Am I missing something here or is Intel starting to lag behind on Fab Tech?
I thought they were years and billions ahead?!?
I thought they were years and billions ahead?!?
Intel had a reprieve of almost a decade with a weak AMD that let them coast along with the desktop monopoly and extract a yawn-worthy 5-10% improvement per generation, but now that they have the incentive to compete again they're struggling to get their house in order - the chip design hasn't had a major refresh in a long time and they have been very late with their version of 10nm.
So they're really at a crossroads now where they can't rely on old tactics and their long-term prospects are in serious doubt, since they didn't position themselves to counter the efficient small-core/big-package architecture that AMD is pushing with the Zen chips. For now, they can still put out competitive flagship product launches simply by binning extremely expensive parts and running them hot(e.g. compare i9 and Threadripper) but that advantage might erode within one more generation.
Mobile SoC design and being answerable to a huge number of very large customers forced fabs to evolve their processes in a way where market forces and customer demand forces requirements rather than office politics.
Intel has still an edge on many parts of the manufacturing process but as far as the lithography goes they've lost this round.
Luckily for them their 10nm was much more ambitious than any of the 7nm designs and they are facing problems that other fabs will not face until their 5nm and beyond processes.
Intel is also fighting a much tougher fight now TSMC was always good (better than AMD/GloFo) but now you also have the Alliance which is IBM/Samsung/GloFo which combine resources on process R&D.
GloFo botched their 20/22nm process and had to scrap it completely and if they couldn't use Samsung's 20nm process and call it 14nm AMD's Zen would likely would never have materialized because of the WSA.
And this is essentially the gist of things GloFo/Samsung/IBM are essentially a united front, TSMC is as capable as ever and what all of these 4 (and more) share in common is that they answer to external customers so if something doesn't work there is a much bigger pressure to drop it and find something that would instead of sinking more and more cost into it because of internal politics.
*at an ASML booth at a kind of job fair at my uni
Pursuing the foundry route seriously would have meant Intel giving up one of its largest advantages.
I've always wondered about this. What's to keep the hard won experience and knowledge of how to do cobalt from escaping into the wile and being adopted at a much higher rate by their competitors?
It goes both ways I guess, and some experience and working at smaller scales can also come to Intel, but I would imagine the gains for a leg up are greater with the harder process.
Sure, there are IP laws in place, but just not having to waste months (or manpower in parallel research) on paths where you can get a hint (path B is a dead end, don't devote much to it) seems like a gain in itself.
The cause was that the water pipes under that section would impact that part of the process because of mechanical vibration the reason why it didn’t impact all processes because they were tied to the cooling system and it only had an effect when other procsses put stress on it.
These vibaration were apparently so small that they couldn’t measure the difference they identified this through a process of elimination.
This is a classical story of practical vs theoretical engineering the secret sauce isn’t the recepie it’s the cook.
If you think about it this way if it was so easy to recreate a process through reverse engineering a few hot chips talks and poaching Intel wouldn’t be in this mess and GloFo didn’t had to scrap their 20nm process.
When you almost at the level of moving atoms around the wing flaps of a butterfly start to really matter.
We’re well pass the time where you had Disney animators draw transistors on sheets and copper masks were cut by hand it wouldn’t surprise me if there are no beans days at foundries these days since a fart across the building might increase your defect rate by 3%
That's what I'm talking about. Who's to say there aren't a few gotchas like this in the new cobalt processing, and that's not exactly something that can be protected under IP law (or even necessarily by NDA, at least provably).
How much time does it save to have the second company attempting it get a hint of "hey, the new process is much more susceptible to problems of X,Y and Z than you would think, and you can save yourself months of headaches by being extra vigilant with respect to those from the beginning." ?
The benefit of the lead time you get as the first really needs to pay off, since the followers almost always have it easier. It's not hard to imagine that sometimes the pain and cost of being first is actually higher than the benefit and profit for that time period.
The example I gave in my previous was simplified the actual root cause was much weirder and included a condition where the flow rate would have to get to X and the temperature to get to just an exact Y for thermal expansion to apparently compress the insulation enoguh for it to matter if the temp would be a tad to low it won’t impact anything if it goes above the next level of flow rate it wouldn’t have an impact yet again because it would drop the temp.
Intel’s whole conflict free campaign was a marketing spin on a real problem and a way to benefit from the extra cost of materials and that extra cost wasn’t because of children in African mines.
Intel needs so much control over the raw materials to prevent contamination that they issue orders on what fuel, hydraulic fluid and lubricants can be used to mine their dirt to prevent or at least reduce contamination.
Heck I’m sure if one will read what ever T&C they attach to their supply contracts the metal composition of the pickaxes will be specified.
They survey and sample everything and essentially tell their supplier ok you can mine this specific area everything in the top 1m you get rid off everything below 10m we don’t want.
Like honestly at this point I think the only way for GloFo to have exactly the same problem as Intel is we live in a simulation.
They will however have their own problems with leakage, bonding, crystallization and w/e else can go wrong with this insanity with Cobalt but likely they’ll have completely different root causes and different solutions.
Other foundries were able to improve density by 2.7x for their 7nm nodes compared to their 14/16nm nodes, so I'm not sure what exactly Intel is doing there.
I have been struggling to explain this better, and those words describe the exact problem. Scale.
Apple alone ship more CPU unit then Intel. And that is all going to TSMC.
Just a reminder, the "original" original schedule, was that we have 10nm in 2016, 7nm in 2018, and 5nm in 2020. After the delay in 14nm, everything being pushed 1 year later. 2017 come and gone and we don't have 10nm, now 2018 we still won't have it, and as pointed out in various investor conference call. 10nm is now Scheduled for 2019.
They "were" miles ahead, but lack of competition and incentives meant 10nm didn't work out. They have been milking whatever they have for far too long. And waited a little too long to decide to enter the GPU market.
Intel recognizes this and is focusing on data centric use-cases like supercomputers and clouds.
For example, Intel is leading "Pathforward" with the US Government to develop very high-end solutions to large-scale problems; https://www.ecpannualmeeting.com/
In summary, Intel doesn't care that much about the PC sector because it's shrinking as a whole.
They've actually released one chip on 10nm but it's performing much worse than the equivalent 14nm chip so it needs a lot more work.
Google in search, Intel it processor fabs, ARM in power efficiency, Etc. During the time of fast growth it is a huge differentiator, and once that fast growth has been exhausted you need a different differentiator.
Also, it's rumored that Intel's 10nm will actually be worse for clock speeds than its 14nm is.
according to their big mouth marketing department, yes. according to reality or market, no.