Understanding Intel
chipstrat.com
chipstrat.com
Also, I think that the thing about their chip design not being a relevant strategic advantage is wrong. The reason they lost the mobile market is to a large extent because their chip design was bad.
The other thing to mention of course is that strategically breaking the foundry off from the rest of the Intel business lines Intel up to basically dump their foundry the way AMD did. Strategically, Intel's foundry pays a massive cost (a) by canabilising the profit of the product group - you now have an internal allocation of costs/profits that don't functionally exist, and (b) competitors don't like to use your foundry, because you're likely to be their biggest competitor and have in the past used foundry customers as terrible acquisition targets.
Or more directly because they scraped XScale since they didn't want to compete with other ARM designers. Wouldn't this be the opposite of what "a manufacturing company that happens to design CPUs to drive demand." would do?
FWIW I feel like I remember hearing similar remarks about AMD when they spun off GloFo. It's easy to assume that whoever is currently in front, will stay in front. On a 1-5 year time scale, it's a safe bet to be sure. Yet, Intel's own loss of process leadership tells us that things can change in the long run.
I posed this question in a top-level comment, but I'll throw it out here too: world governments are more interested than ever in making sure their fabs are on the leading edge. Could this serve to create more parity than we've seen historically?
Not while ASML is a bottleneck.
As for whether this dynamic helps level the playing field between governments, I don't see how it would. Ever more expensive fabs make it harder rather than easier to stay competitive.
The aviation world has some historical parallels. China has been working to catch up on jet engines for at least 40 years and they're still not quite there yet. Not for lack of effort, engineering talent, theoretical understanding, etc, certain kinds of industrial capability are just hard and slow to build. A much smaller country would have no hope. My guess is chip production ends up being similar.
In reality, TSMC only caught up to Intel's process in 2016. The playing field remained pretty even over the ensuing 4 years. The level playing field exposed Intel's stagnant core architecture, breaking their datacenter hegemony.
I think the author gets the big picture right - the process node sets the bar. But, I do wonder if the author glosses over architecture too easily. Sure, history tells us that it only matters when the "process playing field" is level. But, times are changing. There are fewer players than ever in the cutting-edge process arena, yet the cost of implementing those new processes marches forward at its usual exponential pace. Major world powers are more interested than ever in keeping their domestic fabs at the forefront of the field. In this environment, can anyone safely assume they'll be able to lean into a long-term process advantage?
The design of the CPU matters for this quality criterion only in the unlikely scenario when the design team was not competent and they have made a far from optimal design.
When AMD has transitioned to TSMC in 2019, they have instantly got a much better MT performance per watt than Intel, so the TSMC "7 nm" was already better than anything Intel had in 2019.
At that time, "7 nm" was already an old process for TSMC, having been used by Apple since 2018. Therefore, at the latest in 2018 TSMC was well in advance over Intel.
So what you said, that "TSMC only caught up to Intel's process in 2016. The playing field remained pretty even over the ensuing 4 years." is only partially correct. No later than 2018, i.e. no later than 2 years after 2016, "the playing field" was no longer even.
Perhaps TSMC was already above Intel long before 2018, but there are no older products in direct competition that would allow us to judge whose CMOS process was better.
I think this is an overstatement in a couple of ways:
> unlikely scenario
We're still less than a decade removed from the final descendants of Bulldozer. We can't directly compare it to Zen because of the process differences, but Bulldozer sucked in several ways that weren't related to its 28nm process.
> made a far from optimal design
AMD and Intel continue to release improved x86 architectures. Alder Lake introduced heterogeneous cores to x86. Zen 5's dual decode path is less visible, but an innovation in its own right. If there is a long-term local max in x86 design, we haven't found it yet.
That's not to say flagrantly bad design is impossible (again, Bulldozer) - it's only to say that there are indeed two avenues to making a CPU better. Even if one avenue (process) sets the hypothetical ceiling for the other (architecture), we haven't found that ceiling very often for any particular process node. Incremental improvements are a routine part of any uarch, even when the process remains the same.
The best ideal models are simple. Unfortunately for ideal models, more often than not, data says no[1].
If they managed to allow consumer Arcs to vfio it would be huge in the homelab market
In particular, you need to be somewhat optimistic that whatever happens to Intel at the end of the road will go in favour of the shareholders. Whether it's split into foundry and design, or acquired by someone who wants the fabs, or stolen by the government on national security grounds. I don't know whether any of those exits result in shareholders gaining money. It seems unlikely that any involve shareholders gaining 50% or so.
Or you could bet on one of their competitors who seem to know what they're doing. Superficially I like global foundry as a US centric manufacturer of semiconductors.
> "Last fall, a Wall Street analyst called AMD “un-investable,” following the announcement of its terrible Q3 2012 numbers and the sudden loss of its CFO."
How times have changed!
My question hinges on moore's law eventually rounding off, but eventually 'more speed' doesn't equal business outcomes for companies using these chips right? Specifically for CPU-style chips, not GPUs*
Look, the post is fine as far as it goes. If you want to tell a simple story, that’s fine. The problems start when you try to understand what’s actually happening in the real, chaotic world (like why Intel had a bad second quarter or why it laid off a bunch of people) with reference only to your too simple model.