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Intel Starts Shipping High-NA EUV Silicon
- dyauspitr 3mo agoIm rooting for Intel. I hate the current paradigm where all the best chips are made in one factory in Asia.
- nasretdinov 3mo agoIMO it's competition that makes better products in the end. If either party becomes a full monopolist the progress will stall (as already happened with Intel I guess)
- jbstack 3mo ago> as already happened with Intel I guess In which sense? Intel is neither a full monopolist (AMD, ARM) nor has progress stalled (we're still getting a regular cycle of new generation CPUs which improve on the previous).
- ahartmetz 3mo agoIntel didn't do much to improve their CPUs while AMD was out of the competition with the Bulldozer disaster.
- c0n5pir4cy 3mo agoIt was a pretty bad time - ARM wasn't really encroaching on any of their markets in the way they are now & AMD was struggling. Intel basically just left the engineering to rot & the business people to try and gouge consumers with things like the Intel Upgrade Service, low power CPUs that were essentially just normal cores but less rather than optimized, inflated prices etc. It also allowed AMD to completely blindside them with Zen - so we're in a situation where AMD now dominates consumer desktop and arguably a lot of enterprise/DC instead of it balancing towards a more competitive centre.
- toast0 3mo agoEh, xeon 2690 was released 2012q1 at 8 cores, 2690v4 was 2016q1 at 14 cores. Same suggested customer price. Clock speed dropped a bit, but IPC was way up (AES-NI had a big throughput increase among other things). IIRC, desktop core counts were pretty stagnant, but a Haswell/Broadwell desktop chip at the same corecount and similar clocks was much faster than a Ivy Bridge/Sandy Bridge. During 2012-2016 AMD was firmly in the Bulldozer disaster. In 2017, Zen1 came out, and Intel's tick/tock mostly stopped. Zen1 was better than Bulldozer, but not better than Intel. Zen2 in 2019 was the big moment, and Intel hadn't done much. I recall an interview where the AMD person (might have been Jim Keller) said they had been targetting Zen2 to be competitive with what they thought Intel would have when it came out. Since Intel was in their pipeline bubble, Zen2 was a big win.
- ahartmetz 3mo agoZen1 had 8 cores to Intel's 4 while only being 15% or so slower per core, at good energy efficiency. For embarrassingly parallel workloads, it was a major improvement right away.
- PowerElectronix 3mo agoIntel had a monopoly on bleeding edge cpu for a long time until they got stuck on 14nm for years, allowing TSMC to catch up and providing AMD the means to compete. In a the best of timelines, intel, tsmc and samsung (and glofo maybe?) Would all have competitive fab nodes.
- deaton 3mo agoIntel had something very close to a monopoly for a long time. ARM wasn't taken seriously for desktop or server applications, and AMD was unable to compete with Intel's top-end CPUs until Zen (and with it Ryzen and Epyc) came around.
- fsuts 3mo agoTsmc are opening 10 factories in USA at cost of $265bn https://www.techrepublic.com/article/news-tsmc-us-investment-arizona-chip-fabs/ https://www.techrepublic.com/article/news-tsmc-us-investment... Intel staying strong is still vital for competitiveness though
- matwood 3mo agoUntil they are built, it's all talk. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/21/foxconn-mostly-abandons-10-billion-wisconsin-project-touted-by-trump.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/21/foxconn-mostly-abandons-10-b...
- Orygin 3mo agoThey are built, at least one in Phoenix: > As of 2025, the first fab has been completed and is producing four-nanometer (nm) chips.
- p_l 3mo agoTSMC also AFAIK is forbidden from setting up bleeding-edge fabs outside of Taiwan?
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- dzonga 3mo agoyeah - I wouldn't bet against Intel. they might have floundered in the past. panther lakes I hear are pretty competitive with some of the apple silicone.
- adrian_b 3mo agoIntel Panther Lake is a serious improvement over the previous Intel CPUs, both in energy efficiency and in GPU performance. The good energy efficiency is a good sign for Intel's 18A CMOS fabrication process. Nevertheless, it is worrying that the computers with Panther Lake CPUs have become much more expensive in comparison with their equivalents of last year with Arrow Lake, and this before adding the hugely increased costs for DRAM and SSDs. It is also confusing for buyers that the 300-series Panther Lake part numbers that appear to be replacements for the previous 200-series Arrow Lake in most cases correspond to lower technical specifications, i.e. a much smaller GPU and lower clock frequencies. The Panther Lake models that have the new big and very good GPU are extremely expensive and also hard to find, despite the fact that the GPU continues to be produced by TSMC. Perhaps TSMC has raised its price and prioritizes other customers, so Intel cannot get enough big GPUs, but even the Panther Lake models with the very small GPU (much smaller than Intel has used in many years for its mobile CPUs) have become far too expensive. Because Panther Lake introduced a few important new features that could have been interesting for experiments in software development (e.g. FRED), I intended to buy some mini-PC with Panther Lake, but I gave up because even one that would cost double in comparison with the mini-PC with Arrow Lake H from last year that I have (i.e. around $1000 as barebone, instead of around $500) would be a downgrade in specs, instead of being an upgrade.
- topspin 3mo agoIntel is doing well. They have 18A yields up to 85% at Fab 52. That's huge for the foundry business: the best foundries are not all in Asia now. Rumor is they're moving Nova Lake production mostly in-house due to 18A success.
- rando1234 3mo agoAmazing looking machine! $380 million a pop. Must surely be one of the most sophisticated machines humanity has ever built? A great achievement of European science and technology (ducks).
- spwa4 3mo agoThat's what makes this hard to interpret. The whole strategy of intel is that they have their own version of this machine, part of their "18A" design. The only reason they need the ASML machine is because of the "optics" (between quotes because at the frequencies they work at no optics work - only (bad) mirrors do. However you need make the mirrors accurate enough - we're talking far more accurate than the chips, as in sub-nanometer max deviation, they can function as optics with high losses, but low enough that exposure works). No American company can achieve even 10 times lower accuracy at the moment. So is this giving up on their own version? That would mean their stock price is absolutely not justified at $110, and it should be more like $60-70 if not lower. Or is this "we have technical reasons to use this. We're still going to do 18A and it's still going to beat 2nm", which would mean their stock price is easily justified at $200 and it's high time to buy.
- vrganj 3mo agoOnly the optics is an ... interesting way of phrasing it. There was a great Economist article a while ago that talks about this. ASMLs moat isn't just the know-how to build the machines themselves. It's a network of suppliers all across Europe, specialized businesses doing one little part better than anyone else in the world. This is the type of thing that Europe is still leading in, and it'll be incredibly hard to reproduce elsewhere. You don't just need to figure out how to build an High-NA EUV machine. You need to figure out how to build or procure all of the parts that go into it. Many of these suppliers have exclusive contracts with ASML. Here's the article, de-paywalled: https://archive.ph/jP1HX https://archive.ph/jP1HX
- spwa4 3mo agoYeah. ASML doesn't make the mirrors, but they have exclusive sales rights, exactly as you say. And yes, positioning them, for example, both in the fixed sense (mounting the mirrors in the machine) and in the dynamic sense (rapidly positioning wafers to nanometer-or-better accuracy below the beam, I forgot how quick exactly but it's 10s to 100s of times per second to maintain production rates) is very much not easy either. But it's "been done" (by teams of phds). Producing the mirrors has not been duplicated. Of course, producing the EUV beam in the first place has also not been duplicated and it's Californian technology. Intel 18A has a different strategy all together. I mean, it's not like they're saying much about it, but from the little we know, it's very different.
- Tepix 3mo agoI believe Intel has a winner with the upcoming Crescent Island GPUs with up to 480GB of LPDDR5 memory. A lot of SMEs will need local AI with large open weights models (i.e. >1.5TB of VRAM), but they don't need a watercooled 8x Nvidia GB300 box. Besides, it's difficult to deploy and very expensive. Crescent island is air cooled and likely fast enough for a group of users running something like GLM 5.2 or Kimi K3.
- gigatexal 3mo agoI thought Nvidia after they invested in Intel killed Intel’s GPU efforts as it could be a threat to Nvidia’s GPUs
- minraws 3mo agoTo Nvidia the biggest threat is a capex cut from big tech not another company in the same domain, maybe some Chinese companies but people aren't going to be moving off of Nvidia for large deployments in the short term even if some TPU/Tranium etc is used it's not close to Nvidia. I have no explanation other than people, researchers are comfortable with it and don't want to switch.
- throwway120385 3mo agoNvidia's software support remains "best in class" so they've become the default for a lot of this stuff. To overcome that I think you'd have to get a lot of hobbyists and by extension interested young people using your hardware instead of Nvidia. So you'd have to have good software support, decent hardware, and low hardware cost. People started with Nvidia because most machines had an Nvidia card in them, and Nvidia's software support was carried-over momentum from how they've supported their GPUs with PC gaming. I've tried AMD, for example, and the compatibility matrices and bugs and just general lacking software support for ML on their hardware makes it a total non-starter. It may be a lot better with current-generation stuff but it's going to take a lot for me to trust AMD for ML.
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- tangsoupgallery 3mo ago[flagged]
- amelius 3mo ago> ASML moved to camera-style anamorphic optics that magnify the mask by different amounts along the two axes Does this mean they do high-resolution designs in the center of the lens and low-resolution designs in the periphery?
- reinitctxoffset 3mo ago[flagged]
- sylware 3mo agoI wish that, but for high performance RISC-V micro-achitectures.
- dismalaf 3mo agohttps://www.eetimes.com/barcelona-bsc-celebrates-tape-out-of-cinco-ranch-chips/ https://www.eetimes.com/barcelona-bsc-celebrates-tape-out-of...
- sylware 3mo agoClearly something you need to keep an eye on. And "everything pushing RISC-V forward is a good thing". The trick is with current tension between the US and Spain: hopefully intel won't "be told" to pull out from this project, because I don't thingk TSMC has the production capacity to accomodate such project decently (and RISC-V is a US initiative!!). (I am talking latest silicon process, because without it, even an amazing micro-architecture will be dragged down).
- johndear223 3mo agoI was just reading about this in a tech magazine, couple of startups also trying other techniques of interest, one of them using helium atoms for the lithography. This uses pretty close to x-ray wavelengths of light. Amazing feats of engineering taking place in this crazy world of ours.
- bilsbie 3mo agoHow come we don’t make chips with really small 3d printers?
- wmf 3mo agoAFAIK you can't really print crystalline silicon so they have to start with a wafer and dope/etch into it to form transistors.
- dehrmann 3mo agoSibling has a good comment about silicon. Another reason you're printing something like 100B transistors. So that's at least 100B raster steps. It would just take too long.
- tbrownaw 3mo agoThe closest thing there is is e-beam lithography. It isn't really practical.
- Melatonic 3mo agoIsnt that smaller? I was under the impression e-beam is one of the (possible) next generation chip technologies. Getting it to scale is the issue
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- ginko 3mo agoIs it so hard to explain what the term "High-NA" is supposed to mean at the start of your article?
- caycep 3mo agomost importantly, is Ian Cutress' blog basically the new Anandtech? I miss that site...