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I think they have been a commodity for a long time. Rephrased, the discussion is similar to, "Will GE make a comeback in the refrigerator market?" Intel isn't going anywhere, they have many, many big customers to satisfy who simply cannot shift to ARM due to ROIs <=0. And after 30+ years of this, I also don' think there's anything new or revolutionary in silicon fabrication on the horizon. I stopped getting excited about CPU tech when AMD crossed the 1GHz barrier in the PC space. Could be burnout though.

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> I stopped getting excited about CPU tech when AMD crossed the 1GHz barrier in the PC space

That was only around 2000. There was a lot for me to get excited about since then:

* AMD64

* SMT

* Dual-core / multicore

* On-chip integrated graphics that weren’t awful (low-end discrete graphics aren’t a thing anymore)

* Gigantic L3 and L4 caches (a side-effect of on-chip graphics)

* Turbo mode making a comeback (yes, I know Turbo Mode switches actually slowed down computers)

Judging by Apple’s direction, it’s looking like we’ll start seeing actual (ultra-fast) RAM on-chip too, with Optane that could mean we can finally move-away from block-addressed storage and have a massive flat memory-space for everything .

ADM64... Aka Yamhill on Intel. Holy shit I had to sign waivers and get a special Unix acount just to ACCESS the RTL model with Intel's 64-bit iHDL.

I kinda laughed when AMD beat Intel to the punch not once, but TWICE. (1GHz, then 64b).

I also worked on the 740, 810 and 815 (both hardware and drivers, oddly, I did a lot of stuff). Game devs HATED us for the 810/815 because it was such huge volume they had to target it as the LCD.

Can you elaborate on all of that? I'm unfamiliar with "RTL", "iHDL", "740", "810", "815", I assume "LCD" is lowest-common-denominator?

Correct me if I am wrong.

RTL https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Register-transfer_level

RTL is a way to model a digital circuit and some common HW design languages are VHDL, Verilog amd Intel's proprietary iHDL.

Numbers are just Intel chipset families.

> And after 30+ years of this, I also don' think there's anything new or revolutionary in silicon fabrication on the horizon.

Why so? Few more material, and device generations are on the way. Litho has went through more generation changes in the last 1 decade, than in any previous one.

Whole new device classes are on the way: optics on silicon, new memory, logic in the backend, and logic on package.

Semiconductor engineering is still a career suicide though, that haven't changed in the last few decades.

This is my "640K should be enough comment", but we've reached the limits of optical fabrication with ~2nm. And really, it is just smaller transistors. Yes, that glibly does a disservice to the process engineers making this miracle happen, but I can get excited about "look, smaller transistors!" only so many times in my lifetime. :)

> optics on silicon,

Yep! That and quantum and post VNeumann architectures. There's some weird shit on the horizon that I probably won't live to see in household products, but I don't think it will be be optical deposition by layer. It might, who knows, I"m officially talking out my arse now. :)

Optics may come earlier than people expect.

And not even for I/O, but for on-die communications, and busses.

High speed SERDES may well be replaced by same-die optics, as a lower transistor count, dumber, and cooler solutions.

> Semiconductor engineering is still a career suicide though, that haven't changed in the last few decades.

This is so true. I am currently a hardware engineer and planning to switch to software. If you are not in Nvidia, Apple or other mega-growth hardware companies, you are suffering atleast 40% paycut compared to software industry and also working about twice as hard, using obsolete tools and flows, and almost no opportunities for technical advancement or significant impact. Meanwhile the annual raises are cost-of-living adjustments. Its truly depressing.

> Semiconductor engineering is still a career suicide though, that haven't changed in the last few decades.

Wow, so I need to thank myself for accidentally bumbling towards ops and dev? Meh, for me it’s just that in EU there’s a total dearth of opportunities in the industry

People making WordPress websites are making more than PhD research scientists in Taiwan, and Korea.

TSMC announced that they're raising salaries by 20% across the board, so that should improve things a bit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6DaxXukog4

And they cut the bonus at the same time.

Depressing

> Semiconductor engineering is still a career suicide though, that haven't changed in the last few decades.

Could you go into more detail?

Most of semiconductor jobs are in Asia, and in the same Asian countries, you will get n times less than a software person of the same seniority.

The long term is that the industry will get less, and less labour intensive as more, and more old, labour intensive fabs are retired, and new ones are 100% AMHS.

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