundamental increase in cost. https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/Unwdy4CoCC6A6Gn4JE38Hc-970-80.jpg https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/Unwdy4CoCC6A6Gn4JE38Hc-970... > and that a 7nm die cannot run more than half of its transistors at the same time without melting. That's true for trying to run multiGhz designs in classic plastic package BGAs like most cell phone chips, but that's been true for a while, hence why flip chip packages are a thing. Actually having a heat spreader connected to the die goes a long way. Wilson's comments aren't incorrect from a certain point of view, but tend to get extrapolated out of her niche to the greater industry in a way that pushes the statements into inaccuracy.
  - chasil 5y ago
    Thanks, the cost per wafer does look convincing. I wonder where Wilson's figures emerged.
    - monocasa 5y ago
      I think what's happening is that initially a node is more expensive, because of consolidation of the market and supply/demand amongst all of the fabless customers until capacity fully comes up. Once we're back into steady state we see the traditional economics of $/transistor falling. That sort of coincides with TSMC having competitive, close to leading edge nodes (so the 28nm timeframe) which would line up with the rumor. The information simply hasn't been updated over the timeframe of the node. Previous to that the cost of the node was pretty fixed as long as someone like ARM cared about, now there's a lot more economic effects from the increased buyer competition that heavily changes final cost over time.
me_me_me 5y ago
Fabless scenario will not happen, ever. One simple reason that similarly to aeronautics chip manufactures are critical industries for US. US government will not let either one die.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago
  > US government will not let either one die This isn’t Intel’s shareholders’ problem. Split the businesses. If the U.S. wants to bail out Intel’s fabs, let them. (Though a better strategy would be a general subsidy for anyone building fabs in America, which should be a thing.)
- threatripper 5y ago
  We don't need small nodes for military/aero chips. It would suffice to keep some old fabs running to secure supply. The US needs fabs but they don't need Intel as a company. Splitting out the fab business and letting it run into the red however could incentivize the government to save the fabs and the jobs with billions of bailout money while the other Intel continues to rake in money with TSMC chips.
  - alrs 5y ago
    This assumes that US military has no need for servers, desktops, or mobile devices.
    - threatripper 5y ago
      Which will be covered by fabs built on US soil which presumably are contractually obliged to manufacture chips for the military on demand. (And obliged to take the precautions to be able to do so.) Some of them can be (ex) Intel fabs, some TSMC or Samsung. I don't see any hard necessity for Intel to keep their fabs in house when there are other solutions.
  - monocasa 5y ago
    Increasingly we do. The military is very much embracing edge compute currently.
opportune 5y ago
I think there is a pretty clear outcome, Intel will go fabless for highest end chips and continue as normal with everything else. They will have many customers (USG) who will require domestically manufactured chips. But they also need to compete with AMD, Apple, and friends and this will allow them to fab out to TSMC while, for lack of a better term, saving face.
- rasz 5y ago
  This wont work. Moving high margin parts to TSMC will wither Intel fab resources to keep up in the mid range. Soon enough you start to struggle like GlobalFoundries.
Spooky23 5y ago
Another possibility is that the market is changing. The age old Xeon/Core/“binned low end” model may not be viable anymore as hyperscale cloud providers start to rule and people don’t care about CPUs as a differentiator. Add in COVID chaos and the answers are unclear. Hell I just replaced thousands of older desktops with slower laptop chips — nobody noticed. Frankly, I only bought new devices because of Microsoft’s bullshit Windows 11 requirements. The guaranteed cash flow train is slowing down, which makes setting billions of dollars on fire with high risk fab processes a big deal. Intel had to adapt like this in the early 90s when memory became a commodity. We’ll see if they make it.
- rjzzleep 5y ago
  > Hell I just replaced thousands of older desktops with slower laptop chips — nobody noticed. Frankly, I only bought new devices because of Microsoft’s bullshit Windows 11 requirements. Big enterprises think like that yeah, because they can't get their crappy Dell Inspirons to new employees anymore. Personally I just had to get a Ryzen laptop replacement temporarily because Lenovo took too long to repair my thinkpad. And the result was delightful. Better sound, fantastic compile times, beautiful screen for half the price of my thinkpad. Next time I'll get a cheap Ryzen and if it breaks just buy a replacement device instead of relying on a pro intel enterprise device with crappy overpriced enterprise service.
  - Spooky23 5y ago
    Agreed - but that’s a problem for Intel, as they need enterprises to lap up those shitty Dell laptops to keep the throughput going! NYC Public Schools buy like 200,000 computers a year. A decade ago, it was probably 50% higher due to faster refresh cycles. There are a lot more big dumb enterprise endpoints than you might think. When I sold computers in college to commercial customers, the average refresh was 30-40 months. Now it’s closer to 60.
- acdha 5y ago
  > Hell I just replaced thousands of older desktops with slower laptop chips — nobody noticed. This is certainly plausible if these were mostly Office users but how confident are you that you'd know if they did notice? Most of the large IT departments I've interacted with would post glowing self-evaluations while the users had plenty of complaints and/or were doing their real work on personal devices. Depending on how the business is structured and the relationships, this can be hard to measure without a fair amount of effort — I've heard people say they weren't going to report something because they didn't think it was worth the effort or they were sure that the IT people would notice and fix it.
paulpan 5y ago
Agreed except there's only 2 outcomes: #1 (win) or #3 (lose). The chips business is a winner-take-all market where if your product isn't the best (in efficiency, performance, whatever metric), then it can't command a price premium nor the attention of OEMs. Also the core business isn't consumer but for enterprise/datacenter market where efficiency/performance is paramount. If #1, then everything is rosy and Intel will regain its dominance from the days of Sandy Bridge. Its chips will be fabricated internally and they get to enjoy the profits from vertical integration. If #3, then Intel will certainly spin off or sell off its manufacturing/fabrication business very similar to AMD more than a decade ago. The caveat is that I don't think Intel's problem right now is simply a manufacturing issue. Sure their Alder Lake is competitive but it's not superior to AMD's offerings or even measured against Apple's SOCs. Remember that unlike the last iteration (Rocket Lake), Alder Lake doesn't suffer from a mismatch in design vs. manufacturing cadence - it's arrived as expected.

chasil 5y ago

The problem that the industry faces is that the economics and reliability of these chips have been undermined on the recent nodes. Sophie Wilson has said that cost-per-transistor is rising since we shrank below 22nm, and that a 7nm die cannot run more than half of its transistors at the same time without melting. Sophie addresses the cost rise at 22:00. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zX4ZNfvw1cw https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zX4ZNfvw1cw Heat is more of a problem because finfet can't dissipate as well as planar, and reliability is declining at smaller nodes. "With a planar device, you do not have to bother about self-heating. There are a lot of ways to dissipate heat with a planar device, but with finFETs that is not the case. The heat gets trapped and there are few chances for that heat to get dissipated." https://semiengineering.com/chip-aging-becomes-design-problem/ https://semiengineering.com/chip-aging-becomes-design-proble... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29889951 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29889951 If I needed a 20-year service life, I would not choose 7nm. Edit: I did not realize that ARM1 had fewer transistors (~25k) than the 8086 (29k), and over ten times less than the 80386 (275k). Intel should have bought ARM in the 80s; instead Olivetti got them.

threatripper 5y ago
This problem is not specific to Intel. Many chips are not using the smallest node sizes and old fabs get a second life producing those chips instead of CPUs. That could soon be the future for Intel fabs.
- monocasa 5y ago
  That's where a fab goes to die. It needs to be fully capitalized at that point or else you don't have the money for R&D on leading edge. Intel going this direction is the direction of GloFo and no longer even attempting leading edge node production in the US anymore.
monocasa 5y ago
> Sophie Wilson has said that cost-per-transistor is rising since we shrank below 22nm The data has been saying otherwise. 5nm is the only node that increased $/transistor beyond it's previous node (7nm), and that's at a time when Apple payed out the ass for a monopoly on the node except testing shuttle runs from competitors but isn't a sign of a fundamental increase in cost. https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/Unwdy4CoCC6A6Gn4JE38Hc-970-80.jpg https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/Unwdy4CoCC6A6Gn4JE38Hc-970... > and that a 7nm die cannot run more than half of its transistors at the same time without melting. That's true for trying to run multiGhz designs in classic plastic package BGAs like most cell phone chips, but that's been true for a while, hence why flip chip packages are a thing. Actually having a heat spreader connected to the die goes a long way. Wilson's comments aren't incorrect from a certain point of view, but tend to get extrapolated out of her niche to the greater industry in a way that pushes the statements into inaccuracy.
- chasil 5y ago
  Thanks, the cost per wafer does look convincing. I wonder where Wilson's figures emerged.
  - monocasa 5y ago
    I think what's happening is that initially a node is more expensive, because of consolidation of the market and supply/demand amongst all of the fabless customers until capacity fully comes up. Once we're back into steady state we see the traditional economics of $/transistor falling. That sort of coincides with TSMC having competitive, close to leading edge nodes (so the 28nm timeframe) which would line up with the rumor. The information simply hasn't been updated over the timeframe of the node. Previous to that the cost of the node was pretty fixed as long as someone like ARM cared about, now there's a lot more economic effects from the increased buyer competition that heavily changes final cost over time.

me_me_me 5y ago

Fabless scenario will not happen, ever. One simple reason that similarly to aeronautics chip manufactures are critical industries for US. US government will not let either one die.

JumpCrisscross 5y ago
> US government will not let either one die This isn’t Intel’s shareholders’ problem. Split the businesses. If the U.S. wants to bail out Intel’s fabs, let them. (Though a better strategy would be a general subsidy for anyone building fabs in America, which should be a thing.)
threatripper 5y ago
We don't need small nodes for military/aero chips. It would suffice to keep some old fabs running to secure supply. The US needs fabs but they don't need Intel as a company. Splitting out the fab business and letting it run into the red however could incentivize the government to save the fabs and the jobs with billions of bailout money while the other Intel continues to rake in money with TSMC chips.
- alrs 5y ago
  This assumes that US military has no need for servers, desktops, or mobile devices.
  - threatripper 5y ago
    Which will be covered by fabs built on US soil which presumably are contractually obliged to manufacture chips for the military on demand. (And obliged to take the precautions to be able to do so.) Some of them can be (ex) Intel fabs, some TSMC or Samsung. I don't see any hard necessity for Intel to keep their fabs in house when there are other solutions.
- monocasa 5y ago
  Increasingly we do. The military is very much embracing edge compute currently.

opportune 5y ago

I think there is a pretty clear outcome, Intel will go fabless for highest end chips and continue as normal with everything else. They will have many customers (USG) who will require domestically manufactured chips. But they also need to compete with AMD, Apple, and friends and this will allow them to fab out to TSMC while, for lack of a better term, saving face.

rasz 5y ago
This wont work. Moving high margin parts to TSMC will wither Intel fab resources to keep up in the mid range. Soon enough you start to struggle like GlobalFoundries.

Spooky23 5y ago

Another possibility is that the market is changing. The age old Xeon/Core/“binned low end” model may not be viable anymore as hyperscale cloud providers start to rule and people don’t care about CPUs as a differentiator. Add in COVID chaos and the answers are unclear. Hell I just replaced thousands of older desktops with slower laptop chips — nobody noticed. Frankly, I only bought new devices because of Microsoft’s bullshit Windows 11 requirements. The guaranteed cash flow train is slowing down, which makes setting billions of dollars on fire with high risk fab processes a big deal. Intel had to adapt like this in the early 90s when memory became a commodity. We’ll see if they make it.

rjzzleep 5y ago
> Hell I just replaced thousands of older desktops with slower laptop chips — nobody noticed. Frankly, I only bought new devices because of Microsoft’s bullshit Windows 11 requirements. Big enterprises think like that yeah, because they can't get their crappy Dell Inspirons to new employees anymore. Personally I just had to get a Ryzen laptop replacement temporarily because Lenovo took too long to repair my thinkpad. And the result was delightful. Better sound, fantastic compile times, beautiful screen for half the price of my thinkpad. Next time I'll get a cheap Ryzen and if it breaks just buy a replacement device instead of relying on a pro intel enterprise device with crappy overpriced enterprise service.
- Spooky23 5y ago
  Agreed - but that’s a problem for Intel, as they need enterprises to lap up those shitty Dell laptops to keep the throughput going! NYC Public Schools buy like 200,000 computers a year. A decade ago, it was probably 50% higher due to faster refresh cycles. There are a lot more big dumb enterprise endpoints than you might think. When I sold computers in college to commercial customers, the average refresh was 30-40 months. Now it’s closer to 60.
acdha 5y ago
> Hell I just replaced thousands of older desktops with slower laptop chips — nobody noticed. This is certainly plausible if these were mostly Office users but how confident are you that you'd know if they did notice? Most of the large IT departments I've interacted with would post glowing self-evaluations while the users had plenty of complaints and/or were doing their real work on personal devices. Depending on how the business is structured and the relationships, this can be hard to measure without a fair amount of effort — I've heard people say they weren't going to report something because they didn't think it was worth the effort or they were sure that the IT people would notice and fix it.

paulpan 5y ago

Agreed except there's only 2 outcomes: #1 (win) or #3 (lose). The chips business is a winner-take-all market where if your product isn't the best (in efficiency, performance, whatever metric), then it can't command a price premium nor the attention of OEMs. Also the core business isn't consumer but for enterprise/datacenter market where efficiency/performance is paramount. If #1, then everything is rosy and Intel will regain its dominance from the days of Sandy Bridge. Its chips will be fabricated internally and they get to enjoy the profits from vertical integration. If #3, then Intel will certainly spin off or sell off its manufacturing/fabrication business very similar to AMD more than a decade ago. The caveat is that I don't think Intel's problem right now is simply a manufacturing issue. Sure their Alder Lake is competitive but it's not superior to AMD's offerings or even measured against Apple's SOCs. Remember that unlike the last iteration (Rocket Lake), Alder Lake doesn't suffer from a mismatch in design vs. manufacturing cadence - it's arrived as expected.