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Intel tapes out chips on 1.8nm and 2nm production nodes
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y agoExciting news. 1.8nm in late 2024 is quite soon. Intel to Apple: If you can't accept me at my worst you don't deserve me at my best.
- daneel_w 4y ago>"Intel to Apple: If you can't accept me at my worst you don't deserve me at my best." Thank heavens for that. Good riddance.
- counttheforks 4y agoYeah, I can't imagine wanting to work with Apple.
- daneel_w 4y agoMe neither, with all those hundreds of millions of devices sold annually.
- coffeebeqn 4y agoOutbidding every other company for the fab.. it’s truly a nightmare
- Tagbert 4y agoLooked at from the fab’s viewpoint, that is just selling their capacity to the highest paying customer. Seems pretty much standard business practice. Nothing nefarious.
- Dylan16807 4y agoThat post was using the fab's viewpoint. Nightmare was sarcastic.
- Someone 4y agoIntel Foundry Services (https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/foundry/intel-foundry-services.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/foundry/intel-foundr...) needs customers. We’ll see whether they turn down Apple when it offers to buy stuff worth billions. Also: how large are Intel’s nanometers, compared to those of the competition? I wouldn’t know.
- tambourine_man 4y agoI know you're kidding but this is capitalism, not a spouse relationship. If they pay, they’re always welcome. Pat even said they wanted Apple's business back in an interview.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y agoOf course. If Apple brings the money Intel will gladly fab their chips.
- BeetleB 4y agoNot many people are aware, but for a while Intel was manufacturing parts for the iPhone. They made no money out of it - Apple demanded too low a price.
- tambourine_man 4y agoI don’t think they did. Apple made an offer and they refused. One of Intel’s worse mistakes.
- BeetleB 4y agohttps://www.wired.com/2016/09/oh-hey-intels-iphone-now/ https://www.wired.com/2016/09/oh-hey-intels-iphone-now/
- tambourine_man 4y agoThanks
- tambourine_man 4y agoIt wasn’t so obvious a few years ago. You couldn’t have Intel fab your design for any price. x86 was as strategic for them as their fabing expertise. Now it’s a different story.
- mdasen 4y agoIntel did say that they were hoping to win Apple's business back (https://www.macrumors.com/2021/10/17/intel-hopes-to-win-back-apple/ https://www.macrumors.com/2021/10/17/intel-hopes-to-win-back...). I doubt that Apple will go back to x64 architecture, but Intel is offering to work as a third-party foundry for others' chips and Apple is willing to pay a ton more than most companies (probably including Intel's own internal accounting) for the latest fabrication processes. If Apple is willing to pay such that the margin on Apple's business is better than the margin on Intel's own chips, I don't think Intel is going to be vindictive. In fact, Apple choosing Intel for their fabrication would probably be the best thing for Intel's fabrication business. Not only can Apple pay lots of money in advance, it would signal to the industry that Intel's fabrication process is something they should all be paying attention to. Apple tends to be very risk-averse with their supply chain and Apple is known as the company that pays for the best fabrication. If they move to Intel's fabrication, they've done a lot of due diligence in that process. Yes, Intel could offer a good deal to Apple to get them to move so some of it might be marketing - but that's exactly what Intel could use for its third-party fab business. I doubt that Intel will hold a grudge. It would be way more valuable to Intel to win Apple's business. Heck, TSMC is on the cutting edge today in part because Apple will commit so much money. If Intel can win Apple's business, they can remove a lot of the wind behind TSMC's sails. Yes, TSMC will still be a great company, but Apple's willingness to pay premium prices definitely helps TSMC. They know that investing in new, expensive processes will be paid back by Apple. If TSMC has to rely on Qualcomm and MediaTek (who want to wait for nodes to become cheaper), it's likely that they won't have the same purchasing for their latest nodes leading them to slow down their progress a bit. If TSMC's progress slows, that gives Intel so many benefits. All those ARM datacenter processors that people might move to? Not if TSMC's progress slows and Intel gains and keeps a sizable advantage on fabrication. If Intel can snag Apple away from TSMC, it will probably be the best thing Intel could do for itself.
- phkahler 4y agoYou said yourself that Apple is risk averse. All those "ifs" about Intel should tell you it ain't gonna happen. Apple pays TSMC a lot of money because they can deliver, not because they "have a plan".
- amelius 4y ago> Intel to Apple: If you can't accept me at my worst you don't deserve me at my best. OR: Dear Apple, pay us 30% of your revenue or get kicked out of our FabStore.
- ChuckNorris89 4y agoWould be great to get more competition from Intel in the fab space. Would also be great if intel would stay in the GPU race as a third player to put some pressure to AMD and Nvidia.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago> Would also be great if intel would stay in the GPU race as a third player to put some pressure to AMD and Nvidia. Are they not?
- ChuckNorris89 4y agoTheir discrete GPU business has had loses over 3.5 Billions so far and it will likely keep loosing money for the near future since they aren't competitive yet and the next gen, Battlemage is not planned till 2024 the earliest. Their ability to support the losses of the GPU division to keep them in the race for the long run will depend on the other businesses making bank to compensate. Are they making bank? If not, they might axe the GPU division.
- bryanlarsen 4y agoBut I wouldn't hesitate to buy one if it's the right card for your needs. I'm likely going to. Even if they axe the discrete cards the tech will make it into CPU's and SOC's so driver support will continue. And of course their Linux support is open source and top notch.
- galangalalgol 4y agoYeah, as many other things as I dislike about intel, I give them some grace for how well they support their GPUs on linux. If I could only figure out how to get flux.jl to work with oneapi.jl
- helf 4y agoI’m loving my A770. Absolutely zero issues with it and it’s handling raytracing and all with aplomb.
- timmg 4y agoThis seems so good (almost too good) that I wonder if they are being realistic. It seems like Intel has recently been missing all their projected timelines. Considering they are talking about full-on manufacturing in about a year, they should be pretty far along. But I can't help being a little worried that it will happen.
- VHRanger 4y agoTo be fair, they started missing all the timelines after Brian Krzanich succesfully executed his political coup as CEO of the company. It's hard to overstate how toxic he's been to the company.
- rjzzleep 4y agoIs there context to this claim? If so, can you share it?
- jacquesm 4y agoThe performance of Intel during the five years that he ran it is plenty of context, no? 2013 is a pretty clear inflection point for Intel and that was the year that he became CEO.
- williamDafoe 4y agoI arrived at Google search in 2013 and soon they were complaining about how much Intel was "Slacking" and how badly they needed an alternate supplier for data center chips. I followed Chromebook and laptop iGPU 3D performance very carefully from 2013-2019. Did you know Intel made ZERO iGPU performance improvements in this time period? The 2013 IRIS Pro 5200 and Haswell (4000 series) were a major highpoint for FIVE years. The 5000 Through 8000 Intel core cpus were highly stagnant and forgettable! Mostly they were slacking off with new designs like the Ynnn "thermal throttlemaker" Such chips ran fast for 3 secs then quit - completely! From 2013-2019 their marketing pinheads sure had a field day making up new names for the same old shit iGPUs year after year after year! I have seen NO impact from Pat Gelsinger so far! Almost-competitive CPU's using 250% of the power of Ryzen 7000? Are you kidding us, Pat? Kryzanich laid off a huge number of CPU architects in 2014 so they could have a much bigger and of course - more important marketing department! Who needs these useless digital designers when all they can do is reduce the mips per watt? I mean who cares about that? And while we're at it why not staff the boardroom of the world's greatest physics company with community college marketing people? Because, why not? I don't see Apple returning to use the Intel i9-thighburner CPUs anytime soon!
- dougmwne 4y agoIntel has been troubled for about 10 years now. The cracks started showing in 2013 when they delayed the 14nm process for about a year, then widened when they couldn’t get 10nm into production for several years. At this point we are allowed to be a little skeptical when they tell us they are going to regain the crown.
- ozarker 4y agoI definitely agree with you. Though AMD's comeback with Ryzen really surprised me and I don't think other companies can't replicate comebacks like that. After the Bulldozer fiasco who would think AMD would be where they are today?
- nordsieck 4y ago> After the Bulldozer fiasco who would think AMD would be where they are today? I mean... for people who remember AMD's original breakthrough with the Athlon, it's not super surprising. Although it feels a bit like a problem with Intel as well. I think, too much time wearing the crown can be bad for a company. Although some companies don't seem to suffer from that problem - Nvidia and TSMC being 2 pretty good examples.
- snovv_crash 4y agoTSMC hasn't been on top nearly as long as Intel was. NVidia indeed seems an outlier, although arguably the GPU division of AMD hasn't had the same overhaul that the CPU side had.
- mepian 4y agoYeah, the last significant stumble of Nvidia I can remember is the GeForce FX (aka GeForce 5) series being notably inferior to the ATI R300 series.
- nerpderp82 4y agoI do, Bulldozer was a great lesson on how to run a great team to make a mediocre product because you don't have the right feedback in place. When you have silicon is not the time to find out you perform poorly.
- tiffanyh 4y agoSince "nm" is meaningless these days, what's the transistor count/mm2 of this 1.8nm Intel node? As reference: TSMC 3nm is ~290 million transistors/mm2 (MTr/mm2). IBM TSMC Intel Samsung 22nm 16.50 16nm/14nm 28.88 44.67 33.32 10nm 52.51 100.76 51.82 7nm 91.20 237.18 95.08 5nm 171.30 3nm 292.21 2nm 333.33 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27063034 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27063034 https://www.techradar.com/news/ibm-unveils-worlds-first-2nm-chip https://www.techradar.com/news/ibm-unveils-worlds-first-2nm-...
- hardware2win 4y ago240m on 7nm node vs 290 on 3nm? Oo
- sct202 4y agoIntel renamed their nodes to align better to the foundries. 10nm is now Intel 7, 7nm is now Intel 4, which would broadly look more aligned in that table if it were updated.
- spiffytech 4y agoWhat does nm measure these days? I hear it's just a marketing term at this point, but "1.8" seems like a specific enough number that it must be measuring something.
- ddulaney 4y agoNothing anymore. Originally it measured a specific dimension on the transistor. Then transistors started shrinking non-uniformly, so they adjusted it -- "how big the transistors would be at equivalent density if they had shrunk evenly". That's an easy thing to play with though, and so you see more and more departures from reality.
- KptMarchewa 4y agoIt's like RHA on tank armor.
- Havoc 4y agoCan’t wait to see negative Nanometers
- linuxftw 4y agoHigh voltage anti-electrons that produce power rather than consume it while we're at it.
- propter_hoc 4y agoNice seeing angstroms used in real life!
- williamDafoe 4y agoThis article about Intel candy canes and unicorns and rainbows looks like simply a large hit of cocaine to keep their bloodied investors hopes' up! To quote Newt from alien 2, "Ripley, it won't make a difference!" because SRAM is NOT scaling down! https://fuse.wikichip.org/news/7343/iedm-2022-did-we-just-witness-the-death-of-sram/ https://fuse.wikichip.org/news/7343/iedm-2022-did-we-just-wi...
- helf 4y agoAnd? Just because one aspect isn’t scaling well doesn’t mean the rest being scaled is pointless. Besides the fact they will probably figure out a way to either replace sram with something else that does scale better or they will figure out novel techniques to scale sram.
- nerpderp82 4y agoHBM is scaling up!
- ddren 4y agoIsn't this problem solved with a chiplet design like AMD does? Just manufacture the SRAM using an older and cheaper node and keep the logic in the most advanced node.
- undersuit 4y agoEventually you kick all SRAM out of the compute die and the Levels start meaning Layers.
- imtringued 4y agoThat's what they did on their GPUs with HBM.
- undersuit 4y agoHBM was a bit of the opposite. That was off-chip DRAM being brought very close to the GPU.
- eganist 4y agoEdit: I was going only off the headline, never opened the article. original comment below. --- Somewhat surprised we're not measuring in Angstroms yet. 18 and 20 angstroms respectively. Might not be a SI unit but it's still metric and gets rid of that pesky decimal. Especially since a silicon atom is 2 Angstroms, it seems like the right unit.
- kirab 4y agoDid you read the article? It's literally what Intel is doing.
- eganist 4y agoI didn't. I was going off the comments and headline. Thanks for the call-out, it's well deserved.
- taspeotis 4y agoDid you read the HN Guidelines [1]? It's literally saying not to do what you did: > Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that". [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- kilgnad 4y agoHow does Intel China coexist with Intel USA without proprietary information leaking out?
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y agoDoesn't Intel only produce memory in China, and is in the process of moving all of that production to SK?
- elihu 4y agoStrict export controls on information. People from countries that are subject to export controls aren't allowed to see certain things or work on certain projects. I'm not sure how big a presence Intel has in China these days, but my impression is that it's small and it shrunk quite a bit when Intel got out of the NAND memory business.
- kilgnad 4y agoI'm curious how this is enforced within the company ecosystem. Seems that it can easily be violated.
- mrtweetyhack 4y ago[dead]
- dsq 4y agoThis is the first time I have read the term “tape out”. Please clarify for non-semiconductor people, thanks.
- LeanderK 4y agoI really have no electrical engineering knowledge, so this question might be naive. Given that we are approaching a hard limit (the size of the atom), I wonder wether we could branch out into (true) 3d? So far everything is 2D and if I think of the brain I picture it as an interconnected 3d-blob, which just seems much more sensible.