Intel will never become fabless. They made the wrong bet on the type of technology to reduce transistor size and they overestimated what their engineers would be capable of creating and doing, but that won't last forever.
There's a lot of working going on with 10nm and 7nm to fix the production problems (because a lot of work is still required). It won't happen overnight, in fact, I predicted about a year or two ago that it would be around 2023, +/- 6 months, that Intel would have its node production problems mostly ironed out.
Sadly by then, TSMC should be at 3nm, and while Intel's 10nm is easily a match for TSMC's 7nm, it won't be enough to be competitive against TSMC 5nm and 3nm. I hope that Intel has their shit together for the 7nm node, or can at least break even on it. If they can break even (cost of wafer is equal to or less than what they can sell the chips for) on 7nm, they'll be able to hang in there until they get the 5nm / 3nm nodes up and running.
If Intel drops the ball though... and they aren't able to get 10nm yields over 90% by 2023 and if they can't get 7nm yields at a reasonable point... well that's a whole different ball game for Intel. It might not be out of the question for Intel to approach the US government about either subsidies, tax breaks, custom manufacturing for military applications, etc., in order to 1) keep Intel viable until the engineering challenges are resolved and 2) prevent the offshoring of all semiconductor fabs.
Put simply, Intel staying competitive is a matter of national security for the United States.
It seems a dollar of government investment now is likely worth $5 of investment down the line, once we've fallen further behind. The US ought to be investing on multiple fronts to regain/maintain the lead here.
Best company I worked at -- small startup -- would always do 2-3 R&D initiatives in parallel. One would be conservative (guaranteed results). One would be super-high-risk (huge payoff if it works). Sometimes there would be one or two more. It was all a big hedge. Some panned out, some didn't, and when we hit the market, our technology was like science fiction. Competition didn't know what hit them.
That would run a fair bit of coin, but fairly little on the national scale.
Nope. I don't identify myself online, and recommend the same to others.
I think the most detail I can give is general class of work it engaged in. Think of MRIs, sonar, radar, ultrasound, back-scatter x-ray, LIDAR, CAT scans, etc. That's the general sort of technology it worked on.
That should give enough detail for the purposes of this discussion...
No this is a move to protect market share and buy time their processors with the current Intel node are not competitive this way they are able to compete with AMD as well as restrict AMD supply. They will be able to hold market share with this till their own next generation fab is fully functional.
Clearly evidence of the "free market" working on human prosperity. Oh, wait, no it's the opposite. Innovation killed over a monopoly's power. Cool, cool, cool.
This sort of anti-competitive behavior should be illegal. How is it okay to just clog your competitors supply line, when they got the better tech you just can't up?
When it comes to fab, AMD didn't beat intel, they gave up and went with TSMC. Now they have to compete with TSMC's other customers, including Intel, for access to the kingmaking process. That's not foul play, it's the bed they made, and now they get/have to lie in it.
The current high end AMD parts are multi chip modules. The CPU dies are made at TSMC in 7nm but the IO dies that glue multiple CPU dies together is made in the Global Foundries 14nm process.
GF has basically given up on 10nm and smaller nodes.
Didn't AMD have contractual obligations to use Global Foundries for their high end chips from when they split, or something along those lines? I guess that turned out really well for them, though, since that might have led to the necessity of chiplet designs.
GF has given up on research and pioneering smaller nodes. Their current process is based on tech they licensed from Samsung. I would not be surprised if they licensed another process from TSMC or Samsung in the future.
Maybe not legally, but if their (partial) intention is to retard AMD's design success, it's at least what is considered "a dick move".
Intel is strong-arming AMD on many fronts AFAIK, I sincerely hope they vanish into insignificance for their dick-locomotion nature. And I also hope the EU succeeds at spinning up their own fabs. And that ancaps one day see the light of regulation.
I want fancy tech and scifi and wealth for everyone, and the free-market doesn't deliver. It's all monopolies and patent wars...
Intel (and NVidia for that matter) don't owe AMD uncontested access to TSMC's kingmaking process, no matter how much AMD fanboys wish it were so.
> AMD's design success
The market is showing us that the value center isn't design, it's fab. Which AMD gave up on. The lack of competition that's squeezing them is the very pile of dung they created by dropping their foundries.
Sounds like you have all this backwards. If the rumours are true, it's TSMC with all the power in this situation, not Intel. TSMC selling their services to the highest bidder because they have the best tech is the free market at work. It's the opposite of anti-competitive. Intel is the one going to pay up (to TSMC) for their mistakes. Incidentally, AMD outsourcing its fab came with inherent risks, one of which is this.
> This sort of anti-competitive behavior should be illegal.
You're assuming the legal system is intended to foster competition and prevent the formation of monopolies. That is not the case. The examples of this occurring are exceptions to the rule. And as evidence, you can examine the concentration of wealth, and investment capital in the USA (or other developed capitalist countries).
Why so? They have practically a monopoly as there is nobody that can actually compete, Samsung just isn't there, same for INTC's fabs, obviously.
In addition, more and more AI/ML accelerator startups show up with even more need for wafers and ASML has 2 year old orders on the backlog (half of their EUV's machines last year went just to TSMC).
We never know when intel or Samsung will catch up, or even get ahead. They have a monopoly today, but a little bit of luck on either part and that is gone...
Sure, assuming that their in-house manufacturing is more expensive than buying externally (quite likely, considering that it was grown for decades more on USPs than on pricing). I wonder how much the "cooperate to learn" effect has been part of the decision. You surely won't get outright trade secrets this way or technological details, but valuable insights in how they think, how they "do things on a high level"
If you want volume from TSMC you make a big order, you sign a contract, and then put down a billion dollars or two and TSMC will build you a nice new fab for your needs.
That's more or less how it works. TSMC doesn't allow itself to be in a position to have to screw one customer for another customer. It would destroy the trust that customers need to put the survival of their business in TSMC's hands.
I don't think so. They have a lot of things to produce in their fabs. Optane, Chipsets, NAND (if they still produce it), sensors, FPGAs, Ethernet Controllers, etc.
They're considering it as an interim solution IMHO. To buy time for their own processes.
It's confusing though because it's to be followed up with mid to high range CPUs as well. So this is a quite long interim period. If they just need a bit more time, outsourcing high end CPUs makes more sense.
Intel's selling off the NAND fabs and never owned a 3D XPoint fab; Optane products are built with 3D XPoint memory fabbed by Micron, with whom they co-developed 3D XPoint.
And it's not cheap or quick to refit a memory fab to produce processors.
Isn't it a bigger step than that, as they have to firewall the design team with access to confidential TSMC info now? If they got another process online in 2 years they'd have to have a different team on it or wait another two years or so.
TSMC could hand Intel everything they know and it wouldn't do them a bit of good before it's no longer relevant. Raw knowledge won't buy machines, train people to maintain them, build factories, tune the manufacturing processes, or make relationships with design partners. By the time Intel gets something running with something they pick up and starts thinking about making deals, TSMC will be off profiting from another breakthrough.
I've just heard that TSMC requires strict isolation for a period of years for any team that gets the detailed design specs that can lead to process knowledge, and that this now prevents several fabless companies from second sourcing without a second design team. I would think it would be even stricter with a non fabless client competitor like Intel.
I find it surprising that TSMC is going along with it, just because I would think it's hard to be sure some confidential information wouldn't leak. Unless this kind of institutional firewall works better than I think.
If I were to speculate, I would say that tsmc has a diversified enough customer base AND doesn’t see intel as a contract fab competitor. I would imagine if roles were reversed there would be a whole lot more concern.
Oh, transistors haven't shrunk that much. I don't know the exact process details, but integration density has been going up( putting gates vertical with FinFET), together with better electrostatic control (GAAFET, kind of a step uf from FDSOI), while gate length remains the same.
Think about it this way: you're doping semiconductors by adding a few other atoms. On the order of 1 dopant atom per 1M intrinsic (undopped) semiconductor. How thin can you make it before there's only a dozen dopant atoms? And then, how do you make sure they are evenly distributed? And in the same way across multiple transistors, to guarantee a consistent performance? Yield is key, at this scale.
Technically, they can still improve density by embracing 3D. A friend of mine works on multi-gate vertical nanowire transistors, for instance, but that's still a few years (or a decade?) away from the fab.
I'm not clear what Samsung makes for Apple (someone might know, but not me), but it makes sense to share the more complex parts. One team does all the expensive design work, and then both benefit because the design cost is over more devices, plus more hardware means better scale factors in manufacturing.
The above is on a case by case basis. So they may share some complex part, and some other (possibly more complex) they decide isn't worth sharing.
So Intel becoming Fabless is a matter of time?