Comment by cushychicken | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cushychicken | Hacker News Reader

Man, this is a great followon to the article about Intel's business model that floated up to the front page a few weeks ago. It really illustrates how Intel is betting the farm, year after year, on reliable performance increases. Even with how many semiconductors I build into products, I can't help but boggle at the sheer scale of the semiconductor industry's investments. $1.38 BILLION dollars committed to a research project that's not set to pay off for three years is a rare thing in the private sector.

On a less fanboy note - I'd have loved to see a more detailed description of how they ship the EUV tools. I can only imagine the logistical headache involved for Intel - they spec out all of their fabs to be identical for quality reasons. Shipping nine school-bus-sized, vacuum sealed containers to some far corner of the globe has to be a shitload of work. And then you have to set it up when it finally gets there! In vacuum! And then when you're done, you have to do it again for each Intel fab!

(Fanboy rant over now, I swear, I just get really excited about making all these miniscule things for some reason.)

Intel can afford to, and also has to, make that 'bet' because that is their competitive advantage.

Intel has 'the best' chips because they literally pay the price for being, at least on their headline grabbing products, a full process generation ahead of more or less the entire rest of the semiconductor industry.

Does Intel still have a competitive advantage? It seems like they've hit a wall and competitors like TSMC and Samsung have basically caught up.

I think they've acknowledged that they're slowing down with their new strategy [1].

[1] http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/03/intel-...

Won't those competitors hit a wall as well? Seems like Intel doesn't need to be fast, just faster than the competition. I imagine the rate of change will slow for the whole industry.

If they aren't a generation ahead as they have been then I think it ceases to be a competitive advantage. Then they would have to start asking questions like "Why not fab Intel chips at TSMC or Samsung if they offer better pricing?"

They've already decided they're going to fab ARM chips, so I think they've already come to this conclusion.

Isn't the new tech that comes out of R&D patented?

Here's the trick: they already do. Only the biggest margin products get fabbed at Intel fabs.

Is there some x86 fanned outside Intel ?

You're right they are all hitting the wall at the same time. The 7 nm node is going to be a problem node for all of the companies [1]. Popular opinion is that Intel always has enough tricks up it's sleeve to effectively be a node ahead (even when on paper it isn't), but I've never been able to find a source on that. But honestly the industry has been hitting this wall for over a decade, and making less progress then it appears on paper (through not fault of their own. Moore's law has been dead for a long time now. "Node size" has only a loose relation to the size of any structure on the chip and is really just a marketing term.

[1] http://semiengineering.com/7nm-market-heats-up/

I would suggest reading the following article to see a source for comparing Intel vs competitors: http://www.anandtech.com/show/8367/intels-14nm-technology-in...

I suggest reading the following article: http://www.anandtech.com/show/8367/intels-14nm-technology-in...

The plot 2/3 down the page compares Intel's process with competitors. It's a bit out of date in the sense that it only shows projections instead of the result after-the-fact, but the plot shows that Intel is still ahead.

Intel has been leading the world in semiconductor process technology almost since the beginning. Because they've been the world's largest semiconductor company for a long time, they can afford to keep R&D spending as a major expenditure.

Intel is only one of the ASML customers. ASML has been founded 32 years ago, and before it was part of Philips. It has been making the same bet for years and years.

The logistical headache is not the problem of Intel, but for ASML. A downtime costs around ten thousand euros per hour and can run up in the millions. Distribution of spare parts is very important.

You can sort of look at Moore's law opposite the usual way -- as a commitment to make the investment required to make it happen.

Took a long time for physics to start to get in the way.

This isn't quite what you're looking for, but ASML one of the biggest tool suppliers has a youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/ASMLcompany

This video has a little bit of the tool assembly and support systems: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttbaaI5xUcg

Yes! Excellent! Thanks for the link!

In California, drug makers have spent nearly $110M on campaigning against a single proposition. $1.38B spent over many years doesn't sound like much.

The oil and gas industry regularly spends that kind of money. Look into offshore drilling.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com