
Intel grew revenues in Q2 2020, but key manufacturing upgrade delayed - sleepyshift
https://venturebeat.com/2020/07/23/intel-grew-revenues-20-to-19-7-billion-in-q2-but-manufacturing-upgrade-delayed/
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ksec
20% YoY Revenue increase, 43% YoY Growth in Datacenter Segment. 76% Growth in
Non-Volatile Memory solution, _another_ 7% YoY growth in Client Side
computing.

This is truly amazing results.

I get stabbed over at Anandtech every time I made an argument _for_ Intel as
an AMD investor. The Internet is full of Intel bashing comments but reality is
Intel has been making record revenue quarter after quarter.

For the not so good part.

> _The company 's 7nm-based CPU product timing is shifting approximately six
> months relative to prior expectations. The primary driver is the yield of
> Intel's 7nm process, which based on recent data, is now trending
> approximately twelve months behind the company's internal target._

The most important bit is that last part, _12 months behind Internal target_.
To put this into perspective.

Intel original 7nm, ( on the assumption it is still the same 7nm because Intel
has already changed their 10nm spec) was suppose to be slightly better than
TSMC 5nm+, but not as good as TSMC' 3nm. ( In terms of transistor density, by
no means it is the only metric it should be judged on ). It was scheduled for
2019, pushed to 2020 then 2H 2021, and are now looking at 1H 2022, which means
in terms of consumer getting their hands on it, it would be more like 2H 2022
assuming no further delay.

Given TSMC has never missed a beat in their execution and has iPhone SoC
production. It is highly likely by the end of Calendar year 2022, TSMC would
have shipped more 3nm Wafer than Intel's 7nm for the whole year.

I am waiting to see AMD's results.

~~~
bhouston
Why hasn't Intel given up on their internal process nodes? Their advantage is
clearly not in owning their process nodes at this point. Dump them and adopt
TSMC.

~~~
rgbrenner
Who would they order from? Keep in mind they are slightly behind Samsung in ic
volume. Samsung is #1 and Intel #2. Almost double the volume of TSMC. It takes
a few years to build a new plant.

Literally impossible without a very long term plan... and when it’s over they
lose control of their destiny. They can beg TSMC for more chips if they want
to meet their sales targets, but maybe they’ll sell to Apple or Nvidia
instead.

~~~
sct202
Where are you getting that number for Intel? Everything I see has Samsung,
TMSC, then Micron as the top in terms of wafer production. Intel is like 1/3
of TMSC which is still alot. [https://www.eetindia.co.in/over-half-of-global-
wafer-capacit...](https://www.eetindia.co.in/over-half-of-global-wafer-
capacity-held-by-five-companies/)

~~~
wtallis
Raw wafer counts aren't particularly relevant here, because you can't really
re-tool a NAND or DRAM fab into a competitive logic fab. Based on those
numbers, about a third of Samsung's wafer count is logic, putting them
slightly ahead of Intel (logic and a bit of NAND). TSMC's wafer count (all
logic, AFAIK) is higher than Samsung+Intel, but not all of that is on leading-
edge nodes. TSMC 28nm and 16nmFF nodes are going to be sticking around for
many years to come.

~~~
MrBuddyCasino
The numbers are even more tilted in Intel‘s favor if you consider that the
foundries do a huge part of their volume business on outdated nodes. Intel
doesn‘t do that. They have many times the capacity of TSMC in their market
segment.

------
JoshTko
Intel's 10% stock drop is all about losing investor confidence. They've been
given a pass for delaying 10nm for years in part because there was no
competition and assurances that it was a one-off thing and they have learned
their lesson. This delay threatens that narrative and instead suggest that
Intel hasn't learned from their 10nm debacle.

------
perardi
Is there any reputable reporting, or even just wild gossip, about why Intel is
behind?

The cynical answer is “they were focused on profit margins and didn’t invest
in process”, but is it possible they bet hard on some technology that didn’t
pan out? Ultraviolet lithography? Some exotic indium gallium arsenide magic
that didn’t work in mass production?

~~~
wtallis
There seems to be consensus about their 10nm failures: they were trying every
trick in the book _except_ switching to EUV lithography, betting that they
could get ahead and stay ahead while EUV power levels creeped upward toward
what's needed for volume manufacturing. But Intel bit off more than they could
chew and ended up with a process that simply didn't work (cf. the disabled
iGPU on Cannonlake). So Intel scaled back their ambitions and spent more time
working out the kinks, and they're apparently still a year away from having a
10nm desktop CPU.

I'm not sure if we have any good clues as to what's going wrong with Intel's
7nm efforts, but it seems reasonable to guess that they weren't putting as
much effort as their competitors into getting ready for EUV.

And given how long Intel's had these issues at this point, it seems pretty
clear that they have some broader management issues.

------
jjoonathan
Have any insider accounts of the 10nm debacle emerged, or is it still too
soon?

~~~
snovv_crash
This is 3rd hand, but I heard that the 14nm was rushed with a crazy schedule,
and as a result the greybeards who actually knew everything all left. Intel is
having to rebuild all that institutional knowledge from scratch again.

~~~
thu2111
The account I just read (linked from the other thread) suggested it was more
just that they happened to set really ambitious targets and make a lot of big
bets in 10nm, some of which simply did not pan out. Sounds like they may have
ended up in a situation where diagnostic and investigation tooling also wasn't
working properly due to the use of cobalt, so they'd have ended up with
fabrication failures that were then difficult to investigate, as the debugging
tools also weren't working. Painful.

~~~
snovv_crash
IMO, that sounds exactly like the greybeards weren't there to advocate for
"one step at a time" and "get the debug tools working first".

------
ogre_codes
Apple's timing here is spot on. If Intel was firing on all cylinders, it would
be a lot harder for them to pull off a processor change.

~~~
paranoidrobot
If all Apple cared about was faster chips, they could easily call up AMD and
move their platform there. It'd be a lot less work for them.

Moving to their own ARM chips lets them gain tighter control over the
platform, and not be beholden to Intel or AMDs roadmap or desire to implement
specific features Apple wants.

~~~
OldHand2018
> If all Apple cared about was faster chips

Everybody _wants_ faster chips, but for most people, the chip is in idle state
99% of the time. Outside of the data center and serious gamers, chip speed has
been fairly irrelevant for years.

~~~
CarbyAu
I agree with you. My frustrations centre around wait times after starting an
app.

Am I waiting for CPU? No. Storage? No.

I am waiting for some friggin call-home/update-check/irrelevant network
request.

Edit:brevity, removal of profane words.

~~~
perryizgr8
> I am waiting for some friggin call-home/update-check/irrelevant network
> request.

Is that right? Any examples? I feel most of the times I'm waiting is for the
network because everything is online now. Even my work is all done on a remote
VM in a data center. I connect using vscode over ssh. And the app is snappy af
except when it needs to do a network opeation.

~~~
CarbyAu
For some basic apps: Notepad++ annoys me most. Modern, updated regularly. But
wants to update plugins before even appearing it seems?!?

iTunes(thanks to iWife) annoys me with it's updates. It checks for updates
after you've started the program, pops up to get in your way and doesn't give
you an "Install on exit" option.

Paint.Net does it right. Opens up, lets you get things done, checks for an
update, gives you the option to install on exit. More should be done this way.

Playing games, Steam and all the many games with their own servers etc.
Example of bad, It takes me roughly 2 mins to get into
GhostRecon:Breakpoint.(not that good a game really but that's another day).

Example of good, Rocket League. Starts up, gets you going. (Disappointingly
not a League of actual Rockets but good fun anyway. :-))

------
AaronFriel
I wonder to what extent a six month delay could influence hyperscaler
decisions for compute purchasing. Every major cloud now offers AMD Epyc
instances at a discount relative to Intel's 14nm(\\+)* offerings. It seems
unlikely Intel will be competitive until 2022. It seems unlikely any of the
top three cloud providers would go all AMD for new instances but I could see
the ratio shifting heavily in AMD's favor.

~~~
jeffbee
Nobody can flip their whole fleet suddenly -- the TCO-positive lifespan of a
datacenter computer is way longer than most people assume -- but at least some
of the hyperscalers operate a "machine of the day" process, where 100% of new
machines are identical. In that sense, whoever gets the design win gets all of
the orders.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
But that just means it's on a delay. If AMD gets the design win in 2020 or
2021 then it means more trouble for Intel even if they're competitive again in
2022, because then they're the ones waiting on the next redesign.

------
abraxas
Aren’t these node sizes mostly marketing BS that can’t be compared across
manufacturers anyway? If Intel’s products can compete on performance or price
or power consumption then who cares what they call it?

~~~
jiggawatts
The objective metrics are things like: transistors per square millimetre,
power per billion transistors, frequency, SRAM bit-cell size, etc...

Marketing calls it "7nm+++super", engineers get graphs of power-vs-frequency.

E.g.: comparing transistor densities:

    
    
        Intel     14nm    38 MTr/mm^2 
        TSMC       7nm    97 MTr/mm^2
        Intel     10nm   100 MTr/mm^2
        Samsung    5nm   127 MTr/mm^2 
        TSMC       5nm   173 MTr/mm^2
        Intel      7nm   "higher than TSMC 5nm" (planned for 2022)
        TSMC       3nm   290 MTr/mm^2           (risk production in 2021)
    

This should make it pretty clear why Intel is going to struggle to be
competitive: The majority of their products are stuck on 14nm, which has 22%
of the transistor density of TSMC's bleeding edge product. They can't compete
with the likes of AMD and Apple with such outdated tech.

It should also make it clear that Intel's 10nm node is basically the same as
TSMC's 7nm.

However, from what I heard (I'm not an expert!), Intel's 10nm node is a "pain
in the ass" to manufacture. The design phase is complex, the yields are low,
etc...

For comparison, TSMC's 7nm is supposed to be a relatively "straightforward"
process, and 5nm is actually an _improvement_ in manufacturability. That is,
it's easier to design and make a 5nm TSMC chip than a 7nm TSMC chip. That's
actually a pretty big advantage, something Intel doesn't talk about much...

~~~
AgloeDreams
You are spot on on 10nm fab, it's why Apple shipped an update with split 14
and 10nm chips on different models, it wasn't large enough or cheap enough to
update all models.

A notable thing about TSMC's 5nm is it is shipping in _three months_. Thats a
massive gap and there is little proof that Intel 7nm is 'much' more than 5nm.

And thats before you consider other upsides seen in the TSMC chips such as
cost, or the incredible power management tactics seen in the Ax series chips
that are easily generations ahead of Intel.

------
totalZero
I'm still waiting for them to move to 10nm.

~~~
hmottestad
Haha. Yeah, me too. Still no 10nm pro laptop cpus, desktop cpus or server
cpus.

------
pwarner
This has got to be interesting for folks like AWS, Google, MS. Is this the
opening for AMD? Or will we see things like AWS ARM chips take off? They
should both be close to entering production on 5nm chips once TSMC gets enough
Apple chips knocked out. Are we going to see more specialization in the form
of custom chips as process nodes are stalled out?

------
madamelic
"Yes, we missed 10nm... and 7nm... but we assure, we will be ahead with 5nm"

History says otherwise...

~~~
AgloeDreams
Totally agree though 7nm brings them to UVL which will make that step much
easier. But they will still be at least a year behind.

------
grizzles
Intel is a company that's living on it's distribution legacy. Ask yourself -
why do regular people still buy Intel PCs?

Because they are easy to buy. A _great_ non Intel hardware and software
laptop+aio by AMD or someone else would be a mortal wound on $INTC.

~~~
billyhoffman
This is a 2000s view of Intel that is not accurate in 2020. Look at the
numbers.

\- 7% growth for consumer (the “Intel PCs” you mention)

\- 43% growth for data centers

\- 70%+ growth in nonvolatile storage (SSDs)... much of which goes into high
end servers in data centers

Will there be more data centers And cloud offerings in 3 years, or less? Many
More!

Will there be more or less PC sales in 3 years. For Intel it’s less or the
same (Apple is 8-10% of the market that is disappearing and PC growth is flat
to slightly up. So 3 years out it will be roughly the same)

Also keep in mind the margin on Xeons vs The laptop chips That go in a $599
plastic Dell.

Intel as a “PC” company is dying. Intel as a data center provider (SSDs and
heavy processors) is ascendant

~~~
lend000
A single socket AMD threadripper 3995WX (the "ECC" version just released) is
likely going to destroy a dual socket Xeon 8275+ (the ones used for the Amazon
C5 metal instance) in most benchmarks like the 3990X did, while running at
roughly the same power and a fraction of the price. Once AMD convinces cloud
providers that its ECC works just as well as Intel's, there's really nothing
holding AMD back from taking a huge chunk of the server market.

~~~
fomine3
Threadripper is priced for workstation like Core XE that priced usually way
cheaper than for server even though actual chip is same.

Anyway EPYC is performs far better than Xeon in same price.

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edem
To be honest Intel is always late with manufacturing updates (and
manufacturing in general).

------
coldtea
Not like they are under any pressure...

~~~
nodesocket
Can't tell if you being sarcastic, but AMD is working Intel these days.

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bhouston
At some point Intel should just dump their own process nodes and go with TSMC.
This is getting ridiculous.

~~~
_1100
As much as I enjoy seeing Intel falter for all of the anti-competitive
practices it has employed in the past...

I think them moving to outsourced foundries would be a huge move in the wrong
direction for fab consolidation.

~~~
coayer
I feel the same about Samsung's Exynos mobile SoCs. While they are definitely
worse than Qualcomm's, if they went away Qualcomm would be the only chip maker
for Android flagships (excluding Huawei, but without Google play services they
don't really count).

~~~
Iwan-Zotow
MTK anyone?

