Hacker News Reader

Comment by rmrfstar | Hacker News Reader

> the consensus seems to be that Intel tried to pile up too many new improvements, which backfired. TSMC took a more incremental and safe approach

Can you point to some industry literature that explains this?

If this is true, it is a lot more surprising that Intel is talking about going fabless. You build a lot of expertise by rolling the dice on new techniques that don't pan out on the first iteration. People wouldn't be so pessimistic about Boeing if they had just been overly aggressive in a new airframe design, rather than failing to safely mount new engines on an old design.

View on HN

The consensus on HN (search for Intel 7nm, cobalt, ...). It's all speculation at this point. I doubt that Intel would publish details on their processes and its defects so soon.

Intel buying some TSMC capacity does not mean it is going fabless. Nor does it mean Intel is abandoning being vertically integrated.

I like your Boeing remark. It's better to fail at doing something aggressive than to fail to innovate.

> It's better to fail at doing something aggressive than to fail to innovate.

I don't think that's a particularly useful way to divide up failures. I think it's better to fail in a way that doesn't kill people than a way that does. Whether you kill people by being too conservative or too aggressive with your design is pretty irrelevant compared to that.

According to Semiaccurate the new Contact Over Active Gate (COAG) feature ended up causing just as many problems as moving to cobalt.

The original article is here:

https://www.semiaccurate.com/2018/08/02/intel-guts-10nm-to-g...

It's paywalled but Charlie later published something else referring to that article as talking about COAG problems so I don't feel bad sharing the info at this point.

https://semiaccurate.com/2020/08/13/intel-talks-about-10nm-s...

> People wouldn't be so pessimistic about Boeing if they had just been overly aggressive in a new airframe design

Well... yes. That's called judgement, and execs at firms like Boeing get paid positively stupid sums of money to provide the good kind. Which they didn't.

"What's the big deal? If I had left the vat of acid unattended in a locked room, everything would have been fine."

Are they talking about going fabless? I thought they’ve only discussed making some parts at TSMC, not all of them.

They’re not on the first iteration at this point. They’ve been on 14 nm since 2014. 10 nm and to a lesser extent 7 nm is failing after many iterations and many years.

>People wouldn't be so pessimistic about Boeing if they had just been overly aggressive in a new airframe design, rather than failing to safely mount new engines on an old design.

Unfortunately Boeing doesn't have a huge list of customers that are willing to spend what it costs to switch to a new airframe. They sell to airlines what airlines want to buy. Airlines wanted a 737 with higher bypass engines and that's exactly what they got.

Boeing deserves what they get for pushing a faulty design out the door but they didn't do it as some nefarious cost cutting measure. They did it because American and Southwest said they wanted nothing to do with a "797" and threatened to switch to Airbus.

Their customers are not responsible for putting a defective product with insufficient operator training which has cost hundreds of human lives.

Maybe they are responsible for pressuring Boeing too much, but Boeing put defective airplanes on the market

> they didn't do it as some nefarious cost cutting measure. They did it because American and Southwest said they wanted nothing to do with a "797" and threatened to switch to Airbus.

so a nefarious moneygrabbing measure?

I'd probably think just as poorly of Boeing if they killed people with a more innovative/aggressive idea.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com