
Intel's 7nm is Broken, Company Announces Delay Until 2022, 2023 - tosh
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-announces-delay-to-7nm-processors-now-one-year-behind-expectations
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kristianp
Duplicate of
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23932082](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23932082)
, which is also on the front page at the moment.

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sparker72678
I realize that all the process sizes aren't all necessarily equivalent ("TSMC
is on 5nm already!"), but this could really be an existential problem for
Intel.

Windows already has an ARM version. Apple is about to release its own silicon.
Amazon is running its own silicon on servers.

It seems like peak Intel is already behind us, but just how quickly might they
fall?

~~~
icedchai
I wouldn't count Intel out yet. They've been leapfrogged by AMD before, and
then caught up. The cycle repeats.

Also, do you remember the 90's? There was a promising 64-bit CPU called the
DEC Alpha. Windows once even had an Alpha version. We know how that turned
out.

~~~
wenc
I remember the DEC Alpha.

Intel (and HP) countered with Itanium, which was a break from (i.e.
incompatible with) the x86 architecture (IA64). It tanked.

AMD created AMD64 which was x86 compatible. They released chips like the
Athlon which were very popular. This turned out to be the winning strategy.

In a strange twist, Intel was forced by the market to adopt the AMD64. It
released it's own version, Intel64.

Intel messed up there too in the 90s too. It wasn't until the Core CPU roadmap
that Intel regained its lead.

There seems to be a link -- Jim Keller [1] was involved in the design of DEC
Alpha chips, and then moved to AMD to work on the K8 and then co-wrote the
AMD64 instruction set. He also worked on Apple's chips and Tesla's HW. He
recently just left Intel. What a career.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Keller_(engineer)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Keller_\(engineer\))

~~~
BbzzbB
Since you brought up Keller, if anyone is interested here is a great
podcast/conversation/interview with Lex Fridman:

[https://youtu.be/Nb2tebYAaOA](https://youtu.be/Nb2tebYAaOA)

~~~
jiggawatts
One of the best bits I took away from that interview is Jim's comment that a
lot of things need to be "rearchitected every decade, or even faster".

It's such a throwaway comment, but I think there's deep insight behind it from
someone with extensive experience in the matter.

I also feel it applies to many other things, not just ASIC design.

For example, every customer I go to manages their VMware farm just like they
managed their bare metal boxes in the past. Just as they're oh-so-slowly
wrapping their heads around the design concepts that are a better fit for
virtualisation, they're moving to the cloud. So of course, they deploy
everything in the cloud just like they're used to in their on-premises VMware
environment.

It's shocking how much low-hanging fruit is out there, just waiting to be
rearchitected by someone with understanding and a clear vision.

As a random example: I just saw a bunch of Azure servers with empty 1TB
"Application" D:\ drives. The team that built it was used to how VMware thin-
provisioned drives only allocate 2MB blocks at a time, so the 1TB max capacity
is just a high water mark that has no real cost. Meanwhile, Azure bills based
on capacity, not usage, so that 1TB is burning money.

It seems like a small thing, but if you store 1GB in a 1TB volume in the
cloud, you're _not_ paying $123/TB/month, you're actually paying $12,288 per
terabyte of data stored per month!

If you look around, it turns out that everywhere you look, people are doing
"what they've always done", and it leads to crazy inefficiencies.

~~~
devonkim
The reality is most places keep running software architected for an era over 2
decades ago now and it’s ossifying harder if it’s still carrying enough
business inertia. Those workflows of bootstrapping VMs and EC2 instances like
it’s 1996 are not going away because to do anything cloud native in your
architecture you need cloud native software, and usually if you can get a
container you can get an RPM or Deb and play package jockey rejecting the new
technologies literally meant to do half the work for you.

In most of the cases where places just dump money it’s usually a question of
labor cost spent to optimize vs the gains, and unless your business is built
around scaling a lot of small customers like the usual SaaS unicorns customer
acquisition is super long, painful, and technical inefficiency is the default
for enterprise as a rule. It’s worth paying $200 for a $1 part because the
overhead and risk of renegotiating anything is not worth it. When an hour long
meeting essentially costs a minimum of $1000 to a company essentially, it’d
better be worth it.

When it comes to ASIC designs and VLSI the technical debt is pretty different
because each generation of hardware has past benchmarks primarily to drive it
forward. Oftentimes in software people tend to want to keep things the same
which discourages innovation or touching.

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etaioinshrdlu
Highly relevant and I don't see this mentioned here (in the comments at
least)... Intel's CEO considers outsourcing fabrication!

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-24/intel-
con...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-24/intel-considers-
what-was-once-heresy-not-manufacturing-chips?srnd=premium)

~~~
ramshanker
It appears only for the GPU for the time being.

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tus88
AMD hasn't been whipping Intel like this since the days of the Athlon 64 vs
Pentium4.

~~~
pseudosavant
Everyone and their dog are whooping Intel. AMD on x86, and GPUS. ARM on
everything else. Modem business, flop. Nvidia is trashing them on accelerator
cards and GPUs. Amazon is starting to use its own ARM CPUs and AMD. Intel
really doesn't have an answer to "twice the cores, for less" value prop for
cloud providers selling vCPUs.

Could they recover from this death spiral?

~~~
anarazel
And yet they're quite profitable...

~~~
corty
They are still profitable, because there is a lot of remaining momentum in
business markets and laptops. Those who have historically only bought intel
and produced intel like a dogma take some time to change their ways. But
change is happening, and it will hurt Intel badly...

~~~
jamiek88
Yep. Just like RIM had their best few quarters post iPhone release.

~~~
catalogia
Like Wiley E. Coyote running off the side of a cliff; he doesn't fall until he
makes the mistake of looking down.

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d_silin
Here is link explaining actual dimensions of Intel and TSMC recent nodes:

[https://www.eetimes.com/intels-10nm-node-past-present-and-
fu...](https://www.eetimes.com/intels-10nm-node-past-present-and-future/)

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rpiguy
Intel 10nm is broadly comparable to TMSC 7nm, but this is really bad optics
for Intel.

~~~
AgloeDreams
The problem is that Intel still can't ship 10nm in mass production.

Apple's has been shipping all new chips, in TSMC 7nm, since the iPhone XS in
2018, at tens of millions per quarter, in fact nearly every product Apple
sells is 7nm.

They probably sell more Watches every quarter with 7nm than Intel has sold
10nm in all time. It's a mess and TSMC will ship 5nm this quarter. They are
seriously behind in MASSIVE ways.

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moonchild
> [intel's] first 7nm server CPUs (Granite Rapids) will arrive in 2023, a
> delay from earlier roadmaps that projected a launch in 2022

Only a one year delay; less than the title implies.

> Swan also said "we have root-caused the [7nm] issue and believe there are no
> fundamental roadblocks"

Heard that one before. Would like to believe it's true this time, but—who
knows.

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chx
[https://www.extremetech.com/computing/306978-intel-
expects-t...](https://www.extremetech.com/computing/306978-intel-expects-to-
reach-process-parity-with-7nm-in-2021-lead-on-5nm)

Back in March they said

> Intel CEO Bob Swann has stated that 7nm CPUs will ship in Q4 2021.

And now they are on 2022/2023...

~~~
threatripper
The same tactic as with 10nm. What they say doesn't mean much. They will admit
just as much as the lawyers advise them to. They will probably release some
7nm devices in homeopathic doses just to show the shareholders "see, we are
delivering, you can't sue us".

At some point they probably will be ready to produce in quantities but we have
no indication when that date is.

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akmarinov
No wonder apple is jumping ship...

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pier25
Apple would be switching to ARM regardless of what the x86 industry is doing.

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mindfulhack
What supports that proposition? Plenty supports the opposite, such as Intel
causing massive problems for several years e.g. to the MacBook Pro line, with
overheating and thermal issues. They've been failing to innovate at the speed
Apple would otherwise be able to, for a long time now.

~~~
posix_me_less
> _" Intel causing massive problems for several years e.g. to the MacBook Pro
> line, with overheating and thermal issues."_

Do you not realize how ridiculous this statement is? Apple knows what CPU
models are going into their laptops, they could properly design hardware and
software to prevent overheating and degradation.

~~~
rowanG077
They could. But that means the macbook pro would perform worse on all the
superficial benchmarks.

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Jerry2
Well, now we know why Apple initiated the move to ARM this year. They must
have known about this for quite some time and Intel probably shared this new
timeline with them. Apple's ARM will on on 3/5nm nodes when Intel hits 7nm.

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shmerl
Looks like AMD will get to 5 nm through TSMC before Intel will get to 7 nm.

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TwoBit
And get to 3nm before Intel gets to 5nm.

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shmerl
Good opportunity for AMD to gain wider adoption.

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Shorel
What seems insane to me is that in 2020, no matter what volume Intel and AMD
seem to be able to produce, everything they produce is sold out.

This means our appetite for computing power is increasing.

~~~
AgloeDreams
AMD is sold out due to demand and Price/Performance, Intel is sold out dude to
incredibly large inability to ship anywhere near enough quantity. It's
probably 5+ AMD 7nm units per every Intel 10nm.

Meanwhile Apple has been shipping 7nm for two years at probably 10 times the
units per quarter.

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JaceLightning
I can't wait to watch Linus shit on Intel again.

~~~
perryizgr8
Yeah, both of them ;)

