
How Intel Makes a Chip - vermontdevil
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-09/how-intel-makes-a-chip
======
turbohedgehog
> Another way to make a chip faster is to add special circuits that only do
> one thing, but do it extremely quickly. Roughly 25 percent of the E5’s
> circuits are specialized for, among other tasks, compressing video and
> encrypting data. There are other special circuits on the E5, but Intel can’t
> talk about those because they’re created for its largest customers, the so-
> called Super 7: Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Baidu, Alibaba, and
> Tencent. ... If you buy an off-the-shelf Xeon server from Dell or HP, the
> Xeon inside will contain technology that’s off-limits to you. “We’ll
> integrate [a cloud customer’s] unique feature into the product, as long as
> it doesn’t make the die so much bigger that it becomes a cost burden for
> everyone else,” says Bryant. “When we ship it to Customer A, he’ll see it.
> Customer B has no idea that feature is there.”

This is something I've never heard of before. Anyone have some insight into
this? Is it a relatively recent phenomenon?

~~~
gravypod
After reading some of the other replies that more directly address your
question you might want to read up on binning [0].

A lot of Intel's chips are recycled binned Xeons. They've almost completely
stopped making desktop processors.

The I7s you buy are usually failed Xeon chips. To my knowledge Intel currently
only fabs laptop and server chips.

[0] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_binning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_binning)

~~~
dogma1138
That's not true at all in some cases it's actually the other way around entry
level xeons are failed i5/7's that can't turbo boost as high.

There were only a few xeons that were made into desktop processors and they
ended up as i3's there were a few of those that supported ECC.

The 'E' edition CPU's can potentially be xeons but then they aren't failed
ones but highly cherry picked ones as they boot and overclock very high.

------
Cyph0n
> It’s surprisingly dark, too. For decades, Intel’s cleanrooms have been lit
> like darkrooms, bathed in a deep, low yellow. “That’s an anachronism,” says
> Mark Bohr, a small, serious man who has spent his entire 38-year career
> making chips, and who’s now Intel’s top manufacturing scientist. “Nobody’s
> had the courage to change it.”

Wait, what? Isn't that UV-free light? Ultraviolet light is used in the mask
exposure step, so using normal light in the room would basically remove all of
the photoresist before photolithography.

I guess they've automated the process to the point where the wafers are never
exposed to light even when moving between steps.

~~~
TFortunato
This is true. The wafer carrying "foups" mentioned are actually an acronym for
Front Opening Unified Pods, which is what carry the wafers from machine to
machine in batches of up to 25 wafers at a time. They are typically UV opaque
yellow, or black. The wafers aren't ever actually out in the open in the room
at any time.

(As an aside, since the air quality of the room was mentioned...god forbid you
ever broke a wafer in the foup. Entire lot in that box is ruined, and cleaning
the foup itself and the equipment front ends is a giant PITA)

Source: was engineer at Varian Semiconductor / Applied Materials, who make all
those giant tools that Intel and the other fabs use. Intel was definitely one
of our largest customers and our most technically demanding.

~~~
Cyph0n
Oh cool! I was exposed to some tools in a class 100 cleanroom at my research
institute. None of them were from Varian though. The lab director always told
me that the stuff used in academia is nothing compared to the tools used in
large fabs like Intel and TSMC.

By the way, how do tool manufacturers make money? Is it basically sales +
maintenance + repairs? Do you have any idea what kind of profit margins they
operate on?

~~~
TFortunato
Very cool! Money came mainly from sales, but we also offered training courses
and had a large services and maintenance division, since the tools did require
periodic maintenance. A lot of these tools also have "consumables", just like
other large pieces of equipment. Gas sources, graphite liners for beamline
components, etc.

As a whole the industry was very cyclical though. We would employ a ton of
people in the factories in the years when everyone was moving to new process
nodes, but in the years in between there could be lots of manufacturing
layoffs / shifts to part time. On the engineering side work was more constant
since we would be busy working on the next generation of tools. When I left we
were working on the transition from 300mm wafers to 450mm (12 in. to 18 in.)

As far as the profit margins went, I forgot our divisions exact numbers, but
AMAT as a whole had roughly ~40% gross profit margins from what I remember.
Being on the supplier side of the millions/billion dollar fab builds is a good
business :-)

~~~
Cyph0n
I see, never thought about the demand for tools that way. But that's a pretty
damn lucrative business!

I was just looking at the list of top semiconductor equipment manufacturers
[1], and it seems that all of them are either American or Japanese companies!

Thanks for taking the time to answer man :D

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor_equipment_sales_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor_equipment_sales_leaders_by_year)

------
_yosefk
"It costs more to make a chip than a plane" \- nope, not if you don't build
the fabs as Intel does. Of course Bloomberg (or at least many people there)
should and does know better.

~~~
nn3
I'm sure Intel would be happy learn from you how they could avoid investing
all that money.

To misquote George Burns, too bad that all the people who know how to build
fabs are busy hanging out on HN instead...

~~~
trsohmers
The point is that if you have a new chip design as a fabless semiconductor
start up (like mine), you can get a chip fabbed on a fairly new process node
(28nm) for less than $250k for a small quantity run, and go into production
for under $5 million through a pure play fab like Global Foundries, TSMC,
Samsung, UMC, SMIC, etc.

~~~
nn3
Right. Who need power plants when the power is coming out of the wall plug.

See the problem? Someone has to build the fab in the first place so you can
use it.

~~~
trsohmers
Oh of course there needs to be fabs, but plenty of them exist. All I was
saying is that if you want to make a chip, you don't need to take on Intel's
capex.

~~~
wolrah
Then you end up like AMD, with designs that have to be cut back and
compromised when a third-party fab doesn't manage to do what they expect on a
new process.

There's something to be said for tight integration between fab and design when
you're trying to go in to uncharted territory.

If you don't need to be at the edge of process technology, you're completely
right of course.

~~~
_yosefk
Why do you have to be like AMD - why can't you be like Apple, Qualcomm,
NVIDIA, or, well, about any successful/large chip maker other than Intel and
Samsung?

Regarding the edge of technology - Intel doesn't beat others to a new node by
making both chips and fabs, it would beat others even if it was only building
fabs. And it's not like TSMC is that much behind Intel. Grandparent who
mentioned 28nm could mention 16nm except that there the masks will costs much
more but it's still millions, not billions.

~~~
trsohmers
Our next shuttle run is on 16nm... Depending on a bunch of different options,
it is "only" ~2-4x the cost of a 28nm run (and should be declining in the next
year). Doing a full mask set is still extremely expensive though (~$5-10m
range)

------
gavinpc
Why is it so important to make the chips smaller every time? Especially if
they're going into servers, where, as the article says, they will almost never
be seen by the customers. To go from 2bn transistors to 10bn on something
that's already trivially small, why not just make the thing 5 times thicker?
Obviously there would be downsides in cost of materials and power consumption,
but wouldn't that be offset by avoiding the need for nano-manufacturing
advances in every single round? It sounds to me like there's some kind of
"manifest destiny" at work here, especially the quote: “Our job is to push
that point to the very last minute.” Really?

~~~
kogepathic
> Why is it so important to make the chips smaller every time?

Because the amount of power leakage (heat) is proportional to the size of the
transistors. So you cannot improve the efficiency of the chip without making
the transistors smaller or lowering the frequency.

> Obviously there would be downsides in cost of materials and power
> consumption,

Huge costs. Data centers aren't only worried about the power consumption of
chips, because for every watt that's generated as heat, they have to use >1W
to cool that (because cooling systems aren't 100% efficient themselves).

As you may know from other branches of science, the resistance of a conductor
rises with heat, meaning that electrons running through the conductor are more
likely to hit a vibrating atom and dissipate as heat. This is why so-called
"super conductors" are usually super cooled. Very little atom movement = very
low chance of an electron hitting a moving atom. Silicon is a semi-conductor,
but the principal is the same. If the temperature of the chip rises, so does
the heat generated. This is why world-record setting overclocks are done using
liquid nitrogen to cool the chip.

To prevent things from getting too toasty, data centers would have to reduce
the density of the servers, which means they would need larger buildings and
more land to house the same number of servers.

> but wouldn't that be offset by avoiding the need for nano-manufacturing
> advances in every single round?

In short, no.

~~~
williadc
> the amount of power leakage (heat) is proportional to the size of the
> transistors

Small correction: leakage actually increases as transistors shrink. This is
why high-k dialectric and fin-fets were such important developments. They
pushed back the point at which leakage power overtakes switching power as the
dominant source of waste. Even with these technologies, we have to do a lot of
design work to reduce leakage. I can't even guess how many power domains are
on modern cpus -- certainly dozens if not hundreds. Most of those domains can
be switched off to eliminate leakage in those domains altogether.

I'm nearly certain you meant switching power reduces as transistors shrink,
which has been true so far. Things are getting weird with these new processes,
and a lot of things that we've held as fact are looking less and less
reliable.

~~~
kogepathic
> I'm nearly certain you meant switching power reduces as transistors shrink,
> which has been true so far.

Yup. Thanks for the correction.

------
MrBuddyCasino
> These feats of computer science are often attributed to the rise of the
> smartphone, but the hard work is being done on thousands of servers. And
> pretty much all of those servers run on Intel chips.

Considering Intel's recent exit from the smartphone SoC business and
concentration on the data center, I have a suspicion why Bloomberg was "given
the most extensive tour of the factory since President Obama visited in 2011".

------
rwmj
Interesting BBC documentary from 1977 which shows the inside of an Intel
factory making RAM chips and (I guess?) 8080 processors:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HW5Fvk8FNOQ&t=9m](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HW5Fvk8FNOQ&t=9m)

------
brudgers
Past:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11875892](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11875892)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11870546](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11870546)

~~~
vermontdevil
Strange. I searched and saw nothing. Then I posted and HN accepted it instead
of redirecting to these previous posts as it had done before.

~~~
brudgers
Algolia runs its search service on its own metal for performance. Being off-
site [relative to YC] and realtime search not really being critical [relative
to YC] might explain some latency.

Anyway, HN's dupe detector isn't all that performent either.

------
Black-Plaid
> Our customers expect that they will get a 20 percent increase in performance
> at the same price that they paid last year

Well, looks like they have really lowered the bar, I seem to remember it being
twice as much power, for half the price, every 18 months.

