
Intel vs GlobalFoundries at the leading edge - yaantc
https://www.semiwiki.com/forum/content/7191-iedm-2017-intel-versus-globalfoundries-leading-edge.html
======
tormeh
>It is also surprising to me to see how far Intel has fallen from the process
lead they had. First with HKMG by several years, first with FinFet by several
year, I suppose they are still first to do cobalt interconnect but in terms of
process density the foundries have caught them and appear poised to take a
substantial lead over the next several years.

>With Intel offering foundry processes and GF, Samung and TSMC all offering
leading edge processes the industry now has four viable leading edge process
options.

Exciting times.

~~~
tomalpha
Indeed. Intel finally having some really competitive competitors (as it were)
is great to see.

I was going to mutter about this great competition coming from overseas and
being an example of the Decline Of The West, but Global Foundries appears to
be a mainly US+Europe based thing. (I know it span out of AMD a while back but
had assumed until just now that it did all its manufacturing in China).

Exciting times indeed.

~~~
Spooky23
I think fabs are a business where capital rules vs labor cost. GlobalFoundies
built a fab in New York, but got megabucks in aid to do so.

~~~
neuromantik8086
GlobalFoundries is getting massive incentives to expand in New York State. The
initial Saratoga Springs is just the first fab Cuomo has built for them.
Currently, they're building another fab in Utica that's intended to
rehabilitate it after its Rust Belt woes.

Similarly, Tesla/Solar City received a huge number of economic incentives to
build a factory in Buffalo.

Naturally, since this is NYS there's also been a fair bit of corruption:

[1] [http://www.timesunion.com/local/article/Kaloyeros-in-
fight-t...](http://www.timesunion.com/local/article/Kaloyeros-in-fight-to-get-
charges-tossed-11160539.php)

I fully expect the state government to throw a bunch of incentives at Amazon
as well for HQ2- there's a push in Rochester for someone to take over all of
the Kodak/Xerox buildings after those two companies royally messed up.

------
Symmetry
I've heard it claimed that the delays in Intel's new process node were mostly
due to problems debugging the cobalt metal layers. If that's true I wonder if
other players will avoid it for a bit? But the problems it solves will only
get more pressing as feature sizes shrink so that might not be feasible.

My impression of Intel's process compared to most foundries is that they tend
to have higher drive currents at a given node leading to faster switching
speeds but also more restrictive design rules leading to lower practical
densities then the standard cell size would predict. And making it hard for
them to act as a foundry, though it's still possible. But my understanding at
this level is tenuous and don't place too much weight on it.

And overall the general slowdown in Moore's law means that Intel's technology
lead has less of a performance/price ramification.

~~~
dogma1138
The problem is that none of the other players so far has been able to produce
chips with the size and power envelope of modern CPUs or GPUs.

Intel will release some 10nm in mid 2018 but these would be the Core M ultra
low power parts.

AMD isn't going for 7nm in 2018 just yet, the Ryzen refresh slated for March
of 2018 is going to be on 12nm which is a rebrand of GF14 NM process rather
than a true node shrink.

I'm not entirely sure if GF or any other foundry would actually come out with
large power hungry dies on 7nm any time soon.

TSMC seems not to be able to produce them even on 10nm, which is why they
introduced their 12nm process which is back of the line node improvement of
their 16nm node primarily so NVIDIA could produce their GPUs on it.

So far the only parts which are made on 10nm are mobile SoCs.

~~~
mtgx
TSMC never intended to use 10nm. They planned to skip it to get to 7nm faster.
Samsung planned for 10nm on the other hand, because it thought 10nm will be a
"long node" (it won't be).

Also Samsung's first 7nm node will use EUV lithography, which may be a bit too
costly for most chip makers, and that may have played a role in developing the
stop-gap 10nm process, too. We'll likely see most of the 7nm users switch to
GloFo and TSMC until Samsung lowers costs/increases yield for its 7nm process.

~~~
dogma1138
Intended or not both of them adopted 10nm which is closer to Intel’s 14nm not
counting the fact that they neither can produce large or power hungry chips on
either process.

GF is skipping EUV for the initial 7nm process and based on the issues they
and Intel have been having with masks and patterning under EUV I’m not sure if
they’ll be on track for EUV in 2019.

In either case it would be very interesting to see what Intel is going to end
up releasing it might be in lithography hell with 10nm or it might be
overblown.

Intel’s 14nm++ and +++ processes atm do not have competition and it’s not
clear just how much it would matter if GF moves to 7nm before Intel atm.

Intel’s biggest problem is less with their process and more with their roadmap
as it seems that they want to launch 14nm+++, 10nm and 10nm+ products all
within a similar time window with a huge overlap. If I was an OEM atm it would
be rather confused.

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baybal2
"EUV in mass production" is something akin to commercial fusion power. Every
few years, a big fab comes forward and says that they will get EUV in
production in yet another few years.

Except this time, there is a genuine need for it. There is only that much free
area they can get by squeezing cell sizes.

After compact SRAMs (there are a few 4T and 3d SRAM designs that fabs will be
introducing next year to compensate for missed node shrink
[https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1332734](https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1332734)),
they will not have many things left to shrink.

EUV was thought to be a way to avoid multipatterning at 65/45 transition, but
now we will have to do quad patterning with both 10nm and with EUV at 7nm, and
this makes the main reason for EUV use (avoiding multipatterning) not that all
important.

~~~
deepnotderp
EUV is a crazy technology, but comparing it to fusion makes no sense. ASML has
already demonstrated near 250W brightness sources, their plan appears to be
brute forcing away the brightness issue.

~~~
chx
The comparison IMO makes perfect sense: there are promises but nothing
actually works. Even you state something about plans.

~~~
baybal2
Better to say, when one blocker issue is solved with EUV, 2 or more new ones
are discovered. And further you go, more people question "whether it all worth
it?"

------
redshirt
I'm waiting for Intel to divest of either the arch/micro-arch business or the
fab business. They can invest in one or the other, but what is crippling them
is having to invest in both simultaneously. I can definitely see them doing
something like HP and split off into Intel-Fab and just Intel. Would enable
the arch/micro-arch to use all the fabs and allow the fab to focus on what it
does best, processes research and development. Intel already fabs chips for
other people
([https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeanbaptiste/2013/10/29/exclusi...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeanbaptiste/2013/10/29/exclusive-
intel-opens-fabs-to-arm-chips/#6c0129fb3078)) why not expand that relationship
to maximize their profits/capacity.

~~~
old-gregg
I am not an expert, but based on what I've read about this (my interest got
sparked by the resurgence of AMD with Ryzen), Intel's vertical integration may
actually even grow in importance.

The processes developed by Samsung, GloFo and TSMC are all optimized for low-
power designs required by mobile applications. There are far more phones out
there and they're on a much faster upgrade cycle than desktops/servers, that's
why foundries optimizing for mobile.

This creates a problem for AMD because high power/freq Ryzen CPUs can't
compete with Intel's if they're made on a node optimized for low power ARM
cores.

~~~
AlphaSite
GloFos new 12LP is perf optimisied, is it not?

~~~
tfha
LP = low power = not performance

~~~
AlphaSite
LP is leading Performance

------
bhouston
A future with ARM in server CPUs seems more plausible when Intel doesn't have
a manufacturing advantage.

Also it is likely that Intel's loss of lead in process is one of the reasons
that AMD (e.g. Ryzen) is actually competitive again.

~~~
dogma1138
Ryzen is competitive despite being on an inferior process. Ryzen is
competitive because AMD stopped playing in the mud and decided to catch up,
that said it's sad/scary just how much core seem to be a head of it's time
Intel has been riding the same uarch for over a decade.

~~~
philjohn
The only problem with Ryzen is that it doesn't clock as high as comparable
Intel chips, but then again, it runs cooler and uses less power - both of
those are because the process GF are using is targeted at lower power mobile
CPU's.

~~~
dogma1138
It really doesn’t run cooler nor does it consumes less power at the same
performance envelope.

Intel calculates the peak max draw TDP AMD uses sustainable average over 2
min.

Zen is built on 14nm LLP it’s not a ulv/ulp process.

------
nickik
This is great. GlobalFoundries has joined the RISC-V community and they are
seeing it as one of they ways that can help them compete with Intel.

Its really quite a clever move by them and I hope it works out.

See slides and videos:

[https://content.riscv.org/wp-
content/uploads/2017/12/Tue1236...](https://content.riscv.org/wp-
content/uploads/2017/12/Tue1236-Revolutionizing_RISC-V_GlobalFoundries-
Bartlett.pdf)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKwbFbFLkS0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKwbFbFLkS0)

------
narrator
It's weird how the sub-14nm date keeps getting pushed back. The end of 2018 is
going to make it 4 years between chip generations. They still might fail
though. Could this be the start of the great silicon stagnation?

------
nimos
Super excited to see what 2018-2019 looks like. If we have 3-4 high yield ~7nm
nodes and the dram/nand markets start clearing again I think we'll see some
pretty crazy prices for hardware especially with AMD/ARM pressuring Intel.

Hopefully Openstack will be a bit more mature then too. With lower hardware
costs and an open source software stack cloud computing might get pretty
competitive.

~~~
pas
Alas, it seems OpenStack is still in the gutter. :(

It's a mindboggingly strange mess. Yeah, it works, when it works, but it's so
undebuggable and unmaintainable. Well, if you have in house committers from
the core projects, then you can afford to run custom forks/branches. Oh and a
few dedicated Infrastructure Wizards deploying it, upgrading the components as
patches land, managing outages and simple gotchas.

It's almost easier to roll a new non-multi-tenant instance for each tenant
than to try to make it multi-tenant as both Horizon and Neutron are bad at
handling domains.

And it [one of the neutron linuxbridge agents] sometimes randomly eats IP
addresses from host interfaces :o

Oh, and the docs and release notes are still generally useless on
compatibility changes, upgrade procedure and so on.

------
mdaverveldt
_Actual logic design is done using standard cells so metrics describing
standard cell size are more useful._

Is it really the case that all logic designs use standard cells? I would have
expected full custom designs to maybe use a standard design for the transistor
but the placement and sizing of the gates is completely custom (e.g. not on a
grid).

------
vermaden
It would be interesting to see first x64 only (only 64-bit) CPU from either
Intel or AMD ...

