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Comment by p1esk | Hacker News Reader

Bleeding edge processes is what Intel specializes in. Unlike Apple, they don’t need TSMC. This should have been a huge advantage for Intel. Maybe that’s why Gelsinger got the boot.

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> Bleeding edge processes is what Intel specializes in. Unlike Apple, they don’t need TSMC.

Intel literally outsourced their Arrow Lake manufacturing to TSMC because they couldn't fabricate the parts themselves - their 20A (2nm) process node never reached a production-ready state, and was eventually cancelled about a month ago.

OK, so the question becomes: TSMC could do it. Why can’t Intel?

They are trying … for like 10 years

Intel is maybe a year or two behind TSMC right now. They might or might not catch up since it is a moving target, but I dont think there is anything TSMC is doing today that Intel wont be doing in the near future.

Wasn't it cancelled in favor of 18A?

It was, but that only puts them further away from shipping product.

These days, Intel merely specializes in bleeding processes. They spent far too many years believing the unrealistic promises from their fab division, and in the past few years they've been suffering the consequences as the problems are too big to be covered up by the cost savings of vertical integration.

Intel's foundry side has been floundering so hard that they've resorted to using TSMC themselves in an attempt to keep up with AMD. Their recently launched CPUs are a mix of Intel-made and TSMC-made chiplets, but the latter accounts for most of the die area.

I'm not certain this is quite as damning as it sounds. My understanding is that the foundry business was intentionally walled off from the product business, and that the latter wasn't going to be treated as a privileged customer.

no, in fact, it sounds even more damning because client side was able to pick whatever was best on the market, and it wasn't intel. Client side could to learn and customize their designs to use another company's processes (this is an extremely hard thing to do by the way) faster than intel foundry could even get their pants up in the morning.

Intel foundry screwed up so badly that Nokia's server division was almost shut down because of Intel Foundry's failure. (imagine being so bad at your job, that your clients go out of business) If Intel client side chose to use Foundry, there just wouldn't be any chips to sell.

Intel Arc hardware is manufactured by TSMC, specifically on N6 and N5 for this latest announcement.

Intel doesn't currently have nodes competitive with TSMC or excess capacity in their better processes.

Serious question, why don't they have excess capacity? They aren't producing many CPUs...that people want.

Because their production capacity is much smaller than TSMC, it's declined over the past few years, and their newer nodes are having yield issues.

Hard to have excess capacity when your latest fabs aren't able to produce anything reliably.

They don't even have competitive capacity for all their CPU needs. They have negative spare capacity overall.

if you think intel has bleeding edge processes, that hasn't been the case for over 6 years ...

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