Intel outsources Core i3 to TSMC's 5nm process

The only problem with this, is that its fairly well-known by industry insiders that Apple has TSMC's entire 5nm production locked up for a significant portion of this year, maybe even the entire year. M1 is just the beginning. New Axx chips are going 5nm too.

I would trust Charlie over at SemiAccurate before I trust TrendForce.

I'm not saying this isn't true or accurate, I'm saying that Apple's manufacturing demands are enormous just for iPhone / iPad chips, and now M1 has invigorated demand for desktop / laptop Mac products, at least amongst nerdier types like us, but wherever we go, the mainstream inevitably follows. Once "normal" people start using MacBook Pros and realize they now have 2-4 day battery life (or even longer for light users), then its only a matter of time until demand rises. I think Apple has anticipated this to some degree.

Not to mention, 2021 is supposed to be the Year of the Mx iMac / Mac Pro.

Ultimately, this is just a terrible time to be Intel. They're at least 2-3 years away from any worthwhile new product on their own nodes. 10nm is still a shitshow and 7nm isn't faring much better.

I made the same mistake just a few days ago. I believed the TrendForce article was reporting confirmed news.

Your link redirects me to a Chinese webpage. I think this article may be more approachable: http://www.trendforce.com/presscenter/news/20210113-10651.ht...

The more credible speculation I've seen (although arguably once you're arguing with speculation is more credible, you've already lost) is that Intel is doing a multiyear deal to have TSMC crank out its discrete Xe graphics/compute cards. Which frankly makes a lot more sense, they need a leading process to compete with NVidia who currently has access to Samsung's 7nm and AMD who has TSMC's 7nm and will probably move on to TSMC 5nm sometime next year as Apple moves on to TSMC 3nm.

So supposedly Intel is guaranteeing enough Xe business to get TSMC to convert part of its Baoshan complex over to making Xe. Intel will keep trying to fix its own fabs for its CPUs and probably intends to bring Xe cards back in house at a later date, but they also want to go challenge AMD and nVidia for datacenter GPUs now and that means getting access to a better process.

Outsourcing the commodity i3 whose main goal in life is run MS Office on a Dell Optiplex is definitely a strange rumor. Out of all the things Intel has, that's the area that has the least need of a process upgrade.

The is why you keep bumping into people who has all the wrong assumption about everything with Intel, Fab, TSMC topics.

News Sources keep bumping out crap. And they never go back to correct their original reporting. And most people simply believe what they read.

General Reminder, any News Source coming from Taiwan on TSMC has an interest of pumping up Stock Price.

Can or should the headline of this HN post be updated to include (rumour) or (speculation) or (unconfirmed)?

TSMC only just pulled out in front. Rewind the clock a mere 5 years and Intel was in front, with Samsung and GlobalFoundries basically tied for 2nd, and TSMC in dead last (they had the weakest 16nm/12nm of that generation - the only one who couldn't hit 30MTr/mm2 of the bunch)

GloFlo then backed out entirely of the race and Intel slammed into a wall.

Since then Samsung and TSMC were on "equal" ground at "10nm" (both ~52MTr/mm2, both released 2017) and again at "7nm" (both ~96MTr/mm2). It's not until 5nm that TSMC was actually clearly in-front of everyone else, with their 5nm being 173MTr/mm2 while Samsung's is only 127MTr/mm2.

In terms of "TSMC is just so far ahead." Samsung's 3nm is supposed to use GAAFET while TSMC's 3nm will still be FinFET. So.. potentially Samsung re-claims the "crown" so to speak at 3nm. And Samsung does contract out their fabs - see Nvidia's RTX 3000 series. There's also no particular reason to believe that Intel is down for the count for good. They are a huge company with a huge amount of capital, they can fund a rough generation or two.

In the 90s, it was Intel that were so far ahead. And the barrier of entry was sky-high then. From that perspective this story is amazing.

99% of the barrier is feature size. Producing the feature size starts with photolithography.

If you want to talk about centralizing concerns, look into the number of companies who can produce an EUV light source capable of supplying a photo tool with powerful & precise output 24/7/365.

A single company in a small country 70 miles of mainland China, who considers themselves an international rival.

The main problem is that there is no profit in chip manufacturing ( relative to software development). Apparently it takes 5-6 years for a node to make any profit.

Consumer high end cpu fabrication*

intel's fabs still work for printing just about anything besides high end current gen shit.

Intel will never become fabless. They made the wrong bet on the type of technology to reduce transistor size and they overestimated what their engineers would be capable of creating and doing, but that won't last forever.

There's a lot of working going on with 10nm and 7nm to fix the production problems (because a lot of work is still required). It won't happen overnight, in fact, I predicted about a year or two ago that it would be around 2023, +/- 6 months, that Intel would have its node production problems mostly ironed out.

Sadly by then, TSMC should be at 3nm, and while Intel's 10nm is easily a match for TSMC's 7nm, it won't be enough to be competitive against TSMC 5nm and 3nm. I hope that Intel has their shit together for the 7nm node, or can at least break even on it. If they can break even (cost of wafer is equal to or less than what they can sell the chips for) on 7nm, they'll be able to hang in there until they get the 5nm / 3nm nodes up and running.

If Intel drops the ball though... and they aren't able to get 10nm yields over 90% by 2023 and if they can't get 7nm yields at a reasonable point... well that's a whole different ball game for Intel. It might not be out of the question for Intel to approach the US government about either subsidies, tax breaks, custom manufacturing for military applications, etc., in order to 1) keep Intel viable until the engineering challenges are resolved and 2) prevent the offshoring of all semiconductor fabs.

Put simply, Intel staying competitive is a matter of national security for the United States.

No this is a move to protect market share and buy time their processors with the current Intel node are not competitive this way they are able to compete with AMD as well as restrict AMD supply. They will be able to hold market share with this till their own next generation fab is fully functional.

I don't think so. They have a lot of things to produce in their fabs. Optane, Chipsets, NAND (if they still produce it), sensors, FPGAs, Ethernet Controllers, etc.

They're considering it as an interim solution IMHO. To buy time for their own processes.

That move seems like a good way of going from having the potential to win to guaranteeing being average at best in the long run.

Is TSMC about to hit a physics barrier?

How much smaller than 3nm, can transistor sizes go? 2 nm? 1 nm? O.5 nm?

It would be very surprising if TSMC would heavily invest in capacity to help Intel

I guess they want to gather experience with TSMC's processes with a product nobody cares about, and then use that experience for the product that actually matter.

As far as I understand, the 5nm process will yield lower power consumption[1]. As the i3 is on the lower end of power consumption this may be enough to make it viable for applications that it would not be viable for otherwise. While their powerful CPUs are fast enough (if you look at competitors) and the power requirements there is already so high that the reduced power consumption from the 5nm process won't make them that much more attractive.

Not sure though, just guessing.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_nm_process#Commercialization

EDIT:

Actually there are i9 chips with same TDP as i3 [2]. I would think that the i3 still sells more units and is lower cost, so maybe a lower power i3 will be more attractive to OEMs than a lower power i7 or i9.

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_Lake_(microprocessor)

Well the Apple m1 machines are fast and have incredibly low power consumption so maybe they’re trying to make their i3 compete with that?

Going to be interesting though, the higher tier Apple silicon machines will probably be shipping before any of these i3 chips so intel will likely be playing catch-up for years at least.

my thinking that this "i3 on 5nm at TSMC" is just to show that nothing good comes out of it. Basically faction fight inside Intel - fabless vs. owning fabs. The owning fabs faction is much more politically stronger inside Intel and they ultimately are forced to let that experiment, and they will make sure that it will have all the obstacles. Basically it like GM's EV1 or like Sun in the 200x when Linux/x86 was basically a guerilla effort oppressed by Sparc/Solaris, and the Sparc/Solaris faction allowed Linux/x86 only into a low end Sun's market.

Could it be partially motivated by competition? Maybe they are less concerned with performance, and just want to eat up TSMC capacity which would be used by competitors

Core i3 is fanless. Moving to 5nm should help to give them a decent boost.

Perhaps they're going for efficiency.

Yes, they should charge Apple 30% of their revenue.

Also, they should insist to change "Made in China, designed in California" into "Made in China, High-tech from Taiwan, rest of the design from California".

If they don't comply, Apple should be thrown out of the FabStore.

It does seem like TSMC has strong leverage since it would take Apple a lot of time and work to move to a competitor.

On the other hand, the incentives seem pretty well aligned. TSMC presumably makes a lot of money when Apple is successful and sells a lot of chips. Having a customer that is demanding and willing to pay for huge volumes of bleeding edge parts helps TSMC build on their lead. Having early access to the best process helps Apple differentiate, and their business model gives them the margins to afford all of this.

Anyway, I don't see why either side would want to really change this setup.

They can do it for a time. Apple can then use some of the hundreds of billions they have on hand to prop up one of TSMC's competitors, as they did with the RAM suppliers.

ASML potentially has an even bigger hold on things as they supply TSMC, Samsung, and Intel with the EUV mirror optics.

Is money really the problem for Intel? The world is awash with capital. Intel’s bonds are yielding 3-4%, so they can easily raise more.

So when it fits our interests we support globalization, free trade, etc.., and when not, we go back to protectionism and government sponsorship?

Isn't this what our defense budget is for?

We should absolutely pour money into Intel.

The govt did it back when it was Japanese DRAM manufactures that were outcompeting the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEMATECH

That is an important observation, but also it is worth noting that Intel reports earnings tomorrow (ie, they're in a quiet period) with the CEO role changing hands in less than four weeks, so presumably they would announce this move with the earnings report (or address it on the investor call) if true.

Global Foundries was born from AMD splitting it out, and AMD learned through battle how to stop the giant and his patents from crushing you (or worse, keeping you out) by having your own critical patents important enough to force a cross licensing deal. I guess this is just a remake of x86/amd64 for them.

Someone has to fund Global Foundries with billions of dollars to plan and build out facilities, and that doesn't include the risk that they run into difficulties like Intel with scaling up. TSMC is reportedly spending $28b on capex this year, while GF is planning on spending $1.4b.

If this deal is real, It makes a ton of sense.

TSMC gets another bidder for its 5nm fab, which affects their pricing power versus bigger 5nm clients. In other words, TSMC makes more money both through increased fab utilization and through price elasticity of demand, while Intel gets to squeeze the gross margins of AMD and Apple.

It makes even less sense when you consider that all these i3/i5/i7/whatever designations are just marketing ploys that don't actually mean anything.

I have a number of computers with Intel processors of varying generations. I know by heart how many cores and threads each one has. I couldn't care less whether any given one is an i3/i5/i7 -- only people who have little clue about processors care about those brand name designations intended to command a higher price for about the same performance.

I think this makes sense in the format that Intel may make 5nm i3 CPUs branded as something else, the timeline for these chips is way far off though, 2022 at least. The M1X ravaging will have already happened to the high-spec SKU industry. Intel needs a response framed as 'we are there at that level'. That should be an i3-like (in design, not name) ultra low power but clocked to the moon CPU. Possibly breaking 5Ghz by a LOT.

No, there aren't any on supply side. It's just overwhelming demand for every kind of ICs across the industry. From 200mm fabs to mid-tier to cutting edge.

Electronics, and semiconductor industries just had the best year on record.

It seems just everything electronic related saw huge sales.

Whilst you can easily point your synthesis tool at a new cell library (this is the tool that takes the hardware description in a language like Verilog and produces a circuit that implements it) there is significant back-end work in getting the best out of any library.

Intel will probably have to rework their layouts, deal with new memory compilers that have produce memories with different characteristics and adapt memory interfaces that what they need. Their implementation engineers will take time to understand all of the new design rules, quirks and best optimisation strategies that come with an entirely new library (given this is an entirely different fab there could be significant differences).

I suspect that's why they're going for Core i3 first, they can get away without lots of detailed work and optimisation to really push the process. A straight-forward (ish) port what you've got and see how it goes will be good enough and will give their implementation engineers experience with the new library that they can then use to work on the higher end.

It's not as bad as you think. From a high-level: Modern Synthesis tools turn your RTL code (which is coded in an HDL or Hardware Description Language) into gates, and then map them to a library of "Standard Cells". These foundry-specific cells are physical plans for an AND, OR, XOR, gates, flip-flops, etc. Once the code is mapped to these cells they are run through a Place&Route tool, which lays out all the mapped standard cells onto a plane, and then wires them together in 3D following a set of design rules from whatever foundry you are using. Finally after verifying the physical properties of the output design, you ship it to your foundry using a industry standard format called "GDS2" which is basically a series of 2D layers for turning into actual lithography masks. Doing this process (commonly called "RTL to GDS2") is non-trivial, but could be done to target a new foundry in <6 months. Now, Intel is known to use some custom layout methods rather than this Synthesized flow I've described, but that's pretty out of vogue and is a vestige of their early days.

At a high level, Verilog, a widely used hardware description language, is portable to almost any fab.

There will be all kinds of layouts for specific subcomponents which are harder to move between providers, but I would guess that the move from 14nm Intel to 5nm TSMC will more than outweigh all the layout based optimizations.

Intel makes more revenue and profits than all the companies you have listed combined except apple.

Risk. Outsourcing all the manufacturing process has several a lot of uncertainty that they need to start figuring out. By the time they decide to manufacture their flagship chips, all the uncertainty will be already in the past lowering a lot the risk. It is better to screw it up with low-end, cheaper chips, than with the ones that represents the brand (high-end)

Also vanity. It's a bad look if Intel's top-end chips aren't made by Intel.

I think i3 is mid-range. Low-end would be Pentium and Celeron.

The long lead time between plan and production means he will be looking 5+ years out. Basically, he is going to need to science the shit out of this situation he will be in in ~5-7 years where AMD, Apple, QC, and Samsung won and everyone else in their client list is jumping ship to ARM Fabs (QC, Samsung) with more quantity small-node Fabs. You're looking at Good Arm Chromebooks, a Surface Pro X that doesn't suck, ETC.

Microcosm of America...

For 2021, Apple booked 80% of 5nm, per:

https://digital-overload.com/2020/12/22/apple-buys-80-of-5nm...

TSMC is also continually building new fabs. And this whole TrendForce report is unconfirmed.

Apple booked 80% of TSMC's 5nm process for 2021, so I suppose Intel's volumes won't be astronomical.

https://wccftech.com/apple-secured-80-tsmc-5nm-production-ca...

Based on the fact there is contention between Apple, Nvidia and AMD already, this will be interesting.

And by proxy it makes Taiwan more strategic. Control Taiwan, control the worlds chip supply.

Also ASML

Tech world needs a TSMC competitor.