[HN Gopher] Intel's New IDM 2.0 Strategy
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Intel's New IDM 2.0 Strategy
Author : addaon
Score : 54 points
Date : 2021-03-23 21:12 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.anandtech.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.anandtech.com)
| trynumber9 wrote:
| Foundry service seems like a good idea. 14nm may be a bit long in
| the tooth for modern phones, laptops, servers but it would be a
| cutting edge process for most embedded products. Intel built more
| 14nm capacity than usual because of the 10nm problems. As they
| finally move to 10nm and 7nm EUV processes, it makes sense to try
| to sell their 14nm fab space/time to anyone who wants it.
| varispeed wrote:
| Or maybe they could pivot and work on foundry equipment that
| small businesses could setup in their garage? I think it should
| be a good time to start democratising the chip production and
| so far there is probably no company who can provide tools in
| this segment affordable for small and medium businesses.
| Macha wrote:
| First of all there are serious economies of scale to chip
| processing, especially at these low scale, that I think it's
| unlikely a SME could compete in this space.
|
| Secondly chipmaking is not always the most environmentally
| friendly process, at least on a local level (Intel[2], AMD[1]
| have superfund sites at former plants, they aren't the only
| one), so I'm not sure people should want someone running one
| "from their garage"
|
| [1]: https://cumulis.epa.gov/supercpad/SiteProfiles/index.cfm
| ?fus...
|
| [2]: https://cumulis.epa.gov/supercpad/SiteProfiles/index.cfm
| ?fus...
| camdenlock wrote:
| I have nothing relevant to add here, except to ask: is it just
| me, or does Intel's branding suck? How do I pronounce X^e
| exactly?
| wmf wrote:
| Xe is officially pronounced as the letters X E.
|
| I suspect large companies have too many branding people with
| too little to do.
| slashdot2008 wrote:
| X to the e
|
| Like the Xzibit song "X to the Z", which might have been good
| branding as it comes with a theme song
| [deleted]
| cjdell wrote:
| I wonder if Intel would allow AMD to build chips using their
| fabs. That'll be interesting to see. I believe it happened once
| before in the early days.
| frabert wrote:
| I believe the opposite was true, when AMD was an OEM for Intel
| CPUs
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| Hopefully Gelsinger will be to Intel what Nadella was to
| Microsoft. Both are engineers following finance people who while
| they still made a lot of money, lost the tech initiative.
|
| I would love to see a 3 way competition between Intel, AMD, and
| Apple for consumer chips.
| nicoburns wrote:
| And indeed a continuing 3 way competition between TSMC, Samsung
| and Intel for actually fabricating the chips.
| adamcstephens wrote:
| I wouldn't put Apple in the same category. They'll never sell
| chips except as part of their vertically integrated systems.
| ISL wrote:
| Even if they remain vertically-integrated, if they can sell
| an Apple datacenter blade or produce bespoke architectures
| for major cloud providers, the market is large -- Apple-
| scale.
| gh02t wrote:
| It would be interesting to see how that would work and what
| sort of unique features Apple would offer in a proper
| enterprise product, but I'm struggling to imagine Apple
| returning to that market in earnest. Even Xserve was not
| really about being a server in its own right so much as it
| was for providing infrastructure to support their desktops.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Apple sells luxury goods. They don't seem interested in the
| datacenter market. Plus it seems like all the cloud
| companies are designing their own ARM chips, I doubt they
| want apple's.
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| Apple is a consumer electronics company and they keep
| reiterating that. Their whole strategy is to be an island
| unto themselves where they can maintain high gross margins
| and squeeze their suppliers.
|
| They're not interested in competing on other people's terms
| in commoditized markets. They sell luxury goods.
| jlawer wrote:
| Cloud providers want dependable suppliers with low costs,
| openness with design, integration with other suppliers and
| long term roadmaps and support. Outside dependability,
| Apple is not good on any of the other aspects. Apple run a
| high margin business, and their processes reflect that.
|
| Apple are a high margin business. I highly doubt they want
| to harm their gross margin, but its possible. Apple however
| have not been that successful co-designing.... well,
| anything. They are highly opinionated that they are correct
| and this has typically lead to them blazing new trails, but
| has also lead to mis-steps. For bespoke systems, that would
| rely on building what the customer asks for. Apple's
| generally isn't great with working with outside suppliers,
| generally trying to bring the work inside. Finally this
| would require apple to tie their hands (in the same way
| microsoft has) with compatibility to provide the long term
| support that the vendors require.
|
| Apple would never become the suppliers the cloud providers
| want. The only way they would be chosen is if the product
| is significantly better then what otherwise exists. I can
| easily see Apple leapfrogging incumbent server vendors for
| performance or such for a short term, but I expect the
| others will catch up very quickly. Cloud hardware is
| already well integrated by companies motivated to eek out
| every little bit of performance (see facebook and the OCP).
| Despite being significantly more different from an
| engineering perspective, I actually think manufacturing
| cars is more similar from a business perspective for Apple.
| ncw96 wrote:
| I'd expect to see Qualcomm in the mix as well, at least for
| laptop chips.
| wyldfire wrote:
| They are in the mix, though their share is likely extremely
| small. But there's several Snapdragon-based laptop designs
| currently on sale.
| varispeed wrote:
| This is underwhelming. By the time they manage to get 7nm fab it
| will already be obsolete. Why not something more ambitious or
| admit they cannot compete with Apple and AMD any longer and focus
| on chipsets or other peripherals? They could free x86
| specification and let other companies with more energy pick a
| fight with ARM, no?
| bgorman wrote:
| No one builds a leading-edge fab for one process node. The new
| factories will be able to support more advanced processes,
| unless Intel is wildly incompetent.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Intel 7nm is roughly equivalent to TSMC 5nm.
| cronix wrote:
| I wonder how Intels chips would stack against Apple/AMD if they
| were to also use TSMC for outsourcing manufacturing instead of
| doing it themselves.
| [deleted]
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Hopefully the foundry business works this time. A TSMC monopoly
| would suck.
| greggyb wrote:
| Samsung, Global Foundries, UMC, and SMIC are other large
| players in the foundry space. It would be _very_ difficult for
| TSMC to eliminate these competitors.
| 55873445216111 wrote:
| Among these only Samsung and TSMC have 7/5nm in production.
| GF and UMC aren't even pursuing it. SMIC is far behind.
| krastanov wrote:
| Some of these foundries explicitly do not compete on cutting
| edge node-sizes. Global Foundries, for instance, have said
| they will focus on specialty circuitry, but will not try to
| compete on things like <10nm node sizes. I think it is fair
| to say they are not really competitors as their business is
| sufficiently different.
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