Intel Launches $1B Fund to Build a Foundry Innovation Ecosystem
intel.com
intel.com
For a long time, the discussion was that Intel had failed, failed and failed again to get their next generation fabs operating at acceptable yields that they were a couple of generations behind TSMC.
Which was a huge departure from their decades of first or least competitive on fabs.
Intel announced they would start having some chips produced by TSMC, so they could try and harness benefits of the latest, or the generation behind latest for their chips.
In short Intel was seen as incompetent and could no longer compete with their competitors. The long Intel domination was sliding away.
Then people started worrying about Taiwan. Intel got a few billion dollars in a sweet contract with the military, building fabs in the US became the major push in tech.
Since then, the perspective has been much more positive for Intel and their role in building domestically.
Intels inability to build a latest generation fab has not changed.
personally, I think the gloom and doom around Intel is hate-hype. It's so fun to look at the giants and laugh, but they're still the giants. If you look at the landscape right now, and ignore the past, you see Intel and AMD in a slugfest for domination, and no (?) real other contenders. If AMD were the incumbent, we'd all be cheering Intel, but they're still neck-and-neck regardless. And Intel has other focii, like compilers, HPC software, kiosk form factors, etc, that help round out the offerings (and those are just things I'm familiar with).
20 years ago Microsoft was evil and google was the little-man's angel. Now I'm much more a fan of MS than Google, and feel MS is moving in the right direction while Google is not. It seems generational.
There is no reason to expect success by infusing cash.
That is going to take ~5 years, according to Intel's publicly released roadmaps (and if they actually succeed, which they may not).
That being said, Intel's "Intel 7" manufacturing node that they are shipping Desktop and Laptop processors on currently is surprisingly competitive. In the markets Intel is competing in, only Apple is currently using a more advanced manufacturing process to my knowledge. TSMC's N7 process, used by AMD and many others seems to be pretty similar in performance and efficiency.
N5 (which Apple uses), was late 2019 with the A14 processor with AMD starting to jump in this year with it.
N3 should be out this year, more than likely with another flagship apple product.
Now. As per Intels roadmap, https://www.anandtech.com/show/16823/ , They should have Intel 4 out later this year. Which should be slightly faster than N5. The big question is whether they stick to their schedules.
What I’d say matters the most is whether Intel can keep up / take back the lead in terms of innovation with TSMC / AMD / all ARM things. The next 5 years will be super interesting to see how things develop.
Probably the most important factor in Intel's success is its (relatively) new CEO's ability to fix cultural problems and internal dysfunction that inhibit any technical improvement.
At least this is a sign that Intel recognizes this and is reaching out to startups - only time can tell if it works.
They don't like it either - it's expensive and slow, but there's nothing else on the horizon so it's not worth complaining about.
Why? Because China would flood the world with dirt cheap open source based super performant (mobile/desktop/servers) royalty-free RISC-V cpus (and gpus...) using a top notch node process (that with tons of backdoors ofc)?
ASML EUV tool: 20 millions of $, then 100 millions of $, and the next one would be 320 millions of $?
The better question is why is the stock up several hundred percent in the past few years, even after falling a bit recently? The business is growing, but not that much. Good company, bad price.
Additionally, all tech stocks are doing poorly over the past month or two.
Intel is roughly a quarter to a third the size of NVidia, a tenth the size of Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft... AMD is starting to eat into the server market, and ARM is more of an existential threat now that Apple sells ARM-based computers and Amazon is deploying ARM based servers. They are no longer a powerhouse, and IMHO, very likely won't ever regain their lead. I think Intel is going to end up like IBM, largely irrelevant, but still hobbling along somehow how as a ghost of its former self. Once single core performance on ARM meaningfully exceeds x86 (which it likely will because energy efficiency will eventually be the defining factor to enable higher speeds) for their most profitable markets, like Fintech it'll be "game over"[1] for Intel.
Intel's management has as a matter of fact: fucked around for the last decade. There is little they can do at this point short of a miracle, to undo their chicanery and prevent the "find out" portion as the market leaves them behind. It's just too bad it's the employees and retail stock holders who will get fucked over in the end.
[1] "Game over" for a multi-billion dollar juggernaut that lasted decades is hobbling along shilling their shittiest technology for decades (think HP).
- Intel is not already experienced in designing high-end graphics cards, so there's less institutional knowledge in the company
- Intel iGPUs have a mediocre reputation
- Intel has a history of failed attempts to enter the GPU/accelerator space (e.g. i740 and Larabee)
- DG2 has been delayed from the timeline that was expected in the techspace when we first heard about it
- The person leading Intel Xe is Raja Koduri who led AMD graphics during AMD Vega (though it's unclear how responsible he is for its shortcomings) and arguably has a history of overpromising.
That said I'm pretty bullish on Intel GPUs because supply still hasn't caught up with demand, so as long as they are reasonably functional, I think they will succeed.
Raja was the technical leader of ATI in 2001+. His hands were involved in every single GPU from that time until Vega.
Intel Optane, Itanium, Xeon Phi, Cell-phone Atom (yes, this was a thing), Intel Edison, etc. etc.
Intel pretty much makes good Ethernet adapters, Wifi adapters, and CPUs these days. Everything else they've tried seems to die off a few years later.
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Its like seeing "Google" try to make a new free webservice. We all know Google has the expertise to make it work, but for some reason, it doesn't.
Similarly, Intel has a wide variety of experts in a number of fields related to chip-making, along with historically successful products and a few chips that are highly important in the field. But something is clearly "off" with Intel's current culture.
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Intel has some GPU-engineers working for them. The question is if the organization as a whole can actually release a product (step 1), and then support it for more than 5 years.
I think its a bit of the "curse of the successful company". No matter what product Intel makes, there's no way its going to make as much money as Intel's CPUs. So the business-minds / bean-counters kill the product.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Arc
Likely they'll be subject to the same price gouging and limited supply as AMD and NVidia GPUs...
[1] https://www.techtimes.com/articles/270196/20220106/intel-arc...
I don't know what will happen in mainland China in 15 years either. 15 years ago it was materially different.
Startups for chip tech is a joke. The knowledge and domain specific equipment necessary is so great that you can't just pick up a tutorial through Google and use a framework to make your product. We need to tax these behemoths and put that into the education and tooling of people. That's how we create competitive markets and innovation.
What are you talking about?
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/education/highered/h...
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/education/highered/u...
https://research.tsmc.com/english/collaborations/academic/un...
They are throwing money wherever they can find an audience.
> "Startups for chip tech is a joke."
Last time I checked, there was a startup called SiFive in the US from a bunch of UC Berkeley professors which successfully had its founders invent a whole new instruction set, RISC-V, a compiler for it, and are now building the highest-performing RISC-V chips on the market.
> "can't just pick up a tutorial through Google and use a framework to make your product"
Because Chips are extremely hard to make and engineer and there are things in this world that can't be boiled down to an internet tutorial. Imagine if we had "Building a Stealth Bomber" as an online course. Or even "Building a SpaceX Rocket" as a course. Chipmaking is more expensive than designing a rocket. This completely ignores the unbelievable difficulty of chipmaking and tries to reduce it to a CRUD application.
> "We need to tax these behemoths and put that into the education and tooling of people."
OK, by your own admission there is a ton of industry-specific knowledge. As linked above, fabs are trying to get into universities where they can, but finding qualified people is difficult. I don't know how taxation would help solve this problem in any way, because government is typically even less efficient at teaching domain-specific knowledge than industry.
The problem we find ourselves in is that we have no competition. If Intel is the only one funding, at very specific institutions, for their own gain, that's not competition. You need competition to innovate. You need a lot of money and equipment to learn. Intel is not putting that in the hands of any institution they don't control.
I'm saying that you can't make a startup for chips out of nowhere like you can software startups. We have to have the underlying education first. The U.S. does not have this, and continues to fall over itself because tech companies have significant Democrat control that won't tax them.
plenty of state schools remain comparatively affordable
and only reason for astronomical cost of life is NIMBY