Hacker News Reader

Comment by snapcaster | Hacker News Reader

I understand why Intel is getting these, but would be nice to see this money go to companies that are still innovating and are somewhere in the US coalition/orbit (TSMC, Samsung, etc.)

View on HN

Samsung is expected to get $6 billion.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-03-15/samsung-p...

Both TSMC and Samsung are expanding in the USA and are expected to receive significant subsidies as well

Intel is still innovating though? What's with everyone acting like they aren't innovating just because they aren't the leading performance x86 chip manufacturer? They're still shrinking node sizes, they've entered the GPU market, they're opening up their fabs to also make chips for other companies...

Bit hard to claim they are shrinking nodes, when Intel 4 claimed to be in production in 2022, but is still MIA except for low volume laptop products. And Intel 3 still has yet to appear.

How can you tell the laptop products are low volume?

Meteor Lake appears to be in mass production and shipping in a plethora of laptops worldwide. There doesn't appear to have any availability problems.

I think the general perception is that they're playing catch-up rather than meaningfully pushing the limits themselves. Yeah, they moved into the GPU market, but the cutting-edge in GPUs is by NVIDIA. As is the cutting-edge in AI chips. The cutting edge in fabrication is by TSMC. The cutting edge in mobile by Apple.

Intel's bread and butter has always been x86, but not only is it an ISA that's proving non-ideal for a couple new applications (mobile is ARM, AI is in the GPU or NPUs, etc), AMD is really putting up a good fight in that market too, and the crown has been traded a copule times in the past few years.

Samsung? Really?

I mean they're a company from a strongly allied nation who operates 13 fabs, why not?

I guess the implication was that are still innovating unlike Intel

Samsung?

I wonder if this is coming from a position of ignorance... Samsung is among the companies of the world that might be producing negative externalities that weigh more than their positive contributions

I am totally ignorant, can you explain more about Samsung's negative externalities?

Yeah will fully cop to being ignorant on this, can you expand your comment?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com