3 ms·

What odds would you place on intel succeeding with 18A?

adrian_b 2y ago
While I hate many anonymous Intel employees who are responsible for some very ugly actions of Intel in the past, I am strongly rooting for Intel to succeed to make good enough the 18A CMOS process, because there is a desperate need in the electronics industry for more competition, after the excessive consolidation that has happened during the last 2 decades. Unfortunately, it is completely impossible for an outsider to make any estimate of the likelihood of success of the Intel foundry division. Based on the available public information, it would seem highly probable for Intel to reach their goals. Nevertheless, there is a history of shameless lies included by Intel employees in their presentations about the 10 nm process, which happened during the many years when Intel had failed to transition from the 14 nm process to the 10 nm process (now rebranded Intel 7). Therefore there is an uncertainty about the truthfulness of the information currently published by Intel. Intel has never published a post mortem analysis to explain the reasons for their failure to develop the 10 nm process and especially the reasons for the discrepancies between the reality of the 10 nm process and the false information about it, which apparently was not only presented to the public, but also to the other Intel divisions, and perhaps also to the Intel management. While it is said that Intel failed because they delayed the adoption of deep UV photolithography, that explains a very little part of the 10 nm fiasco. It does not explain the great differences between the a priori estimated performance of the process and its actually achieved performance. Because Intel has not been transparent about the causes of their earlier failures, we cannot know whether those causes have been removed. The current Intel CEO is certainly better than the previous, but there is not enough evidence that he has overcome the organizational inertia of some parts of Intel. During the many years when Intel had no serious competition, they have become accustomed to increase their profits by not implementing every improvement in their products that they could do, but to partition the possible improvements in many small steps and to implement those steps over many years, adding each year just the minimum that could be marketed as something better than the previous generation, in order to minimize their manufacturing costs and maximize their profit. For Intel to become competitive again, they should abandon this policy and jump over the intermediate steps to really better products, even if that appears to reduce their profits, because when their products are not being bought, there will be no profits at all. While AMD will launch next month the Turin server CPUs, which use up-to-date "Zen 5" cores, a couple of months after their introduction in consumer CPUs, Intel will launch next month the Granite Rapids server CPUs, and it has already launched the Sierra Forest server CPUs, both of which use the already obsolete CPU cores that have also been used in Meteor Lake, and which have only minimal differences from the cores of Alder Lake from 2021. Only in late 2025 is Intel expected to launch server CPUs (Clearwater Forest and Diamond Rapids) with cores similar to those of the consumer CPUs (Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake S), which are launched today and one month from now. Intel needs to streamline somehow their design and verification process, so that they will become able to update all their products more or less at once, like AMD, not doing like today, when they launch new products that are already obsolete, hoping that their customers will buy them anyway. While I do not believe that the great decrease in the company valuation of Intel is justified, I think that it was a good thing, because it has forced the Intel management to cancel some intermediate steps, which were distractions from their main goals, because they did not provide great enough advances, like the 20A CMOS process or the Arrow Lake S Refresh CPUs (both planned for 2025 products). Hopefully these cancellations will bring closer the products that were planned after them.

While I hate many anonymous Intel employees who are responsible for some very ugly actions of Intel in the past, I am strongly rooting for Intel to succeed to make good enough the 18A CMOS process, because there is a desperate need in the electronics industry for more competition, after the excessive consolidation that has happened during the last 2 decades. Unfortunately, it is completely impossible for an outsider to make any estimate of the likelihood of success of the Intel foundry division. Based on the available public information, it would seem highly probable for Intel to reach their goals. Nevertheless, there is a history of shameless lies included by Intel employees in their presentations about the 10 nm process, which happened during the many years when Intel had failed to transition from the 14 nm process to the 10 nm process (now rebranded Intel 7). Therefore there is an uncertainty about the truthfulness of the information currently published by Intel. Intel has never published a post mortem analysis to explain the reasons for their failure to develop the 10 nm process and especially the reasons for the discrepancies between the reality of the 10 nm process and the false information about it, which apparently was not only presented to the public, but also to the other Intel divisions, and perhaps also to the Intel management. While it is said that Intel failed because they delayed the adoption of deep UV photolithography, that explains a very little part of the 10 nm fiasco. It does not explain the great differences between the a priori estimated performance of the process and its actually achieved performance. Because Intel has not been transparent about the causes of their earlier failures, we cannot know whether those causes have been removed. The current Intel CEO is certainly better than the previous, but there is not enough evidence that he has overcome the organizational inertia of some parts of Intel. During the many years when Intel had no serious competition, they have become accustomed to increase their profits by not implementing every improvement in their products that they could do, but to partition the possible improvements in many small steps and to implement those steps over many years, adding each year just the minimum that could be marketed as something better than the previous generation, in order to minimize their manufacturing costs and maximize their profit. For Intel to become competitive again, they should abandon this policy and jump over the intermediate steps to really better products, even if that appears to reduce their profits, because when their products are not being bought, there will be no profits at all. While AMD will launch next month the Turin server CPUs, which use up-to-date "Zen 5" cores, a couple of months after their introduction in consumer CPUs, Intel will launch next month the Granite Rapids server CPUs, and it has already launched the Sierra Forest server CPUs, both of which use the already obsolete CPU cores that have also been used in Meteor Lake, and which have only minimal differences from the cores of Alder Lake from 2021. Only in late 2025 is Intel expected to launch server CPUs (Clearwater Forest and Diamond Rapids) with cores similar to those of the consumer CPUs (Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake S), which are launched today and one month from now. Intel needs to streamline somehow their design and verification process, so that they will become able to update all their products more or less at once, like AMD, not doing like today, when they launch new products that are already obsolete, hoping that their customers will buy them anyway. While I do not believe that the great decrease in the company valuation of Intel is justified, I think that it was a good thing, because it has forced the Intel management to cancel some intermediate steps, which were distractions from their main goals, because they did not provide great enough advances, like the 20A CMOS process or the Arrow Lake S Refresh CPUs (both planned for 2025 products). Hopefully these cancellations will bring closer the products that were planned after them.