Intel puts 1nm process (10A) on the roadmap for 2027
tomshardware.com
tomshardware.com
Intel made huge error when they decided to delay DUV -> EUV transition. Now Intel is the first to order ASML’s EXE:5200 and push High-NA. PoverVia and RibbonFET are what Intel is going to use. Meanwhile Intel's EUV 3nm chips are coming out this year.
Since Intel's early designs for a discrete GPU were based off introducing a third x86 microarchitecture, the failure was not really surprising.
Pretty sure you got that backwards. Intel fell behind because their fab advantage dissipated as they struggled on 14nm for 4 generations longer than their timelines anticipated, their chip design was actually doing alright at the time (without the foreknowledge of Spectre, of course).
In addition, AMD and Intel went pretty tit-for-tat all the way through 90nm; with AMD usually having the superior per-node technology (e.g. AMD 90nm > Intel 90nm) and Intel usually being slightly ahead in node-size. Ironically, similar to Intel and Samsung/TSMC/etc now, in reverse. That didn't really fall apart until 65nm, and really crash until 45nm.
Intel being stuck on 14nm for so long was basically a single sustained fab failure, but their inability to make any significant improvements to the Skylake CPU core or deliver an improved iGPU during those years also illustrates some severe problems on the chip design side of the company: they're too trusting of what their fab teams promise, and their chip designs are too closely tied to a particular fab process preventing them from porting their designs to a working process when things go wrong with their fab plans.
> So all of a sudden, as Warren Buffet says, “You don’t know who’s swimming naked until the tide goes out.” When the tide went out with the process technology, and hey, we were swimming naked, our designs were not competitive. So all of a sudden we realized, “Huh, the rising tide ain’t saving us. We don’t have leadership architecture anymore.” And you saw the exposure.
Intel can get "lucky" too, so what happened?
Did so much harm to the industry and the quality of software.
> Intel made huge error when they decided to delay DUV -> EUV transition.
Just as an FYI, that error was made when the CEO was an engineer, not an MBA.
And I find it amusing for folks here to cheer Grovian culture. Andy Grove's management style had all of what people criticize Amazon's culture, on steroids. Indeed, I believe Jeff Bezos took some of the 14 leadership principles from Grove (who was CEO at that time).
People tend to forgive a leader's flaws, including really terrible flaws, if the leader seems to be producing results that people like.
And not just any engineer, an engineer who specifically came from the fab side of things and not the chip design side of things.
History showed the engineers to be wrong, and here we are with Intel trying to compete with TSMC for customers.
I imagine a failed process step (10nm) would have been an even worse disaster if they had external customers for it.
I don't know how else to describe it, but it's just a justification system for a deep hierarchy to belittle the workers.
I say this having worked years in the inner engineering sanctum of Apple where none of this bullshit existed (both during and after the Steve Jobs era).
I don't disagree that they're often contradictory but I can't come up with directly opposed pairings.
(Not that it matters to your point, it's just bugging me to be spinning my wheels trying to come up with the pairs)
Hm... no? Most of the EUV roadmap decisions were likely finalized c. 2009-2010 when they bet on double patterning for what would become the 14nm node. That was under Paul Otellini, who was an MBA who climbed the ladder in Intel via the sales and marketing organization.
The most important question must be discussed at C-suite. Intel didn't have have enough people there to make decisions.
> Engineering based businesses have to manage both the engineering and the business side. Failing to do that means disaster.
Top engineers can learn to manage business at the highest levels. Business leaders can't learn enough engineering to manage engineering companies.
Cisco Systems was led by CEO John T. Chambers from 1995-2015. His education was BS, BA in business and a JD. After he got his MBA he started in sales. During his time as CEO at Cisco, sales went from $1.9 billion to $49.2 billion. In 2000, Cisco became the most valuable company in the world.
Before Chambers was John Morgridge, who was an MBA. He helped oust the two founding engineers. Before him was Bill Graves (who had a BS in physics, but was only at Cisco for a year).
If the grandparent poster really meant "It is quite difficult", then it seems that we have arrived at a more accurate representation of the original argument, and thus 0xbadcafebee has been contributing greatly to the discussion.
Ironically given the subject matter, this is similar to how math proofs work . . .
1. They haven't tried creating a product and then making money off it. It's amazing how painfully difficult that can be (without good Sales and Marketing).
2. They haven't done a (good) MBA and don't understand how much goes into it, so write it off as similar to an undergraduate business degree.
3. They have a superiority complex from their university days where engineering was the hardest discipline.
Pat Gelsigner's favourite phrase is "We all work for Sales and Marketing". He says it over and over. I think at this time in Intel's history an engineer is the better one to be running the ship, but the idea that you need to be 100% tech savvy to run a successful tech company is, as you proved through your example, patently false. A good CTO can make all the difference in the product, while a good MBA-type CEO can focus on everything else.
I’ve worked at both large and small companies, and engineers do tend to forget that no matter how good what they build is, it’s going nowhere without someone selling it.
Similarly, people on the business side often neglect the blood sweat and tears that can sometimes go into building something, forgetting sometimes that without a product there is no sales or marketing.
I really liked this response, but this is HN, people love romanticizing engineers to a fault.
At the end of the day, it’s just another false dichotomy. There are shitty business people just as there are shitty engineers.
Best to not be married to anyone idea in this case and just take it on a case by case basis.
That's such a banal insight that it's absurd so many businesses screw it up (in either direction) so badly.
PMs will be ready to roll out a product with their finger on the button and Sales is like yo wtf we don't even know what we're charging for it yet or it's not even built into cpq/billing yet. So absurd that it's almost funny
There's basically no crunch in MBA land.
And there definitely wasn't some bubble going on distorting that value
On the other hand, it's not obvious Chambers can be counted as a success in running an "engineering company". Chambers ran an acquisition company. It's entirely possible that an acquisition company was a more profitable idea than an an engineering company, but still.
I think the primary criticism engineers have against "MBAs" is that they make money, but frequently destroy value.
So "during his time as CEO at Cisco, sales went from $1.9 billion to $49.2 billion." is clear evidence of making money, but is not at all clear evidence of producing value and not any evidence at all of producing more money or value in the US in aggregate.
I don't think very many engineers would agree that "value == money," but it wouldn't surprise me if that was a core axiom of many people defending "MBA" leadership.
This is very very left field, but when the US went off the gold standard, money ceased to have a hard relationship to value because money could be invented and thus money games became more profitable than producing. It's worth contemplating China's strategy. Our money first businesses sending production to China made china the place where value is created. So when covid hit and we needed masks, we had money, but not value and people started to understand the difference leading to many of the efforts we see now like CHIPS. War is an economic shift where value is everything and money is nothing, and since the world is heating up (metaphorically and literally), it's worth centering arguments around value produced rather than money made.
Arista is doing very well now but Cisco is long past that growth era.
So many flaws with it:
0. MBAs are Masters degrees, which means that they're the second degree of those who have them. For example, Tim Cook's first degree was an Industrial Engineering degree, and his masters degree was an MBA. So the idea that someone who has an MBA is incapable of learning how to do technical work is essentially backwards.
1. How many tens if not hundreds of thousands of self-taught no-degree engineers are out there coding right now? If a person without an engineering degree can write code, build technical products, etc, what makes you think that a person with a business degree can't learn or understand technological concepts? Aren't some of the most famous technical founders of Silicon Valley college drop-outs? If Steve Wozniak could design the Apple II without having finished his engineering degree couldn't someone who happens to have a business degree do the same?
2. What makes you think that the information within an MBA is trivial to learn and apply effectively? Do engineers know when to structure the company in a matrix organizational structure versus a foundational organizational structure? Do engineers know how to apply organizational behavior techniques to diagnose and resolve group psychology issues like demotivated teams or poor product quality? Do engineers know how to evaluate the business and political climate of a different region to decide what type of business structure to enter into when expanding internationally? Do engineers know how read the financial disclosures of a company to evaluate whether they are a healthy company, how much their valuation should be, whether they should be acquired? Do they know how to prepare a balance sheet, statement of cash flows, or income statement? The list goes on and on - even if an MBA won't confuse you with Fourier transforms, the time investment to learn all the concepts is similar to any degree with similar credit hours.
3. How much in-the-weeds technical work do you think top management is doing at engineering companies anyway?
4. An MBA is a breadth degree just like your typical computer engineering or computer science degree. Just like engineers, people who get MBAs build most of their skill set through on-the-job experience. For example, in computer engineering you might learn about power systems, transistors, microcontroller programming, digital circuit design, and analog circuit design, but it's unlikely that you would do all of those things in one career path. In the same way, an MBA is a foundation in a number of topics: accounting, corporate finance, organizational behavior, operations, information technology, entrepreneurship, etc. The measure of the person who has the degree isn't just the content of the degree, it's where that starting point leads them and how effective they build their career on top of it.
The better question is, do MBAs?
> How much in-the-weeds technical work do you think top management is doing at engineering companies anyway?
You don't have to be in the technical weeds to be making decisions where technical considerations are important.
Good leaders don't need to be technical, though it helps, and just as an engineering degree doesn't guarantee a good IC, an MBA doesn't guarantee a good leader. But it's less appealing to complain about bad employees, and also it's easy to forget that even good employees (on both "sides" of the IC/management divide) can make bad decisions if there's incomplete info and someone has to make a judgement call
It wasn't simply the engineers going nuts trying to make a huge jump all at once. They were taking a bunch of unique risks in order to follow a different path from the rest of the industry. If Intel had planned to follow a similar EUV timeline to the rest of the industry, they would have been subject to the same risks as everyone else regarding EUV and probably could have maintained a moderate lead throughout that transition, with a worst-case outcome being that they would be part of an industry-wide failure to keep up with Moore's Law if EUV didn't work out. Instead, they ended up years behind.
Is that actually true? The direct competitor to Intel 10nm is TSMC N7, which is an overall similar process - DUV, multiple patterning etc. -, achieves similar performance and power efficiency, and had a similar timeline to how the Intel process played out (as opposed to how it was originally scheduled). TSMC also only began using EUV for processes following N7.
In both cases loudest voices would be from someone who has not experienced them and seeing only top of iceberg.
If Engineering and Business work _together_ it doesn't matter who's in the lead position.
I can see in the roadmap slide that 10A "arrives" in late 2027. However, the Intel roadmap also shows both intel4/3 and intel 20A/18A present from the start of 2023. The article mentions that 18A/20A nodes have been in "some form of production since 2023". Meanwhile, current Intel chips are still partially outsourced to TSMC, and Intel has promised zetta-scale systems by 2027.
Isn’t that just their GPUs?
A 3cm x 3cm x 3cm cube could fit a hell of a lot of transistors and gates even if it is 20nm.
I know a little more about how semiconductors work; the heat parts are related to the waste energy from the transistors change between conducting and not. Since the semi-conduction parts need the conduction paths opened or closed by changing charge levels in the narrow parts. I can barely imagine some sort of interference based optical chip might not generate heat at the logic combination part, but something some-where's gotta flip/flop and that's probably where the heat will exist.
The other option we've heard about for decades involves better conduction of the heat out of the chip. If that's the case thermally conductive layers could sandwich between stacked 2D layers. Maybe that'll finally be economically viable for high density logic. As far as RAM stacking seems to work well enough so far.
I worked in a Fab for a year and the complexity is mind blowing. I don't see how they can execute to build those nodes and get the yields under control in such a short timeframe.
Best of luck to them.
Really only 2. Because Intel 7 was so late that it just happened to be close to ready when they announced 5 in 4 years.
So it’s 2 in 4 years. In reality is more like 2 in 5 years because 20A won’t have wide spread products so soon.
However, they do have good timing because the world is about to enter a period where chip designers will be desperate to get new AI chips manufactured.
There is only one cutting edge fab which is TSMC. Chip designers want a second supplier desperately to create some competition.
I think 20A/18A will only be used by products customer can buy in mid-2025 - not late 2024 like they said.
You can see here that Intel has already delayed everything by 1-2 quarters from their 2022 roadmap:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/17448/intel-4-process-node-in...
With any Intel roadmap, delay each point by 1-2 quarters.
What happens if AI is a bubble and those companies don't get an ROI? What if they can't find a way to monetize AI because consumers just see it as a commodity? What if after ramp up AI chip purchase dies down because models are already trained and inference doesn't need that much compute?
AI is going to cause a huge uplift in chip demand from clouds to small devices.
I heard predictions for increase in AI PC sales but I don't buy it. That remains to be proven.
So we are left with data centers. Isn't that right?
Every chip will eventually need to be replaced with one that can do inference for a massive AI model. And we will need more chips to put in more places.
Marketing, Gate pitch, Metal Pitch, Year
7nm, 60nm, 40nm, 2018
5nm, 51nm, 30nm, 2020
3nm, 48nm, 24nm, 2022
2nm, 45nm, 20nm, 2024
1nm, 42nm, 16nm, 2026
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_nm_process
> The phrase "7 nm" does not refer to any dimension on the integrated circuits, and has no relation to gate length, metal pitch, or gate pitch; since at least 1997, "node" has become a commercial name for marketing purposes that indicates new generations of process technologies, without any relation to physical properties. However, the smallest dimension within an individual transistor, the fin width, can sometimes be 7 nm. TSMC and Samsung's "10 nm" (10 LPE) processes are somewhere between Intel's "14 nm" and "10 nm" processes in transistor density.
Occassionally a given process will correspond to actual sizes but it's more out of luck than anything else.
The divergence is because when FinFET layout was introduced, it gave as much of as improvement as a node shrink would have otherwise done.
See also: AMD Athlon "3000" CPUs, clocked at only 2.x GHz, performing "as well as an equivalent" 3.0GHz Intel CPU,
But the step from 2 to 1nm shrunk gate pitch to 93.3% instead of the suggested 50%, a large 87% marketing hype. Or viewed as a shrink by only 6.7%, it's a whopping 600+% hype.
Today, the industry has regressed to hyping tiny incremental gains in narrow sub-metrics which only rarely have a material impact on overall performance across an entire system or most applications and usually at higher cost. Those that entered the industry in the last 15 years don't really appreciate just how much progress has slowed to a crawl.
Sadly, looking at the ten year roadmap projections from the likes of IMEC, there aren't any big leaps on the horizon. Progress will come mostly in single-digit percentages and most gains will be increasingly conditional (eg limited to one logic type or only in certain contexts). And the costs are going to keep skyrocketing. I hope we'll "get lucky" with some unexpected breakthrough but there's no reason to expect that.
Except latency. RAM (uncached) latency managed maybe 3x (250ns in the 80s to sub-100ns these days)?
The only really significant latency improvement is spinning-disks to SSD.
We could probably get 2x as fast even today in multithread if we want but software hasn’t kept up in demand.
Instead, we are likely to start to get 2x as fast in AI accelerators every 2-3 years.
I can't wait for the day when marketing nanometer figures blow right past atomic size and we're measuring feature sizes in quarks. By the time feature sizes DO actually get close to atomic size from an engineering perspective, marketing will be damn near the planck length.
The end result seems crazy now but it's the result a set of decisions that were individually rational, not marketing-driven, at each step.
A table on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2_nm_process suggests:
'20 angstrom (Intel)' ~= 2 nanometer (industry)
Process Gate Metal Year
7 nm 60 nm 40 nm 2018
5 nm 51 nm 30 nm 2020
3 nm 48 nm 24 nm 2022
2 nm 45 nm 20 nm 2024
1 nm 42 nm 16 nm 2026
Also of note, IIRC some of AMD's presentations around when Ryzen launched involved mention that cache / memory (and maybe some other features?) on CPUs weren't scaling down effectively past 7 ~ 5 nm, which is one of the reasons GPUs had the cores and then external memory controllers. I know automakers and a bunch of other consumers that would like bulk (cheap) products made on modern wafers (300mm) with a semi-modern process that's super inexpensive. Particularly power ICs which would prefer lower leakage even if it means a slower response.
And while decreasing the gate and metal pitch, also the logic gates have shrunk to be smaller (typically expressed by measuring the height of a gate in amount of metal tracks) from 9tracks down to 6tracks.
Changing the transistor from planar to fins, and now hopefully to ribbons with eventually stacked pmos and nmos are a big enabler.
That said, we’re still not hitting the ideal scaling numbers. We’re just doing somewhat better than what’s suggested by poly and metal pitch only.
Standard cell height pitch has a similar story, 270nm height is possible but means high parasitics induced RC delay. For good performance 300nm or higher height pitches are used.
These tables miss a huge context though. TSMC N7 drawn gate length is like 20nm, not 60nm. This pitch includes diffusion (source/drain) and contacts. Biggest limit is interconnect (vias are impossible to shrink as we make them now).
https://read.nxtbook.com/ieee/spectrum/spectrum_na_august_20...
Scroll down a bit for a nice overview.
Seriously. I don’t understand why so many people care that the “nm” number is a marketing term. The chip manufacturing processes are now often improving in ways that measuring the minimum pitch doesn’t really capture. So they bump down the number whenever it improves in some other way. It’s that simple.
I have designed a standard cell library. I don’t care what number they use in marketing. If you actually want to know the performance/characteristics/dimensions of the process there are so many other numbers you need to know and you’d refer to the actual documentation.
As an end user customers, all I need to know is that “3nm” is slightly better in performance/density/power than “4nm”, and the label they assign achieves that goal.
Tbh I used to not care until they started lying about power consumption too.
* iPhones count up
* Ubuntu LTS counts YRMO 24 months from April
* Debian counts toy story characters
* CPU nodes count down
"lattice parameter of 0.543 nm ... nearest neighbor distance is 0.235 nm"
It’s a marketing number and has been for many years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count#Microprocesso...
But nm size is so baked into culture, it didn't take off.
Angstrom is kind of a fun word, so I’m sure a few nodes will be named after that.
But it really doesn’t matter. There’s not a single physical number you can extract from the process that accurately describes its performance. So just continuing to use “nm” and assigning some number that feels right is actually a reasonable approach.
IMO it is interesting to get a general idea of where the companies are, but in the end the element size doesn’t matter to end users. People should check the linpack benchmarks of the chips that come out, or whatever.
The actual transistors are around 40nm across [1]. They change the geometry of the features, either the shape of the transistor gate or even the method of power delivery. All really incredible features and worthy of awe. Just not actually making transistors with finger-countable number of atoms.
So you get 65, 40, 28, 20, 14, 10, 7, 5, 3, 2, 1 ...
But then they started having to cheat: you can take a big transistor and "fold" it vertically to be smaller but still have the same gate area, etc... The actual feature sizes may not have changed much but you have the 2x density increase, so you name your new node "32nm" even though the actual width of the gate feature when seen from above didn't change, etc...
But then somewhere around 10nm everyone just gave up and started handing out random numbers. TSMC's 3nm process is not remotely a 2x density increase over 5nm, for example.
There's also a distinction between "drawn length" which is the number specified by the designer, and the actual feature size on silicon. This can be scaled up or down either completely arbitrarily (meaning the drawn length is a total sham) or optically (meaning the drawn length is real but the chip is fabricated with a magnification <1)
Obviously there's a ton of complexity here and lots of cheats and optimizations were done over the decades that weren't directly related to linear sizing. But I stand behind the threshold I gave: the big discontinuity in the industry, where "node size" and "feature size" clearly began to significantly diverge, was the introduction of finfet/tri-gate transistors in Intel 32nm.
The "divergence" started happening long before finfets where Intel is concerned, but they weren't manufacturing for anyone else. For the rest of the foundries, it still followed somewhat logically, if not exactly, down to 14 at least.
Hahaha
You can see this if you compare 2 processes: Intel 45nm had 2,779,468 transistors/mm², and the Apple A14 (7nm) had a transistor density of 134,100,000 t/mm²
2,779,468*(45/7)²=114,865,769, so the two are quite close.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count#Microprocesso...
As it became harder to shrink the minimum feature size, they figured out other ways to shrink. For example various ways of stacking things on top of each other rather than having them side by side[1].
As such they could cram more transistors in the same area compared to a planar transistor, and hence you got the same effect as shrinking the minumum feature size.
Not sure exactly how they name things, but one could calculate what feature size would have been required to get a given transistor density using a plain planar transistor, for comparison.
[1]: https://semiengineering.com/from-finfets-to-gate-all-around/
Considering that the order of magnitude of an atom’s radius is 1 Å (or 100 pm, or 100 000 fm), I really doubt any chip is thinner than 1 fm.
[1] I know Samsung has foundry services (among others) but I don’t think they have the leading node capabilities that really compete with TSMC.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/intel-splits-itself-two-aid-1...
But here's the thing: if you decide to do neither then you definitely lose. But, more importantly, no executive would lose their head from making a wrong decision. It's one of these situations where doing anything, even the wrong thing, is better than doing nothing because doing nothing will definitely lose.
Intel's 10nm process seemed like a similar kind of inflection point. Back in the mid-2010s it wasn't clear what the future of lithography would be. Was it EUV? Was in X-ray lithography? Something else? Intel seemed unable to commit. I bet no executive wanted to put their ass on the line and be wrong. So Intel loses to ASML and TSMC but it's OK because all the executives kept getting paid.
I forget the exact timelines but Intel's 10nm transition was first predicted in 2014 (?) and it got delayed at least 5 years. Prior to this, Intel's process improvements were its secret weapon. It constantly stayed ahead of the competition. There were hiccups though, most notably the Pentium 4 transition in the Gigahertz race (only saved by the Pentium 3 -> Centrino -> Core architecture transition) and pushing EPIC/Itanium where they got killed by Athlon 64 and it's x86_64 architecture.
I see the same problems at Boeing: once engineering-driven people companies get taken over by finance leeches. This usually follows an actual or virtual monopoly, just as Steve Jobs described [1].
I just remember thinking, finally, someone with some authority is getting this ball moving.
We needed and had purchased a rather expensive database software license, however, we didn't have the hardware yet to run that database. The guys doing hardware spent MONTHS debating on which $10k piece of hardware they'd pick to run the DB. The DB license cost? Something like $0.5 mill.
As one engineer said to me "I don't care what hardware you guys get, purchase them all! We are wasting god knows how much money on a license we can't use because we don't have the hardware to install it on!"
E.g. I've been in meetings with multiple developers who, if you add up everyone's salary, is well over $1 million/year, debating for way too much time on whether it's worth it to buy a $500/month service to help automate some aspect of devops.
Maybe this wasn't the case for your specific anecdote, but in the scenario I'm describing I got the feeling that a lot of people think about business purchases in the context of their own personal finances rather than in the context of the business's finances. Leading people to be extremely cautious with things like a $10k purchase that would be "expensive" if purchased as an individual and "cheap" if purchased as a company.
In those cases, getting an exec to come in and pull the trigger can help. The exec is used to looking at big picture budgets/strategy, which IC's aren't. (Although I'm sure someone here can come up with another anecdote proving that wrong)
Every so often my company would provide lunches for the developers. However, they didn't want to spend too much money doing this. So how did they resolve it? They put together a committee of devs to discuss lunch options/etc. Easily 1+million/year of salary in one room debating whether we do Jimmy Johns or McDonalds and how they'd get the food to the office.
For $2000, you can get some pretty nice catering for 100 people. But like you said, people just seem bad at thinking of that sort of big picture.
I find that still happens organically in smaller companies without, but in larger companies things trend towards more clique like behaviour without it (caveat small sample size)
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1985/11/24/nyregion/company-cafeteri...
https://taxnews.ey.com/news/2019-0493-employer-must-substant...
"Snacks
The TAM separately considers whether the value of snacks provided to employees is excludable from income under Section 119. Rather than revisit the business reasons previously analyzed, the TAM relies on Tougher v. Commissioner, 441 F.2d 1148 (9th Cir. 1971), to determine that the snacks are not meals. Accordingly, a snack cannot be a meal furnished for the convenience of the employer. Nevertheless, the TAM does conclude that the value of the snacks is excludable from employee income as de minimis fringe benefits under Section 132(e)(1)."
Meanwhile, there is an accountant somewhere that thinks he's a genius for keeping the hardware budget in check.
It's super important to consider the human cost and opportunity cost of each decision, and it's scaling characteristics.
Eg: spending $20+k on a ci system like circleci, GitHub actions, whatever might feel like a big purchase, but if you consider that split by the number of developers using it, their salaries, and that in general it scales with your head count rather than user count suddenly it's pretty attractive.
On the other hand some other seemingly small (unit) cost that applies per user of your product might be worth optimizing/eliminating as that can have a big impact on your margins - but even then you need to balance it against opportunity cost. We could increase margins by x% with y investment, or increase revenue by z doing something else where the delta of revenue outweighs the better margins.
Basically it's a big juggling act involving numbers that we're not used to dealing with in our personal finance and you need to ground your thinking in terms scaling characteristics and the companies overall revenue/burn to appreciate what actually moves the needle.
A crap boss is one that doesn't make choices, a good boss is one that does, a great boss is one that makes sure that the best of the possible choices is made giving the data at hand.
Having careers and heads depending on making the wrong choice just pushed to paralysis.
Weird way to think of this problem (IMO). I'd think there would always be a mixed wired and wireless world.
Even if customers don't end up using wired connections to their homes, you'd still need wired connection to the antennas servicing a home, neighborhood, apartment building. That's where a lot of Telcos today are making their money. Not to the customer, but to Tmobile or At&t as the put in a fiber line directly to the antenna towers.
And even if google wanted to be the end to end ISP for someone, they'd benefit from a vast fiber network even if they later decided it wireless was the best, because they already have the fiber wherever they'd need their wireless antenna.
Wireless bandwidth keeps going up. Wireless is already >1Gbps inside a building. What if instead of spending $5000 per house, you could use tightbeam wireless or highly cellular network with >1Gbps bandwidth? You may have spent billions on a network that it would take decades to amortize and have it be made worthless by wireless last mile delivery.
I'd presume you'd not cut the existing wired customers over to wireless. So it's not like the $5000 spent is lost, it's just that you can do new customers for cheaper (if you expect a lot of growth in an area).
Overbuilds is a weird one. They can make sense if it's a brand new community as you can get a BUNCH of homes done for cheap and can pretty much immediately turn on internet when someone moves in.
I'm not sure what you mean by "overbuild" here. I mean it in the sense that both AT&T Fiber and Verizon provide services to the same homes. US policy notionally tries to encourage this (because, you know, markets solve everything) but if you have 100K homes and 40% of them get service regardless, having 2 competitors means each ISP has to recoup their costs from half as many homes.
Generally, a developer already owns the rights to everything so it's just working with them to get everything done. And they like it because who doesn't want an internet ready community to sell?
You end up talking $100 per unit vs the $2000 or $5000. Which is a great discount for the ISP.
That's not even necessarily true. The $2000-$5000 is a one time cost, and then that piece of fiber could last for 50 years. Having to amortize $40-$100/year against a service that costs around that much a month isn't fatal. Meanwhile they're offering service for whatever maximum speed so you set your price for that $1 below theirs and then charge $10-$20/month more for double that speed which they can't offer at all. Half the customers take you up on the higher speeds and you make back your costs, the other half take the $1/month discount and your competitor is the one who gets destroyed.
There is a nice mental framework for viewing such things. It has a bit of a religious origin, but it effectively explains and describes what you're seeing (I'm viewing it through an atheistic lens). I mean, the egregore.
This is the natural life cycle of an egregore! Which is explained by having two groups, those that serve the purpose the egregore was created for (engineers, people that provide value), and those that serve the egregore itself (financials, people that extract value). Both these groups need to exist for a healthy entity to exist. But the balance (seems to) always tip - the egregore eventually chooses the group that serves the egregore to lead - when that happens, the original vision is often lost, and the company looses customer trust by altering the relation the customer has with the egregore (how much value the customer extracts from the egregore vs how much value the egregore extracts from the customer).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egregore#:~:text=Egregore%20(a....
This pattern comes up, an possible indication of this flip: when the original owners of a company are pushed out, or leave.
from this recent thread, which is rather relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39491863
If it wasn't for Google Fiber, I'm certain that we'd be stuck with 20mbps speeds, the cable/DSL monopoly, and we wouldn't have the likes of the OTT services and the choices that we have today. Or at least it would have been delayed by quite a bit.
I worked for a company that was an equipment vendor for Google Fiber and other service providers.
Google Fiber deployed to the Kansas Cities, making themselves credible competition. Then, they announced 20 cities they would deploy to. Suddenly, incumbents in 20 cities had deployment plans and deployed before Google Fiber got anywhere, and then Google Fiber decided not to do any new deployments.
Would the incumbents have deployed without Google Fiber's credible competitive announcements? Maybe? We'd need inside information to know for sure. It sure doesn't feel like they would have though.
Of COURSE they wouldn't!
If google fiber hadn't happened, all providers would have continued sitting on their collective asses, soaking as much money as possible, doing the least possible legally permissible work, nickle-and-diming customers as much as possible.
Those countries have governments willing to regulate for the benefit of the consumer, or else to provide the service directly[1]. That there are better ways to do something doesn't mean it's not valuable to have done.
[1] Almost nowhere, in any market, had competing gigabit landlines in residential areas over the timeframe discussed. "Competition" is absolutely not the solution here.
Suppose the government owned the utility poles or trenches along the roads, paid for them in the same way as they pay for the roads, and access to use them was provided to all comers for free. All you have to do is fill out some basic paperwork and follow some basic rules to make sure you're not cutting someone else's lines etc.
People would install it. You -- an individual -- could go out and put fiber in the trench on your street, wire up the whole street, pool everybody's monthly fee and use it to pay for transit.
The reason people don't do this is that it's illegal, or to do it without it being illegal would require millions of dollars in legal fees and compliance costs and pole access charges.
The rest of the world moved to higher speeds and didn't count Gabs (except on mobile) decades ago and I mean decades.
In 2004 in Italy I had a 20 Mbit/s fiber connection, I had 100 Mbit few years later. I still remember pinging 4, literally 4 ms, on Counter Strike 1.6.
And Fiber was started way later in 2010. So I don't see any impact by Google fiber on internet as a whole, maybe it pushed US carriers to not do worse (internet in US is not really that amazing in terms of speeds and latency).
One thing that I noticed is that while speeds increased in the decades since then, latency became worse. Even with the fastest connection I can use I rarely if ever ping below 30 Ms on the very same Counter strike 1.6 or newer versions.
Are you trying to say that Google Fiber influenced the behaviour of incumbent telcos in different regions? If same region, sure, but the size of area served by Google Fiber is/was tiny.
Per the book Chip War, Intel put a lot of money into EUV (going back to the late 1990s):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chip_War:_The_Fight_for_the_Wo...
Per the book, and other sources:
> Intel seemed primed to dominate the chip industry as it transitioned into the era of Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography (EUV). The company had played a pivotal role in the development of EUV technology, with Andy Grove’s early investment of $200 million in the 1990s being a crucial factor.
* https://techovedas.com/intel-lost-decade-5-reasons-why-chip-...
As the book goes into, there were other things in question: since TSMC only did fab, and did not design, they had more customers/opportunities to iterate the process and get good at it (more focus).
There was internal-to-Intel stuff that led to lead loss as well.
I'm only partially through the book currently, and there's a lot of chip history being described (going back to the 1950s), so I'm not going to retain all of it in a single pass.
Before someone says, "but they lost mobile to ARM during that period," lithography isn't why they lost mobile to ARM. Apple was using TSMC's 16nm process in their September 2016 iPhone while Intel started shipping 14nm processors 2 years earlier. Mobile chose ARM when Intel wasn't behind on lithography.
With Google Fiber, not choosing had immediate repercussions. With Intel, the repercussions took the better part of a decade to manifest. Google just decided it didn't really care about the home internet business. No one at Google could say "yea, we're not rolling out wired or wireless home internet and the business is booming." Intel didn't decide that they were exiting the processor business, but their processor business was doing "fine" without this decision being made. Intel could say, "we aren't investing in future lithography and the business is booming anyway. Maybe future lithography is just a big waste of money."
You're correct that not choosing means you lose. However, sometimes it isn't obvious for a while. Google Fiber's lack of decision had obvious, immediate results and you couldn't delude yourself otherwise. Intel could delude itself. Execs could write reports about how they were still ahead of the competition (they were) and how they weren't wasting money on unproven technology. Fast forward a decade and they're not fine, but it took a while for that to manifest.
Plus, if Apple hadn't helped push TSMC forward so much, would Intel be in quite as bad a situation? Qualcomm has been happy to just package together ARM reference designs with their modems and it's really just their poor performance compared to Apple really pushing them forward. While Android users on HN might be buying Snapdragon 8 series processors, the vast majority of Android devices aren't using high-end ARM cores. The vast majority of the market for high-end ARM cores is Apple. If Apple hadn't made a long-term commitment to TSMC for 2016-2021, would TSMC have pushed as hard on EUV? It's a lot easier to invest when you have a guaranteed customer like TSMC had in Apple.
If Apple hadn't pushed performance so strongly, would we have seen as much EUV investment as quickly? It's unlikely it would be pushed by the Android ecosystem where most processors are low-end. TSMC serving Apple meant EUV investment. Once Apple was shipping extremely fast processors, Qualcomm and others wanted to be able to get to at least 50-70% of what Apple was offering (so there were more buyers). Once it was available, AMD could use it to push hard against Intel. Once there were more buyers, Samsung wanted to make sure that its fabrication business was at least in the ballpark.
But if Apple hadn't been focused on taking a strong performance lead, it might have been another 5+ years before Intel's lack of decision came back to haunt it. If it had taken 12-17 years instead of 7-9 years for others to put the screws to Intel, they would have basked in its profits for a long time as its execs were touted as having amazing insight. Of course: you're right. Eventually, Intel would have gotten its comeuppance. But Intel could have pretended it didn't need to invest in the future for a long time. By contrast, when Google didn't make a decision on wireless or wired, that was just the end of expanding that business.
I'm pretty sure that ARM won mobile because it is much lower power.
This one is particularly amusing because the difference is primarily a business distinction and not a technical one.
Here's how your tablet gets internet via fiber: There is a strand of fiber that comes near your house and then you attach an 802.11 wireless access point to it. Every few years the latter has to be replaced as new standards are created.
Here's how your tablet gets internet via 5G: There is a strand of fiber that comes near your house and then the telco attaches a cellular wireless access point to it. Every few years the latter has to be replaced as new standards are created.
They should have just built the fiber network and put cell sites on some of the poles. Then you sell fiber to anybody who buys it and cellular to anybody who buys it and you don't have to care which one wins.
marketing / sales /operations people. These people usually are pretty good at understanding what the customer wants and so has a decent feel for the product, perhaps innovation goes down, but the customer is getting what they want, but then once you saturate the market sales and marketing are no longer going to move the needle so you promote...
Finance people. They usually don't have a great feel for product nor even what the customer wants, but they understand how to increase revenue and decrease costs and at this point in the company lifestyle that is what matters most. The risk is that you are in a competitive space where competitors are willing to jump on any product stumble. Often companies get stuck at this stage and stagnate, but usually they are so large and entrenched they keep doing just fine anyway.
How likely are they to succeed vs TSMC / Samsung?
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_nm_process#Process_nodes_and...
It's the marketing department's claim about what you'd have had to do to achieve "equivalent performance" using geometries (and probably other things) that are no longer used. Or to put it another way it's completely untethered from reality in every way.
https://read.nxtbook.com/ieee/spectrum/spectrum_na_august_20...
Everything supports unicode these days so the only reason they don't use the correct letter is laziness.
Gonna be a hot chip... ;)
No. All of them have similar densities. Some difference but no one has actual 5nm transistor.
Also deception it's only for forum commenter who know that nm means nothing but still are upset about it for reason.
Isn't the pc market shrinking? Or is Intel expecting the server market growth to more than make up for it?
Intel 4 (Intel "7nm" rebranding), is roughly equivalent to TSMC "3nm" in transistor density. By the transistor density metric, Intel is not way behind. There is no reason right now to think they can't deliver 10A/1nm in 2027.
Moreover, "Intel 3" will also be used for some I/O or cache memory tiles even in some later Intel CPUs where the computing tiles will be made with denser processes like "Intel 18A".
For now, Meteor Lake with "Intel 4" is the first Intel product made with a process that has been developed after the change of CEO. It remains to be seen later this year, based on whether the planned server CPUs will be launched successfully, then by the end of the year also the first CPUs with big cores having the first new microarchitecture since 2021 (Arrow Lake, Arrow Lake S and Lunar Lake), if Pat Gelsinger has succeeded to restore Intel's competitivity.
Capacity for the Intel 4 and Intel 3 processes doesn't build as quickly as 20A/18A, but that isn't surprising — the majority of the company's wins for its third-party foundry business have been with the 18A node, which Intel says is according to plan
18A process is planned to be ready in the second half of this year, and Intel is sticking to it. 18A chips (Intel processors and GPUs) will appear next year
When Intel had the world's leading fabs, driven off massive volume in PC CPUs, I don't remember people being so emphatic about how insurmountable its technological lead over the rest of the world was. Yes, I know the geopolitical issues around TSMC bring it more attention, good and bad. But still.