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Comment by bhouston | Hacker News Reader

Why hasn't Intel given up on their internal process nodes? Their advantage is clearly not in owning their process nodes at this point. Dump them and adopt TSMC.

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Once they figure out UV, there are lots of in house innovations in the pipeline that could prolong Moore's law for the next 10-15 years. This is according to Jim Keller, who gave talks about how there could be up to 50x density increase. Most of that technology is proprietary and together with TSMC they are heading toward a quasi monopoly.

Who would they order from? Keep in mind they are slightly behind Samsung in ic volume. Samsung is #1 and Intel #2. Almost double the volume of TSMC. It takes a few years to build a new plant.

Literally impossible without a very long term plan... and when it’s over they lose control of their destiny. They can beg TSMC for more chips if they want to meet their sales targets, but maybe they’ll sell to Apple or Nvidia instead.

Where are you getting that number for Intel? Everything I see has Samsung, TMSC, then Micron as the top in terms of wafer production. Intel is like 1/3 of TMSC which is still alot. https://www.eetindia.co.in/over-half-of-global-wafer-capacit...

Raw wafer counts aren't particularly relevant here, because you can't really re-tool a NAND or DRAM fab into a competitive logic fab. Based on those numbers, about a third of Samsung's wafer count is logic, putting them slightly ahead of Intel (logic and a bit of NAND). TSMC's wafer count (all logic, AFAIK) is higher than Samsung+Intel, but not all of that is on leading-edge nodes. TSMC 28nm and 16nmFF nodes are going to be sticking around for many years to come.

The numbers are even more tilted in Intel‘s favor if you consider that the foundries do a huge part of their volume business on outdated nodes. Intel doesn‘t do that. They have many times the capacity of TSMC in their market segment.

One could ague that vertical integration has been their strength up until recently. I don't think it suddenly becomes a bad idea just because they dropped the ball recently.

Intel is behind, but not actually that behind. Spinning off their fab business at this point in time is throwing money in to the sea. TSMC doesn't have the capacity to handle the volume of Intel orders anyway.

Why would they grant their competitor a monopoly?

Giving up manufacturing would reduce Intel to what AMD now is, except with worse designs.

They're clearly not reaping any reward from their process, TSMC has them beat hands down and they continue to show lack of forward progress towards smaller nodes. They have a much bigger IP portfolio than AMD, and frankly, it appears their foundries are a cost center/boat anchor rather than a profit driver for next-gen silicon.

They don't have to give up their existing 14nm capacity, but next-generation processors could much more easily (apparently) be fab'd externally.

I'm not sure I agree. From what I remember manufacturing is a big part of Intel's profits. Sure, they might not have the best process, but they still have _a_ process, and customers are willing to pay for it.

I agree, there's no reason for intel to shut down their fab, but I don't know that they need to hold progress on their CPUs for like, 5 years now? They can continue to work on their process while fabbing next gen CPUs at TSMC IMO.

They may be betting that a switchover to TSMC would take as long or longer as doing it themselves. As well there's hubris, sunken costs, and Uncle Sam taking a vested interest in semiconductor manufacturing to take into account.

Profit margin. They want that slice o pie.

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