
Intel ‘Stunning Failure’ Heralds End of Era for U.S. Chip Sector - montalbano
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-25/intel-stunning-failure-heralds-end-of-era-for-u-s-chip-sector
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mensetmanusman
Not a failure, just disrupted by a business model of ‘build everything here’.
This is how the economy is supposed to work to improve people’s lives.

Also, China has just poached over 3k TSMC engineers with govt. funding (>3x
salaries!), so we will see if TSMC is disrupted by China’s chosen winner.

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sukilot
Wow! How can TSMC survive that decimation?

One answer may be that 5nm was pretty much the end of miniaturization anyway,
and TSMC would be stuck there with a dwindling moat until competitors caught
up.

[https://www.zdnet.com/article/thousands-of-taiwanese-chip-
ex...](https://www.zdnet.com/article/thousands-of-taiwanese-chip-experts-
moved-to-china-for-better-pay-reports/)

~~~
ksec
>One answer may be that 5nm was pretty much the end of miniaturization anyway

There is 3nm in 2022, 2nm GAA in 2024 and 1.4nm in 2026.

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woofie11
Nope, Moore's Law is over.

We run into wavelength-of-light issues around 400 nanometers. There's really
no practical way to go beyond that. I can provide tons of citations from top
engineers stating we're done here. You might have some processes with e-beam
lithography, but it's just too expensive and slow for anything outside super-
specialized uses.

Fortunately, that's gotten us to the 200MHz Pentium Pro, with 5 million
transistors. Seems like that's plenty good enough for what most people would
want to do with computers.

~~~
chaorace
I think it's more accurate to say that die shrinkage is over. Moore's Law
still has a fighting chance, we just have to wait and see what the clever
engineers at AMD, Intel, Qualcom, et al. do about it.

Of course, with 5 million transistors of pure power, I also see no need for
further improvements.

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ac29
The 7nm delay shoudnt surprise anyone who's been following their 10nm debacle.

Potentially farming out some products to third part fabs is a little
surprising, but seems pragmatic. It could even benefit them to compete with
AMD, NVIDIA, and Apple for the limited number of leading edge node wafers
coming out of TSMC.

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Dalrymple
Bob Swan, a non-technical bean-counter, is famous for running a social club
rather than a serious Board of Directors at Intel. It is a big threat to
national security if Intel goes totally fab-less, or hits some other
performance benchmark of severe management failure. Money alone can't fix
this, only replacing Bob with a real technical leader will do, preferably
sooner rather than later.

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jpeg_hero
Can’t help draw a parallel To Boeing where both used to have a very strong
engineering led culture

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lucio
Eventually, the US government will prop-up Intel. For the Security Apparatus,
is inadmissible to use chips made in China or Taiwan.

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chmod775
If money could fix Intel's problems they would have none.

The only thing that might help Intel would be the CIA or NSA engaging in some
more espionage.

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coded
The “stunning failure” and “end of era” are good clickbait phrases for a
headline, but it’s made by an analyst. Gotta consider the source.

It’s definitely not surprising to see the competition close in on Intel, but
it’s also not the end of an era.

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theevilsharpie
> It’s definitely not surprising to see the competition close in on Intel, but
> it’s also not the end of an era.

TSMC's 7nm process is mature and superior to anything that Intel can currently
produce in volume, and their 5nm process has nearly double the transistor
density of 7nm (and over 4x the density of Intel's mature 14nm process).
Samsung isn't far behind.

That Intel's CEO is telling investors that they may be manufacturing cutting
edge products elsewhere is a clear signal that they're getting ready to pivot.
This is on top of the earlier steps that Intel took to make their processor
architectures more portable between manufacturing processes.

Semiconductor manufacturing, especially at the leading edge, requires massive
economies of scale to be sustainable. While Intel didn't explicitly say they
were bowing out, the steps that Intel's leadership is taking clearly point to
them recognizing that they have no viable path forward as a leading-edge
manufacturer.

Within the next 3 years, barring a government bailout, or TSMC/Samsung's 5nm
processes failing in a similar fashion (which at least for TSMC, seems
unlikely), I expect Intel to spin off its manufacturing business into a
separate company and go fabless.

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rekabis
> Swan said on Friday that Intel’s products are still the best, despite the
> manufacturing delays.

LOL WUT?

AMD’s chips have twice the performance for half the price. The only people
still buying Intel are name-brand fanboys or institutional buyers that need
platform consistency. Anyone who cares about performance is already looking
hard at AMD.

Intel has painted itself into a very dark corner by resting on its laurels.
Somehow I’m thinking that it’s going to be the BlackBerry of the semiconductor
world.

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m463
I guess you could lump all server folks into "institutional buyers" but is
that what the market is really like?

Searching it looks like amd has 5% server market share and 18% desktop.

(personally I think intel chips are better)

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netsharc
Because market share indicates performance...?

The Intel-beating AMD chips are quite new, so them having less market share is
to be expected.

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lazylizard
Were these people around during the last days of p4? "Core" is a pretty good
run...

