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Intel Launches $1B Fund to Build a Foundry Innovation Ecosystem

• ngngngng 5y ago
  I'm not sure I have much hope for Taiwan remaining independent once we don't need them to make chips for us anymore. I think it's a great and necessary move for Americans to manufacture at home though.
  • nine_k 5y ago
    This will happen when, in 15 years? I don't know what will happen in mainland China in 15 years either. 15 years ago it was materially different.
• ameminator 5y ago
  I don't think $1 billion dollars is actually enough in this kind of space. Probably the most important factor in Intel's success is its (relatively) new CEO's ability to fix cultural problems and internal dysfunction that inhibit any technical improvement. At least this is a sign that Intel recognizes this and is reaching out to startups - only time can tell if it works.
  • xvilka 5y ago
    It's not even enough to build one fab, not to say about an umbrella project. It might help to screen future Carl Zeiss or Applied Materials though.
• sylware 5y ago
  Next TMSC foundry is x1.7 transistors from current process (the 'obsolete' process of the foundries intel is currently building in the USA). Samsung will probably follow, if not done already. EUV core tools of state of the art foundries are ASML (Netherland with bits from Germany). One of this tool was 100 millions last time I did check the price. Hence 1 billion is too small to be relevant in the foundry business, for large scale mass production.
  • biggieshellz 5y ago
    If you read the article, the $1B is not to go the fab itself (there's another, much larger pot of money for that); instead, it's for ancillary developments of "disruptive technologies for the foundry ecosystem."
    • foobarian 5y ago
      Basically build up an ecosystem capable of delivering another ASML. Why not?
      • xvilka 5y ago
        To be honest, ASML is "just" an integrator. Parts of these machines are produced all over the world and where real innovation is necessary.
      • jabl 5y ago
        They way I read it it's about enabling fabless semi companies to use Intel fabs, and providing Intel tech for designing high end SoC's like TSV's and whatnot.
  • deepnotderp 5y ago
    Samsung’s N3 is less dense than Intel’s N7
    • sylware 5y ago
      What I could gather from the net (much on wikipedia): Samsung seems not to have finished its n3 process, pushing it back to 2024 (bad news for AMD since they are fed up with apple using much of TSMC production capacity). TSMC should start risk production this year. If they don't increase too much on-die static ram, GPUs based on this process ""should"" dwarf current GPUs. How much more transistors are they going to allocate to ray-tracing :) ?
• nynx 5y ago
  We dearly need a semiconductor fabrication technique that doesn’t involve 150 million dollar machines and campuses the size of cities.
  • gjsman-1000 5y ago
    I can't help but be a little sarcastic for this one, but I can guarantee you that Intel or TSMC would make you a billionaire if you had an idea. They don't like it either - it's expensive and slow, but there's nothing else on the horizon so it's not worth complaining about.
    • nynx 5y ago
      I don’t think this is necessarily true. The large investment required to set up a fab does benefit them in certain ways. It reduces competition. If the machines were 50 million instead of 150 million, I’m sure they’d like that. If the machines were 1000 dollars, I doubt they’d be happy about it.
      • gjsman-1000 5y ago
        Right, but it's so easy to comment on the internet "if only they could reduce the price," as if that's not something TSMC and Intel literally hire engineers for to do whatever they can. (Yes, ASML builds the machines in the end, but they have a very tight relationship with their customers and their needs, to the degree it is almost a co-engineering job.)
        • nynx 5y ago
          That’s a fair statement. Point taken
    • drexlspivey 5y ago
      Intel even pre-ordered the next gen EUV (called High-NA EUV) machine from ASML that is still in development and isn’t expected to ship before 2025. Each one will cost $320m
• brenelson 5y ago
  All I can hope right now is that Intel will develop GPUs to encourage competition and reduce the GPUs to competitive prices.
  • iamricks 5y ago
    Can anyone in the space explain why it would be hard for Intel to be competitive in the GPU space? Is GPU development so far away from CPU development that they couldn't succeed?
    • gjsman-1000 5y ago
      One reason I can think of is that GPUs are a much newer invention than CPUs, and as such there is less history behind how they work and there are far more active patents on their technology.
    • zucker42 5y ago
      I'm not "in the space" but there are many reasons a detractor might give for being doubtful. - Intel is not already experienced in designing high-end graphics cards, so there's less institutional knowledge in the company - Intel iGPUs have a mediocre reputation - Intel has a history of failed attempts to enter the GPU/accelerator space (e.g. i740 and Larabee) - DG2 has been delayed from the timeline that was expected in the techspace when we first heard about it - The person leading Intel Xe is Raja Koduri who led AMD graphics during AMD Vega (though it's unclear how responsible he is for its shortcomings) and arguably has a history of overpromising. That said I'm pretty bullish on Intel GPUs because supply still hasn't caught up with demand, so as long as they are reasonably functional, I think they will succeed.
      • nikanj 5y ago
        Does Intel have access to the necessary patents?
      • dragontamer 5y ago
        > - The person leading Intel Xe is Raja Koduri who led AMD graphics during AMD Vega (though it's unclear how responsible he is for its shortcomings) and arguably has a history of overpromising. Raja was the technical leader of ATI in 2001+. His hands were involved in every single GPU from that time until Vega.
• devwastaken 5y ago
  As each day passes very bright students are forced to not persue a higher level education in the U.S. Tuition and costs of living have doubled to tripled since 2010 with scholarships and funding dwindling. Why persue engineering, especially complicated engineering, when the companies that need it refuse to fund education. Intel, Apple, Microsoft, Google, all the big most wealthy tech companies refuse to put money into the future of U.S. engineering. Startups for chip tech is a joke. The knowledge and domain specific equipment necessary is so great that you can't just pick up a tutorial through Google and use a framework to make your product. We need to tax these behemoths and put that into the education and tooling of people. That's how we create competitive markets and innovation.
  • gjsman-1000 5y ago
    > "refuse to put money into the future of U.S. engineering" What are you talking about? https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/education/highered/higher-ed-overview.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/education/highered/h... https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/education/highered/university-research-programs.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/education/highered/u... https://research.tsmc.com/english/collaborations/academic/university-centers.html https://research.tsmc.com/english/collaborations/academic/un... They are throwing money wherever they can find an audience. > "Startups for chip tech is a joke." Last time I checked, there was a startup called SiFive in the US from a bunch of UC Berkeley professors which successfully had its founders invent a whole new instruction set, RISC-V, a compiler for it, and are now building the highest-performing RISC-V chips on the market. https://www.sifive.com/ https://www.sifive.com/ > "can't just pick up a tutorial through Google and use a framework to make your product" Because Chips are extremely hard to make and engineer and there are things in this world that can't be boiled down to an internet tutorial. Imagine if we had "Building a Stealth Bomber" as an online course. Or even "Building a SpaceX Rocket" as a course. Chipmaking is more expensive than designing a rocket. This completely ignores the unbelievable difficulty of chipmaking and tries to reduce it to a CRUD application. > "We need to tax these behemoths and put that into the education and tooling of people." OK, by your own admission there is a ton of industry-specific knowledge. As linked above, fabs are trying to get into universities where they can, but finding qualified people is difficult. I don't know how taxation would help solve this problem in any way, because government is typically even less efficient at teaching domain-specific knowledge than industry.
• ThinkBeat 5y ago
  It is weird to me how the perspective on Intel flipped a while back. For a long time, the discussion was that Intel had failed, failed and failed again to get their next generation fabs operating at acceptable yields that they were a couple of generations behind TSMC. Which was a huge departure from their decades of first or least competitive on fabs. Intel announced they would start having some chips produced by TSMC, so they could try and harness benefits of the latest, or the generation behind latest for their chips. In short Intel was seen as incompetent and could no longer compete with their competitors. The long Intel domination was sliding away. Then people started worrying about Taiwan. Intel got a few billion dollars in a sweet contract with the military, building fabs in the US became the major push in tech. Since then, the perspective has been much more positive for Intel and their role in building domestically. Intels inability to build a latest generation fab has not changed.
  • jvanderbot 5y ago
    New leadership and a more urgent geopolitical landscape has forced many to change their actions if not their outlook. We just need fabs. We have money. Intel has been saying for a long long time that we need fabs, so lets give them the money. personally, I think the gloom and doom around Intel is hate-hype. It's so fun to look at the giants and laugh, but they're still the giants. If you look at the landscape right now, and ignore the past, you see Intel and AMD in a slugfest for domination, and no (?) real other contenders. If AMD were the incumbent, we'd all be cheering Intel, but they're still neck-and-neck regardless. And Intel has other focii, like compilers, HPC software, kiosk form factors, etc, that help round out the offerings (and those are just things I'm familiar with). 20 years ago Microsoft was evil and google was the little-man's angel. Now I'm much more a fan of MS than Google, and feel MS is moving in the right direction while Google is not. It seems generational.
  • Wohlf 5y ago
    This stuff takes years to turn around, before Zen AMD was in an even worse spot. Intel is down but not out, they have capital to spend and are making the right moves to get back on track.
    • 5y ago
• rubyn00bie 5y ago
  This comes across as desperate to me. I don't think Intel can compete meaningfully with TSMC at this point, and process is literally all that matters as we hit the limits of physics. This sounds like a last-ditch effort to find _something_ which will help them out of the hole their currently in with waves hands ... hope? Intel is roughly a quarter to a third the size of NVidia, a tenth the size of Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft... AMD is starting to eat into the server market, and ARM is more of an existential threat now that Apple sells ARM-based computers and Amazon is deploying ARM based servers. They are no longer a powerhouse, and IMHO, very likely won't ever regain their lead. I think Intel is going to end up like IBM, largely irrelevant, but still hobbling along somehow how as a ghost of its former self. Once single core performance on ARM meaningfully exceeds x86 (which it likely will because energy efficiency will eventually be the defining factor to enable higher speeds) for their most profitable markets, like Fintech it'll be "game over"[1] for Intel. Intel's management has as a matter of fact: fucked around for the last decade. There is little they can do at this point short of a miracle, to undo their chicanery and prevent the "find out" portion as the market leaves them behind. It's just too bad it's the employees and retail stock holders who will get fucked over in the end. [1] "Game over" for a multi-billion dollar juggernaut that lasted decades is hobbling along shilling their shittiest technology for decades (think HP).
  • ac29 5y ago
    The vast majority of the semiconductor market doesn't use bleeding edge nodes, even at TSMC which only has something like 20% of their current production on industry leading nodes. Even if Intel never catches up to TSMC and remains a year or two behind, that still leaves them a huge percentage of the market that they can potentially serve. There is a lot of money and volume in boring, unsexy chips like automotive and industrial microcontrollers and the like.
• vinayakpandey 5y ago
  I think $1B wouldn't be enough to build a wide-ranging project.