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Intel Honesty
- flerchin 2y agoBrutal. Intel processors will be the equivalent of government cheese. Not what anyone wants, but it's what you get with your government dollars.
- brcmthrowaway 2y agoI never thought of it that way. Are they going the way of Raythoen/Boeing?
- wklauss 2y agoI see the semiconductor industry becoming a bit like the auto industry. A geopolitical pawn, heavily dependent on subsidies and in turmoil due to market forces (switch to electric in cars vs. switch to ARM/RISC in semiconductors)
- oldpersonintx 2y ago[dead]
- KerrAvon 2y agoTo be clear, the outcome we actually need here is a bulwark against the possibility of China eventually being the world's only producer of leading-edge chips.
- datavirtue 2y agoThey are building a huge fab in Ohio but I don't see Intel as a going concern that will be around at the date of completion. I fully expect the project to be abandoned.
- davidw 2y agoThe geopolitical bit of all this is the real wild card. No one really knows what's going to happen there.
- UncleOxidant 2y agoYeah, you've got Apple, Nvidia and AMD heavily exposed to that geopolitical risk, but seemingly not willing to help lessen it by investing in US fabs. Whenever I note this people here and elsewhere say "they're smart to be fabless" but somebody's gotta run fabs and more fabs need to be run in the US and quickly. I realize industrial policy isn't in vogue these days but it might be a good idea for the future of US semiconductor production to arrange some marriages between some of these companies that have a lot of capital and have a lot of need to reduce their geopolitical risk. Our brand of capitalism isn't great at looking ahead more than a quarter or two.
- jjtheblunt 2y agoApple is heavily invested in the new TSMC fab in the US east of the north end of Phoenix, last i read; not sure how arranged that marriage really is, but perhaps tax incentives for TSMC facilitated Apple plans to heavily utilize it. (trying to find linkable articles...like this https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/6/23497417/apple-tsmc-phoenix-fab-plans-biden-amd-nvidia https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/6/23497417/apple-tsmc-phoen... ) ; p.s. i wonder if only i compulsively balance lisp parens
- sroussey 2y agoApple could invest in an Intel Foundry spinoff, but there is no reason to invest in the Intel of today.
- Panzer04 2y agoI thought historically companies always wanted "second sources" for things like this. Surely all the fabless semis can't be blithely running off a cliff with TSMC as their only parts source? That would be a catastrophic risk to take down the track if there's only a single vendor for advanced chips and they've decided to hike prices and collect all of the benefits alone from their advanced processes and share none of them with their customers.
- lotsofpulp 2y ago
- andy_xor_andrew 2y agoUS chip production really needs its SpaceX moment, but it seems like it will never happen, and we're left with the crumbling empire of Intel. By "SpaceX moment", I mean a startup entering an impossible market, where the barrier to entry is billions of dollars of research and manufacturing, a market dominated by industry giants from the 60s, and yet still coming out on top somehow.
- knightfall21 2y ago[flagged]
- rowanG077 2y agoI'll gladly take another Elon for siliconX. Hell I'd take 10. The good Elon has done in terms of his companies vastly outweigh the few bad tweets he slings into the world once in a while.
- vessenes 2y agoPlus if there were ten more Elons they would all probably just argue on Twitter and sort of cancel each-other out. Win-win-win.
- psunavy03 2y agoI don't get how some people struggle with the idea that he may simultaneously be a gifted businessman (in certain sectors, obviously Twitter was a disaster) and also simultaneously be a raging asshole. Bill Gates was a raging asshole. Steve Jobs was a raging asshole. Larry Ellison was a raging asshole. It's not ideal, but it also doesn't preclude success.
- rowanG077 2y agoI think that it's actually helpful to a degree to be an asshole to be disruptive in a field. I expect you need a certain resolve of going against the flow. Something which is easier if you are an asshole.
- TheAmazingRace 2y agoI'm still hopeful of the fact that Intel is, in many aspects "too big to fail", and with their cash on hand, they have enough of a burn rate to turn this ship around, even if they aren't being as intense on cutbacks as they should be. The question remains, will Intel survive in its current form or could an activist investor stir up a hostile takeover and change the calculus?
- mnau 2y agoOn the other hand, Intel is small enough to rescue. $82bn (market cap) is not the amount of money it used to be.
- zelias 2y agoI like the proposed approach of purchase guarantees here. Directly injecting cash into Intel just creates a moral hazard where they spend the money dealing with organizational inertia than innovating in the space. Plus, the government could even turn a profit reselling its purchased semiconductors to various US companies! The US ecosystem badly needs a serious Intel competitor -- because they just ain't it.
- jjtheblunt 2y ago> Plus, the government could even turn a profit reselling its purchased semiconductors to various US companies! No freaking way. How do you think that’s feasible, considering how fast depreciation goes in semiconductors?
- wmf 2y agoPork bellies also go bad but you can make money trading them. You don't even take delivery.
- jjtheblunt 2y agoare you suggesting the parent comment should be considering derivatives like agricultural product futures?
- wmf 2y agoYeah. The government could pre-pay for chips to guarantee demand then auction the futures right before the chips are manufactured.
- jjtheblunt 2y agowhat if no one buys the futures, which is entirely possible?
- wmf 2y ago
- scrlk 2y ago> in the late 2010’s Intel got stuck trying to move to 10nm, thanks in part to their reluctance to embrace the vastly more expensive EUV lithography process TBH, it's easy to say this with the benefit of hindsight. Throughout most of the 2010s, EUV lithography was like the "year of the Linux desktop" - i.e., this year will be the year where EUV was suitable for high volume manufacturing. I don't really blame Intel for deciding to go with self-aligned quadruple patterning for 10 nm, but combining it with cobalt interconnects was probably biting off more than they could chew. FWIW, Intel was funding EUV R&D since 1997: https://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/1997/CN091197.HTM https://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/1997/CN0911... That press release had an interesting prediction: > Intel projects that the microprocessor of the year 2011 will contain one billion transistors, operating at over 10 gigahertz and delivering 100,000 MIPS (millions of instructions per second). They weren't that far off in estimating the transistor count and MIPS: the i7-2600k released in January 2011 had 1.16 billion transistors [0] and delivered 117k MIPS [1] @ 3.4 GHz. The clock speed prediction was way off due to the failure of Dennard scaling in the early-mid 00s. [0] https://www.anandtech.com/show/14043/upgrading-from-an-intel-core-i7-2600k-testing-sandy-bridge-in-2019/2 https://www.anandtech.com/show/14043/upgrading-from-an-intel... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructions_per_second#CPU_results https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructions_per_second#CPU_re...
- hangonhn 2y agoIn addition, SMIC in China managed to get to 7 nm without the use of EUV. Also early EUV yields were actually quite low.
- wetpaws 2y ago7nm means nothing, it's an arbitrary marketing number
- schmidtleonard 2y agoDid SMIC get 7nm to yield or is it limping but propped up for PR purposes like Intel 7?
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- AnotherGoodName 2y agoIntel is trapped. Its debt repayments alone are massive. The poor performance in stock has encouraged 20years of wage stagnation to the point where you can literally earn over 50% more at amd or nvidia or even an startup for equivalent roles so they aren’t hiring the best. Their pay in the Bay Area is double tsmc in taiwan for equivalent roles in raw dollar terms but the ppp differences means your better off working for tsmc in Taiwan than intel in the Bay Area. That’s not a joke. Intel are literally incapable of attracting talent from Taiwan right now. They don’t have the talent they need and the debt trap and poor performance means a lot of push back to the needed doubling of wages to attract that talent. It’s a very hard sell for any exec trying to correct this problem. They sidelined lip bu tan who was one of the advocates for even more layoffs and wage freezes but he’s one of many backwards thinkers they need to remove. It’s going to be difficult to fix their board. Without talent intel has no hope of winning and they can’t get that talent due to poor stock performance for the past 20years leading to executives and shareholders wishing to implement the opposite of what they need right now. In fact they have ongoing layoffs right now. A true downward spiral and the only real hope is for a newcomer to step up.
- nightski 2y agoI'm not saying you are wrong but personally I'd view the stock as an attractive perk right now since it is so low. Whereas if I were joining a company such as Nvidia I'd honestly be kind of worried. Historical performance isn't really a great indicator here.
- skeeter2020 2y agosotck can be low because it's undervalued by the entire market and going to jump once they catch up to the future value potential, or it can be low because it accurately reflects the decline and limited value. If you only see the "attractive perk" from being so low you're the one using historical performance as the indicator, thinking Intel's only a few quarters or years away from former glory days.
- sodality2 2y ago
- linuxftw 2y agoIntel has $29B cash on hand. Their new fabs are being subsidized. Sure, American labor is more expensive than APAC, but I don't see that being a huge differentiator in such an automated manufacturing segment. My personal rabbit-hole conspiracy is that AI is driving a fire under the national security apparatus, and we're going to see a restriction on AI-chip technology being exported or manufactured overseas. Intel will be in prime position to onshore that manufacturing.
- crowcroft 2y ago$29b cash and about $50b in debt. They have a valid business still, but I think you're under appreciating how much of a hole they need to dig themselves out of. Their current foundries can't just make other chips, and they certainly can't make GPUs for AI (TSMC make Intel GPUs). They are making a new foundry in Ohio, but in Intel's current state and comments they've made to the market it's not guaranteed the foundry will be built. Intel might make it out of the hole, but it's going to get worse before it gets better. At their current trajectory their is not valid reason for the company to have 100,000 employees. I expect the recent layoffs are the first of a few.
- rstuart4133 2y ago> $29b cash and about $50b in debt. I know nothing about finance, but I have trouble figuring out how they got themselves into this situation given this https://www.intc.com/stock-info/dividends-and-buybacks https://www.intc.com/stock-info/dividends-and-buybacks : As of June 29th, 2024, we were authorized to repurchase up to $110.0 billion, of which $7.24 billion remain available. We have repurchased 5.77 billion shares at a cost of $152.05 billion since the program began in 1990. Had they not bought there own shares they would be sitting on $70B cash and no debt.
- bee_rider 2y agoI wonder if Global Foundries will become relevant again on the high end. They “gave up,” but they are working on some pretty small nodes now, 12nm, obviously not what TSMC is up to, but maybe they’ll catch Intel in 10 years. I’m sure they are fine for automotive.
- onepointsixC 2y agoThey’re 4-5 nodes behind Intel today, with no EUV machines let alone High NA EUV. They’re just not relevant in leading edge in the slightest.
- closeparen 2y ago>Their pay in the Bay Area is double tsmc in taiwan for equivalent roles in raw dollar terms but the ppp differences means your better off working for tsmc in Taiwan than intel in the Bay Area. That’s not a joke. Intel are literally incapable of attracting talent from Taiwan right now. There's some whiplash in hearing constantly how the US is a corporate-dominated oligarchy, and then also seeing trillion-dollar industries at the forefront of the global economy constantly getting their shit rocked by a few dozen NIMBY retirees at city council meetings.
- amluto 2y agoSome of the issues are way downstream of those NIMBYs: Non-housing costs are quite low in Taiwan. Food and childcare, in particular, are so much cheaper than California that it’s hard to believe. But the NIMBYs aren’t totally in the clear. Rental housing with 3+ bedrooms (for families) is severely lacking in much of the US. Maybe fire codes are to blame. Taiwan is full of very nice new high-rise development that contains units with lots of bedrooms. Wandering around those developments and the new 3-story developments in California, the ones in Taiwan are much, much, much nicer, even from the outside. The NIMBYs should take note.
- closeparen 2y agoWhile there are a number of technical issues with respect to the limited trickle of multifamily permits that are given, the fundamental dynamic is that engaged voters don't want to see significantly more people living in the region, and therefore it doesn't happen.
- cogman10 2y agoYeah, it has a lot to do with selfishness. More housing means more people means you have a lower property value for you home in the area. Further, it means your vote becomes less powerful as the poors that live in the high rise have the same voting power as you do in your single family home.
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- ars 2y agoDid I misunderstand or did the author advocate a world where the only high-end chip manufacturer in the entire world is TMSC? Just the one single company, located in a politically unstable area? And putting aside the politics, if they become a monopoly what do you think will happen next?
- randerson 2y agoPurely from the perspective of Intel and their shareholders it makes sense. But it's obviously a terrible idea for the world at large. TSMC and ASML need US based alternatives.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- manav 2y agoIntel was getting something like $20 billion from the CHIPS act - but it seems like by the time the fabs would have been ready TSMC will already have them beat to 1.4nm/a14 (also using High NA EUV). Intel has just consistently failed to execute whereas TSMC has been fairly close to schedule.
- fishcrackers 2y ago[dead]
- newsclues 2y agoWhat happens to the computer and tech industry if Intel fails? The x86 licence still has value to some others in the space, but it seems like Intel could potentially be sold off for parts if it can't sell correct.
- _w1tm 2y agoARM wins the instruction set wars and buys the tech. Future ARM processors will have x86 hardware that offers compatibility with legacy software. Eventually the instruction set is forgotten.
- kbolino 2y agoWhy/how would the death of Intel kill off AMD too?
- _w1tm 2y agoIBM still sells CPUs based on the PowerPC (now Power ISA) architecture. AMD doesn’t need to die for x86 to become irrelevant.
- kbolino 2y agoBut Intel does? Or are you saying x86 becomes irrelevant no matter what?
- _w1tm 2y agoThe latter. I don’t think Intel will survive their spiral without government intervention, the organization is too married to x86. They might transform into something else and keep the name, the same way Nokia stopped being Nokia.
- magicalhippo 2y agoGot me thinking, from what I've read, modern high-performance cores do a lot of similar tricks and translate everything to uops anyway. How hard would it be for say AMD to make a performant dual-ISA CPU? I was thinking somewhat like how virtual 8086 mode[1] worked on 32bit CPUs, ie OS could be ARM-based, but it could run x86 processes. I assume it would be hard to not sacrifice performance for one of the ISAs, but if it's for legacy applications you wouldn't need top speed necessarily. Are ARM and x86 just too different to make it work? Are there other obstacles? [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_8086_mode https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_8086_mode
- 015a 2y agoI'm not sure if I buy the thesis entirely (that thesis most aptly being: "Gelsinger does have one fatal flaw: he still believes in Intel, and I no longer do.") The biggest reason is geopolitics: If escalated confrontation happens with China, Intel becomes one of the most valuable companies on the planet, period. TSMC will finish western fabs eventually, but the delta-t on when they become competitive (tech, capacity & cost, remember) with even Intel's western fabs is... decades, plural? Maybe never? The CHIPS act helped, but TSMC is dragging their feet for very, very (existentially) good reason. Also, remember that TSMC is built entirely on the back of ASML; conflict with China doesn't just block the west's access to the east's fab capacity, it blocks the east's access to the west's tooling to build more and better fabs. TSMC craters in this scenario. Samsung also exists. That's the list of near-SotA fab capacity, globally. Capacity is another good reason: TSMC is not a bottomless bucket, and every year for the past at least two years Apple has purchased 100% of their SotA fab capacity. No one is competing with Apple's margins (except Nvidia, but that's a bubble market; numbered days). His argument is that there's no market reason for Intel's fabs to exist; we don't have the data to say for certain, but I'd guess that if Intel went to TSMC and said "you're already making lunar lake, make our xeon chips too" TSMC would say "we can't" (especially on SotA nodes, but maybe even near-SotA). They're tapped out, they grow, they're instantly tapped out again, everyone wants what they're selling. Intel fabs Lunar Lake and Arc with TSMC; both very-low volume. Also worth keeping in mind: Intel was at one time the global leader in chip fabrication; but they lost that crown. People view TSMC as this unassailable beast, but they're just as fallible; and when I hear people say "Well, Intel 18A is probably three years out and by that time we'll have TSMC N2P with backside power delivery so who will even care about Intel 18A" are just extrapolating history. That's a dangerous game when all these rankings and valuations are based on asymptotically approaching the limits of the laws of physics. And while it is unlikely that Intel will take the lead again, TSMC showing any sign of faltering will raise the relative value of the #2 companies. Intel is not in a good spot, but they're still an interesting business, they're still designing some of the best chips on the planet, and with the right decisions could grow to be even better than interesting. IMO, this article is missing a lot of the hard analysis and data that Stratechery is usually known for; I don't feel you can have a researched discussion on Intel without talking about fabrication volume or their concerning levels of debt, but he didn't mention either of those things. Heck, more than one passing mention of China feels kinda important to the topic.
- cs702 2y agoThe OP makes a compelling case that Intel's foundry operations have fallen so far behind that they are no longer economically viable on their own, in the face of current market forces, i.e., Intel's foundry business may not be able to earn a positive return on the tens of billions of dollars of capex now required to catch up with TSMC. If the US truly views having a domestic foundry as critical to national security, the US federal government has no choice but to pay up big time to support Intel's foundry business until -- hopefully, eventually -- that business is able to compete profitably against TSMC to manufacture chips for Apple, Nvidia, AMD, etc. Oh, how the mighty have fallen!
- cogman10 2y agoThere are a slew of foundries in the US already that aren't intel and are open to manufacturing for non-intel products. For example, Global Foundries. I just don't see what benefit at this point the US government would see investing in intel when they aren't really a whole lot better at the game at this point vs pretty much anyone else.
- wmf 2y agoIntel is a decade ahead of other US foundries.
- kazen44 2y agoAlso, unlike TSMC, which the taiwainese goverment sees as a national asset and which actually garuantees them economic co-dependence with the west and thus independance from china,t he US seems to have forgotten that having your own manufacturing capability is very important for national security.
- Panzer04 2y agoThey aren't competitive right this moment, I suppose. Is that a reason to completely give up on all of the embedded knowledge inside the Intel IFS organisation? Surely at some point you can make the argument that it's worth the investment for possible returns in the future, even if it costs a crazy amount of money right now. Trying to replicate what Intel has as another player would be even more exorbitant, presumably.
- jhallenworld 2y agoThe Altera merger pain is maybe enlightening. Altera 10-series FPGAs were massively delayed due to Intel's 10 nm fab problems. But I speculate that there was also a big difference in toolchains, does anyone know for sure? I mean Altera was using TSMC previously, and I presume were using industry standard tools: Cadance / Synopsis. But I would guess Intel was running their fab on home-grown tools... what is the status these days? For example I know for sure that IBM's synthesis was "Booledozer". It's interesting because maybe Intel will spin out the fab business. But are they immediately ready to become a commercial fab business instead an Intel-only business? What's the toolchain like for Intel fab?
- wmf 2y agoHistorically Intel did use non-standard EDA tools which is one reason they had trouble getting outside customers onto 10 nm (besides the fact that 10 nm didn't work). Some Intel acquisitions like Fulcrum and Barefoot never used Intel fabs. I think they're supporting a more standard toolchain starting with 18A.
- jhallenworld 2y agoI see, this is their newest node or close to it. https://www.anandtech.com/show/21504/intel-18a-status-update-first-chips-booting-first-external-customer-tapeout-in-h125 https://www.anandtech.com/show/21504/intel-18a-status-update... "For Intel, getting an external PDK out for a leading-edge process node is no small feat, as the company has spent decades operating its fabs for the benefit of its internal product design teams. A useful PDK for external customers – and really, a useful fab environment altogether – not only needs process nodes that stick to their specifications rather than making bespoke adjustments, but it means that Intel needs to document and define all of this in a useful, industry standard fashion. One of the major failings of Intel’s previous efforts to get into the contract foundry business, besides being half-hearted efforts overall, is that they didn’t author PDKs that external companies could easily use. " But some bad news today: https://www.reuters.com/technology/intel-manufacturing-business-suffers-setback-broadcom-tests-disappoint-sources-2024-09-04/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/intel-manufacturing-busin...
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- hash872 2y agoNot a trade lawyer but as I understand it, WTO treaty obligations specifically forbid the kind of purchase guarantees that Ben's arguing for here. Part of the whole point of the WTO is to to pull up the ladder and prevent countries from doing what Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan successfully did to become rich. So this kind of support for domestic manufacturers is not allowed
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- synergy20 2y agoIn June 2021, Gelsinger named 22-year Intel vet Sandra Rivera to head up a new Datacenter and AI Group. Rivera, who spent two years as Intel’s chief people officer before taking on her new role, describes what Intel staffers are looking to get out of their relationship with the company, using terms that would have been unlikely to come up in its original heyday. “For sure, we are in an age now where our employees are looking for a deeper, richer connection to the purpose of the organization,” she says. “They care about diversity, equity, inclusion. They care about the planet.”
- throwaway48476 2y agoThat does not sound like the constructive confrontation of intels heyday.
- umvi 2y ago> today AMD has both better designs and, thanks to the fact they fab their chips at TSMC, better processes On paper AMD is better, but in the scientific community, it seems that Intel has much better performance for things like NumPy and SciPy. The reason seems to be "Intel® MKL" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Math_Kernel_Library https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Math_Kernel_Library). I'm using a lot of weasel words like "seems to" because I haven't rigorously proved it. But anecdotally, my company's AI pipelines which are NumPy/SciPy heavy run an order of magnitude faster (2 seconds vs. 20 seconds) on my laptop's Intel i7 than the do on my Ryzen 7, despite the Ryzen 7 being a newer gen than the i7.
- wmf 2y agoMKL detects non-Intel processors and uses a slow code path.
- sliken 2y agoIndeed, and ignores the CPU feature flags for things like AVX2. There is various hacks, some to the binary (to edit out the if <AMD> then slow) or even just ENV flags. This fixes things like matlab's use of MKL and shows a significant performance increase.
- eigenspace 2y ago> But anecdotally, my company's AI pipelines which are NumPy/SciPy heavy run an order of magnitude faster (2 seconds vs. 20 seconds) on my laptop's Intel i7 than the do on my Ryzen 7, despite the Ryzen 7 being a newer gen than the i7. I very very seriously doubt this is a like-for-like comparison. I suspect one case is multithreaded and the other not, or that one is using generic non-SIMD fallbacks or something like that.
- umvi 2y agoAll I know is, when I run `python3 ai_script.py`, it's much slower if I invoke that command on my Ryzen 7 desktop PC vs. my i7 laptop. I briefly profiled it once, and it seemed like `skimage.measure.label` ran much slower on AMD.
- benreesman 2y agoI’ve heard the theory that Intel is physically incapable of doing the lithography transition they need to do without missing at least one full release cycle. Which should be bad news but shouldn’t be existential. The theory goes that any CEO who does the necessary thing will be fired, so either they won’t do it, or the board will replace them with someone who won’t do it. That kind of market failure can destroy arbitrary value.
- wmf 2y agoThey skipped a release cycle with 14th gen (it's the same as 13th gen) and the lithography transition is basically finished already. It looks like Intel 18A will come out before TSMC N2.
- benreesman 2y agoI hope you’re right, I’m not an Intel fanboy but when they hit a high note it’s usually pretty good, and we like competition. I had a 12900K that was one of my favorite chips in ages but nothing since then has looked appealing.
- cbanek 2y agoSidequest: “I’m going to do Windows and then I’m going to do Windows Mobile and I’m going to do Windows embedded.” (all on intel x86) As someone who worked on Windows Mobile and Windows Embedded, it's funny because that's what management was hoping, but it was so different. I don't think any of the phones had an x86 chip in them, although that was our debugging setup so we could use vastly more powerful desktop machines as devkits (although we still had devices to). Having to port parts of Windows to ARM and even MIPS was a giant PITA. Windows Embedded is closer since it was based on XP, but also a completely different branch from what I remember from Win Mobile. A lot of people think it's easy to port things, and hard to write things. With really, really complicated software, it's still really hard just to port things.
- benreesman 2y agoI generally like Stratechery but this is not up to the usual standard. To the extent that CISC means anything it means “backwards compatible”. Modern ARM cores have multi-step decode and issue: to the extent that RISC means anything it means “we developed this with twenty year’s hindsight so we don’t have to do a lot in microcode yet.” In die area, in TDP, in wafer consumption, it’s just not a big cost. To the extent that Intel missed AI so did everyone: right now there’s one target and that’s NVIDIA, no amount of HBM/TC ratio tuning is going to change that. Like 3 of 17 Ray/Anyscale tutorials target Habana. The Gaudi stuff works fine if you’re willing to pay the “last year’s model” tax all non-CUDA does. And bigger picture, on semiconductors it’s the geopolitics people who are watching the bright line: semiconductors are a major power arena, the markets will get adjusted along those lines.
- paulmd 2y ago> In die area, in TDP, in wafer consumption, it’s just not a big cost. And yet we live in a world where an AI 370 processor has less than 1/4 of the single-threaded perf/w of a “totally equivalent” M3 Max processor. One of those things can’t be true. Who are you going to believe, Jim Keller or your lying eyes? And it only gets worse when you realize that he didn’t vaguely say the thing people claim he said… people have spent 4 years now arguing against observable reality using a quotation from Keller that he didn’t even make lol.
- benreesman 2y agoI find it amusing that it was the off-the-scales "SoC" people at Apple who pioneered the new best paradigm for vector compute. Not surprising mind you, the PA Semi people are terrifying, Apple is one of the best microarchitecture firms in history. I find this amusing because we still call them "GPU"s. NVIDIA's revenue is like 85-90% datacenter IIRC, gaming is like, anti-trust insurance or something. The "low end" just almost always eats the "high end".
- dzonga 2y agoyeah intel's foundry business might not be competitive in the short term. but it's better than nothing. they can focus on other industries that don't need high performance / for low power. because if you yield the whole thing to tsmc. you won't be able to recover the expertise, which is catastrophic for both intel / USA.
- keepamovin 2y agoagree. You need to get scrappy and back to basics. Create an internal startup that can act as a seed to rebuild their whole foundry business from the ground up. An incubator to nurture latent capacity and future potential. Capacity building here has to be a long term play.
- ghostpepper 2y agoAnyone else notice how many typos are in this article? Does no one proofread anymore?
- stonethrowaway 2y agoLmao @ AMD coming out on top.
- laaserboy 2y agoFrom the article, “William Shockley, one of the inventors of the transistor at Bell Labs”. William Shockley did not invent the transistor in 1947. He was not on the patent and was in Europe at the time of the invention. John Bardeen and Walter Brattain were on the patent. Shockley shared the Nobel Prize due to work in 1948 on the transistor effect. Source: https://www.electronicdesign.com/technologies/analog/article/21808701/who-really-did-invent-the-transistor https://www.electronicdesign.com/technologies/analog/article...
- netfortius 2y agoAnd the news just keep getting "better" [1] [1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/intel-just-gave-plan-laid-213243458.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/intel-just-gave-plan-laid-213... Intel has been talking about the monumental shift that its 20A node will bring for years, but we'll never see it in action.
- sumo89 2y agoI'm sure all the points are correct but the assessment for ways forward being to just use TSMC as the manufacturer completely ignores the somewhat perilous position Taiwan is in with a looming Chinese invasion. I'd be very reluctant to tie the future of my business to the fates of a company that may become state property within a year or two.