[HN Gopher] Intel puts 1nm process (10A) on the roadmap for 2027
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Intel puts 1nm process (10A) on the roadmap for 2027
Author : rbanffy
Score : 142 points
Date : 2024-02-28 14:40 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.tomshardware.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.tomshardware.com)
| tambourine_man wrote:
| Hoping Intel can catch up, but not holding my breath
| dev1ycan wrote:
| Man american companies sure love to over promise and under
| deliver, aren't they still stuck on 7nm? lol.
| karolist wrote:
| Why single out American?
| sgc wrote:
| This horse is dead and disfigured, but here we go again.
|
| Intel 4 (Intel "7nm" rebranding), is roughly equivalent to TSMC
| "3nm" in transistor density. By the transistor density metric,
| Intel is not way behind. There is no reason right now to think
| they can't deliver 10A/1nm in 2027.
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| It's worth noting that Intel 4 only barely exists (mobile
| only and slower than Intel 7). Intel still is saying that
| they will launch 20a by the end of the year, and 18a next
| year, but I will be pretty surprised if they6 timeline sticks
| adrian_b wrote:
| While Meteor Lake is likely to be the only product ever
| made with "Intel 4", the improved variant of "Intel 4"
| rebranded as "Intel 3" is expected to be launched later in
| this year in several kinds of server CPUs, i.e. Sierra
| Forrest, Granite Rapids and Granite Rapids D.
|
| Moreover, "Intel 3" will also be used for some I/O or cache
| memory tiles even in some later Intel CPUs where the
| computing tiles will be made with denser processes like
| "Intel 18A".
|
| For now, Meteor Lake with "Intel 4" is the first Intel
| product made with a process that has been developed after
| the change of CEO. It remains to be seen later this year,
| based on whether the planned server CPUs will be launched
| successfully, then by the end of the year also the first
| CPUs with big cores having the first new microarchitecture
| since 2021 (Arrow Lake, Arrow Lake S and Lunar Lake), if
| Pat Gelsinger has succeeded to restore Intel's
| competitivity.
| j_walter wrote:
| Yeah, but the most advanced chips in Meteor Lake are TSMC
| chips still...3 of them (GPU, SoC, IOE at N5/6 node).
| Granted there are lots of comparisons saying TSMC N5 is
| Intel 7, etc...but when you actually come down to real
| life testing of power and
| signatoremo wrote:
| Intel 4 and 3 are transitional processes, but 75% or
| customers opt for 18A, that's why they pushed for it and it
| may appear in volume sooner than older nodes, as the
| article noted:
|
| _Capacity for the Intel 4 and Intel 3 processes doesn 't
| build as quickly as 20A/18A, but that isn't surprising --
| the majority of the company's wins for its third-party
| foundry business have been with the 18A node, which Intel
| says is according to plan_
|
| 18A process is planned to be ready in the second half of
| this year, and Intel is sticking to it. 18A chips (Intel
| processors and GPUs) will appear next year
| TMWNN wrote:
| It's weird how widespread this notion is, that TSMC has this
| colossal lead on the rest of the world that no one else can
| possibly catch up to. Yes, TSMC is ahead at the moment thanks
| in large part to the massive volume it is getting from
| cellphone CPUs. But the lead over Samsung and Intel is almost
| as small as the nanometers that all three companies are
| dealing with. IBM has gone fabless but still has some of the
| best chip designers in the world. Etc.
|
| When Intel had the world's leading fabs, driven off massive
| volume in PC CPUs, I don't remember people being so emphatic
| about how insurmountable its technological lead over the rest
| of the world was. Yes, I know the geopolitical issues around
| TSMC bring it more attention, good and bad. But still.
| nottorp wrote:
| So what's the size of this 1nm process in real life nanometers?
| westmeal wrote:
| literally first thought I had. its stupid marketing that...
| quite frankly I'm not sure who it's even for.
| colordrops wrote:
| Probably investors.
| rthnbgrredf wrote:
| I don't know for Intel, but for TSMC the marketing numbers work
| like this:
|
| Marketing, Gate pitch, Metal Pitch, Year
|
| 7nm, 60nm, 40nm, 2018
|
| 5nm, 51nm, 30nm, 2020
|
| 3nm, 48nm, 24nm, 2022
|
| 2nm, 45nm, 20nm, 2024
|
| 1nm, 42nm, 16nm, 2026
| culopatin wrote:
| Is there anything in the process that's 7-1nm?
| jacoblambda wrote:
| Nope. Quote:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_nm_process
|
| > The phrase "7 nm" does not refer to any dimension on the
| integrated circuits, and has no relation to gate length,
| metal pitch, or gate pitch; since at least 1997, "node" has
| become a commercial name for marketing purposes that
| indicates new generations of process technologies, without
| any relation to physical properties. However, the smallest
| dimension within an individual transistor, the fin width,
| can sometimes be 7 nm. TSMC and Samsung's "10 nm" (10 LPE)
| processes are somewhere between Intel's "14 nm" and "10 nm"
| processes in transistor density.
| ReptileMan wrote:
| Well what is 1nm measuring? The diameter of the sphere in
| which the combined gray brain matter of the marketing
| department could be squeezed into? Lithography wavelength?
| jacoblambda wrote:
| It's a standardised "process" sizing established by the
| International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors.
| Originally they did correspond to actual feature sizes but
| since around 1997, they no longer correlate to actual sizes
| and are more just a marketing term that matches the same
| naming scheme as previously.
|
| Occassionally a given process will correspond to actual
| sizes but it's more out of luck than anything else.
| tromp wrote:
| The step from 7 to 5nm shrunk pitch to 85%, a mere 19% of
| marketing hype.
|
| But the step from 2 to 1nm shrunk gate pitch to 93.3% instead
| of the suggested 50%, a large 87% marketing hype. Or viewed
| as a shrink _by_ only 6.7%, it 's a whopping 600+% hype.
| mrandish wrote:
| The hype-to-reality gap is going to keep getting much
| bigger every generation of announcements due to Dennard
| scaling and the end of Moore's Law. I was fortunate enough
| to be an active computer technologist through the "golden
| age" from 1980 to ~2010. Every three to four years things
| got about twice as fast for around half the cost. And not
| just _some_ features or aspects but almost the entire
| system in almost every way. We had no idea back then just
| how extraordinary that period was.
|
| Today, the industry has regressed to hyping tiny
| incremental gains in narrow sub-metrics which only rarely
| have a material impact on overall performance across an
| entire system or most applications and usually at higher
| cost. Those that entered the industry in the last 15 years
| don't really appreciate just how much progress has slowed
| to a crawl.
|
| Sadly, looking at the ten year roadmap projections from the
| likes of IMEC, there aren't any big leaps on the horizon.
| Progress will come mostly in single-digit percentages and
| most gains will be increasingly conditional (eg limited to
| one logic type or only in certain contexts). And the costs
| are going to keep skyrocketing. I hope we'll "get lucky"
| with some unexpected breakthrough but there's no reason to
| expect that.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| This is such a ridiculous way to do, well anything.
| Especially something that's supposed to be based on
| technology and science. It's how you would sell infomercial
| products or gas station virility pills.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| It's true that marketing sort of ran away with it but it's
| important to note that the original idea was sound and
| didn't have to do with marketing hype. "Process shrinks"
| require many different industries to coordinate or else
| nothing can get done, and the ITRS roadmap was meant to be
| the mechanism to accomplish that coordination. What
| happened was that not long after it was introduced the
| actual feature sizes diverged from the names on the
| roadmap, but they decided to just keep using the roadmap
| names because the need for coordination didn't actually go
| away and, well, the names were right there, why bother
| changing them.
|
| The end result seems crazy now but it's the result a set of
| decisions that were individually rational, not marketing-
| driven, at each step.
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| They got their work cut out for them for the <1nm naming
| scheme. 900pm?
| buu700 wrote:
| Seems straightforward to me. 0nm, -1nm, -2nm, etc.
| Lance_ET_Compte wrote:
| How many atoms thick is the gate oxide on a 1nm process?
| layer8 wrote:
| I wonder how they came up with the "1.4 nm" designation
| (which confusingly TSMC calls A14 now and Intel 14A).
| ebruchez wrote:
| See "The Node is Nonsense", which discusses alternative ways of
| describing process nodes in the future:
|
| https://read.nxtbook.com/ieee/spectrum/spectrum_na_august_20...
| 0cVlTeIATBs wrote:
| >they're using "angstroms" I kinda hoped once they hit 1
| "nanometer" they'd stop using these fake units of length.
| TehCorwiz wrote:
| Angstrom is a very real unit of measurement.
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angstrom
| tlamponi wrote:
| I think they meant fake as in "doesn't relate to any size of
| the transistors", as the gate/metal pitch sizes are e.g. 40
| nm and 54 nm respectively for Intel's "7nm" node [0], even
| the fin pitch is 34 nm, so almost 5 times bigger than the
| marketing term would like to imply.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_nm_process#Process_nodes
| _and...
| TehCorwiz wrote:
| Ah, yeah. I can see that. So what does that refer to then,
| the smallest size of any feature of the transistor?
| Hizonner wrote:
| It does not refer to the physical size of _any_ element
| or feature of the chips.
|
| It's the marketing department's claim about what you'd
| have had to do to achieve "equivalent performance" using
| geometries (and probably other things) that are no longer
| used. Or to put it another way it's completely untethered
| from reality in every way.
| vondur wrote:
| As a chem major, we used Angstroms for measuring bond distances
| and other small lengths.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Getting close to the physical limits there, 1nm is just a couple
| of atoms across.
|
| "lattice parameter of 0.543 nm ... nearest neighbor distance is
| 0.235 nm"
| lazide wrote:
| There is likely nothing 1nm in this 1nm process.
| ksd482 wrote:
| What do you mean?
| FPGAhacker wrote:
| Exactly what he said.
|
| It's a marketing number and has been for many years.
| rbanffy wrote:
| They could at least use a number that would reflect the
| current transistor density if they could have that number
| of nm with planar 1980's transistors.
| adastra22 wrote:
| It has nothing to do with transistor density, and hasn't
| for twenty years.
| rbanffy wrote:
| I know, but it could be nice if it were.
| WithinReason wrote:
| It does reflect transistor density. You can check this
| yourself:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count#Microproce
| sso...
| mjrpes wrote:
| Back in 2019 Intel suggested the industry do this:
| https://www.anandtech.com/show/13405/intel-10nm-cannon-
| lake-...
|
| But nm size is so baked into culture, it didn't take off.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Transistor density for just, like, a grid of unconnected
| transistors? Or some reference design or something like
| that?
|
| IMO it is interesting to get a general idea of where the
| companies are, but in the end the element size doesn't
| matter to end users. People should check the linpack
| benchmarks of the chips that come out, or whatever.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| SRAM size has not been scaling at all in recent nodes, so
| these days the notion of uniform scaling is also breaking
| down quite a bit. This means that future designs will
| have less cache memory per core, unless they use chiplets
| to add more memory (either SRAM or eDRAM) close enough to
| the chip to become usable as some kind of bespoke cache.
| automatic6131 wrote:
| Once again, the "process size" are marketing numbers. There's
| no actual feature measuring 1nm.
|
| The actual transistors are around 40nm across [1]. They change
| the geometry of the features, either the shape of the
| transistor gate or even the method of power delivery. All
| really incredible features and worthy of awe. Just not actually
| making transistors with finger-countable number of atoms.
|
| [1] https://www.wikiwand.com/en/2_nm_process
| spenczar5 wrote:
| I have often heard that these are "just marketing." But humor
| me - where does the "1nm" even come from? What is the
| calculation that ends up spitting out 1nm, even if its
| invalid?
| Detrytus wrote:
| Basically, the calculation is: "previous process name x
| 0.6, rounded up", or something like that.
|
| So you get 65, 40, 28, 20, 14, 10, 7, 5, 3, 2, 1 ...
| addaon wrote:
| The actual pattern was intended to follow "previous /
| sqrt(2)", such that every node would double areal
| density, and every two nodes would double linear density.
| kurthr wrote:
| That should be x0.7 or /1.4 since it's sqrt(2).
| whimsicalism wrote:
| literally it is made up
| WithinReason wrote:
| No, it's sort of a "transistor density equivalent"
| ajross wrote:
| It used to be that it was a linear scaling factor. So if
| you moved from, say, 40nm to 20nm, you'd see a 4x increase
| in transistor density. In the early days of VLIW scaling
| (roughly from 45nm and up), that really did work by just
| "making everything smaller". And in that world, the
| smallest thing was generally the size of the middle/active
| region of the transistor on top of which the gate sat, so
| the "gate length" (which is actually the *width* of a
| resist line that crosses the transistor) became the
| standard.
|
| But then they started having to cheat: you can take a big
| transistor and "fold" it vertically to be smaller but still
| have the same gate area, etc... The actual feature sizes
| may not have changed much but you have the 2x density
| increase, so you name your new node "32nm" even though the
| actual width of the gate feature when seen from above
| didn't change, etc...
|
| But then somewhere around 10nm everyone just gave up and
| started handing out random numbers. TSMC's 3nm process is
| not _remotely_ a 2x density increase over 5nm, for example.
| kayson wrote:
| Sort of. Down to around 14nm nodes, maybe lower, the
| number was the actual minimum length of the transistor
| gate. Somewhere thereabouts the transistors weren't
| shrinking as much but they needed the number to go down
| so it became some rough estimate of PPA (power
| performance area) improvement - it's not just density.
|
| There's also a distinction between "drawn length" which
| is the number specified by the designer, and the actual
| feature size on silicon. This can be scaled up or down
| either completely arbitrarily (meaning the drawn length
| is a total sham) or optically (meaning the drawn length
| is real but the chip is fabricated with a magnification
| <1)
| ajross wrote:
| Oh no, long before 14nm. A quick google tells me that the
| gate pitch on Intel 14nm is 70nm!
|
| Obviously there's a ton of complexity here and lots of
| cheats and optimizations were done over the decades that
| weren't directly related to linear sizing. But I stand
| behind the threshold I gave: the big discontinuity in the
| industry, where "node size" and "feature size" clearly
| began to significantly diverge, was the introduction of
| finfet/tri-gate transistors in Intel 32nm.
| WithinReason wrote:
| It's supposed to reflect transistor density. If you take a
| chip made on a say 90nm process and shrink it by 90x it
| should have approximately the same transistor density as a
| "marketing 1nm" chip. The scaling stopped around 45
| nanometers.
|
| You can see this if you compare 2 processes: Intel 45nm had
| 2,779,468 transistors/mm2, and the Apple A14 (7nm) had a
| transistor density of 134,100,000 t/mm2
|
| 2,779,468*(45/7)2=114,865,769, so the two are quite close.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count#Microprocess
| o...
| magicalhippo wrote:
| The size used to correspond to minimum feature size. A
| transistor consists of multiple features and used to be
| fairly planar with things arranged side by side more or
| less.
|
| As it became harder to shrink the minimum feature size,
| they figured out other ways to shrink. For example various
| ways of stacking things on top of each other rather than
| having them side by side[1].
|
| As such they could cram more transistors in the same area
| compared to a planar transistor, and hence you got the same
| effect as shrinking the minumum feature size.
|
| Not sure exactly how they name things, but one could
| calculate what feature size would have been required to get
| a given transistor density using a plain planar transistor,
| for comparison.
|
| [1]: https://semiengineering.com/from-finfets-to-gate-all-
| around/
| nabla9 wrote:
| The latest ASML machines Intel ordered position the wafer with
| accuracy that is half of the diameter of silicon atom.
| imtringued wrote:
| If you looked at the chip sideways we would be shooting way
| beyond femtometers, but if you happen to look at it from above
| then it's only 1 nm. Don't you think it's strange that the
| manufacturer is using metrics that make them look bad?
| kergonath wrote:
| > If you looked at the chip sideways we would be shooting way
| beyond femtometers
|
| Considering that the order of magnitude of an atom's radius
| is 1 A (or 100 pm, or 100 000 fm), I really doubt any chip is
| thinner than 1 fm.
| nabla9 wrote:
| So far Gelsinger's ambitious roadmap has worked out. Goodbye MBA
| mentality and back to Grovian execution and engineering centric
| culture.
|
| Intel made huge error when they decided to delay DUV -> EUV
| transition. Now Intel is the first to order ASML's EXE:5200 and
| push High-NA. PoverVia and RibbonFET are what Intel is going to
| use. Meanwhile Intel's EUV 3nm chips are coming out this year.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| I'm have my fingers crossed for Arc GPU's too. It would be
| awesome to get a 3rd competitive GPU manufacturer in the mix.
| nabla9 wrote:
| FYI: Intel contracted TSMC to manufacture its ARC GPUs on its
| 6nm process.
| cubefox wrote:
| Retrospectively it was a big mistake for Intel not to go
| into the GPU business when they were still leaders in
| microchip design.
| wtallis wrote:
| Intel used to be undisputed leaders in chip
| _fabrication_. They 've always been hit or miss on chip
| _design_. Most notably, every time they 've tried to
| develop two CPU microarchitectures in parallel, at least
| one of them has been a major failure. And most of the
| times AMD has been able to take the lead, it's been
| because Intel's chip design failed so hard it squandered
| their fab advantage and gave AMD an opportunity to catch
| up.
|
| Since Intel's early designs for a discrete GPU were based
| off introducing a _third_ x86 microarchitecture, the
| failure was not really surprising.
| deaddodo wrote:
| > it's been because Intel's chip design failed so hard it
| squandered their fab advantage and gave AMD an
| opportunity to catch up.
|
| Pretty sure you got that backwards. Intel fell behind
| because their fab advantage dissipated as they struggled
| on 14nm for 4 generations longer than their timelines
| anticipated, their chip design was actually doing alright
| at the time (without the foreknowledge of Spectre, of
| course).
|
| In addition, AMD and Intel went pretty tit-for-tat all
| the way through 90nm; with AMD usually having the
| superior per-node technology (e.g. AMD 90nm > Intel 90nm)
| and Intel usually being slightly ahead in node-size.
| Ironically, similar to Intel and Samsung/TSMC/etc now, in
| reverse. That didn't really fall apart until 65nm, and
| really crash until 45nm.
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| It's even sadder when Intel says Nvidia got "lucky"
| (https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/intel-
| ceo-sa....)
|
| Intel can get "lucky" too, so what happened?
| dartos wrote:
| I really hope tech starts a trend of booting that MBA
| mentality.
|
| Did so much harm to the industry and the quality of software.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > Goodbye MBA mentality and back to Grovian execution and
| engineering centric culture.
|
| > Intel made huge error when they decided to delay DUV -> EUV
| transition.
|
| Just as an FYI, that error was made when the CEO was an
| engineer, not an MBA.
|
| And I find it amusing for folks here to cheer Grovian culture.
| Andy Grove's management style had all of what people criticize
| Amazon's culture, on steroids. Indeed, I believe Jeff Bezos
| took some of the 14 leadership principles from Grove (who was
| CEO at that time).
| ryandrake wrote:
| > And I find it amusing for folks here to cheer Grovian
| culture. Andy Grove's management style had all of what people
| criticize Amazon's culture, on steroids.
|
| People tend to forgive a leader's flaws, including really
| terrible flaws, if the leader seems to be producing results
| that people like.
| kergonath wrote:
| Also, the grass tends to be greener in the past.
| jcranmer wrote:
| > Just as an FYI, that error was made when the CEO was an
| engineer, not an MBA.
|
| And not just any engineer, an engineer who specifically came
| from the fab side of things and not the chip design side of
| things.
| BeetleB wrote:
| Yeah, and I should mention that the idea to make the
| foundry a big part of Intel's business came from a past CEO
| who was an MBA (circa 2010-2011), and it was the engineers
| in the company who sabotaged that effort.
|
| History showed the engineers to be wrong, and here we are
| with Intel trying to compete with TSMC for customers.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| The leadership principles are nonsensical because (no joke)
| they occur in pairs labelling extrema of various dimensions,
| the point being that _every_ activity can be described as
| lying on some point in 7-dimensional bullshit space, and that
| point can be either characterized as close to or far from
| some leadership principle.
|
| I don't know how else to describe it, but it's just a
| justification system for a deep hierarchy to belittle the
| workers.
|
| I say this having worked years in the inner engineering
| sanctum of Apple where none of this bullshit existed (both
| during and after the Steve Jobs era).
| thunderbird120 wrote:
| I realize the whole MBA bad idea is popular right now on HN but
| it's worth remembering that Intel's struggles with 10nm were
| the result of too much engineering ambition rather than too
| little. The original 10nm was very VERY ambitious and if it had
| actually worked and had hit volume production on anything
| resembling the original timeline Intel would have essentially
| had a half decade worth of a process advantage over its
| competitors. Unfortunately, letting engineering go nuts can
| sometimes screw you just as much as letting the out of touch
| bean counters rule. Engineering based businesses have to manage
| both the engineering and the business side. Failing to do that
| means disaster.
| nabla9 wrote:
| The MBA idea is correct in this case. Intel had the board and
| leadership that led it to ambitious process without enough
| urgency or resources, or ability to course correct quickly
| enough.
|
| The most important question must be discussed at C-suite.
| Intel didn't have have enough people there to make decisions.
|
| > Engineering based businesses have to manage both the
| engineering and the business side. Failing to do that means
| disaster.
|
| Top engineers can learn to manage business at the highest
| levels. Business leaders can't learn enough engineering to
| manage engineering companies.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| > Business leaders can't learn enough engineering to manage
| engineering companies.
|
| Cisco Systems was led by CEO John T. Chambers from
| 1995-2015. His education was BS, BA in business and a JD.
| After he got his MBA he started in sales. During his time
| as CEO at Cisco, sales went from $1.9 billion to $49.2
| billion. In 2000, Cisco became the most valuable company in
| the world.
|
| Before Chambers was John Morgridge, who was an MBA. He
| helped oust the two founding engineers. Before him was Bill
| Graves (who had a BS in physics, but was only at Cisco for
| a year).
| nabla9 wrote:
| Your are doing _" If I can find few counterexamples I
| debunked your argument."_
| psunavy03 wrote:
| You made an absolute statement . . . "business leaders
| can never lead an engineering firm." All that is needed
| to disprove that statement is one counterexample, because
| then it has to morph into "some business leaders can lead
| an engineering firm and some can't."
|
| Ironically given the subject matter, this is similar to
| how math proofs work . . .
| Aromasin wrote:
| I think a lot of the reasons that engineers rag on
| business leaders more than engineering ones are that:
|
| 1. They haven't tried creating a product and then making
| money off it. It's amazing how painfully difficult that
| can be (without good Sales and Marketing).
|
| 2. They haven't done a (good) MBA and don't understand
| how much goes into it, so write it off as similar to an
| undergraduate business degree.
|
| 3. They have a superiority complex from their university
| days where engineering was the hardest discipline.
|
| Pat Gelsigner's favourite phrase is "We all work for
| Sales and Marketing". He says it over and over. I think
| at this time in Intel's history an engineer is the better
| one to be running the ship, but the idea that you need to
| be 100% tech savvy to run a successful tech company is,
| as you proved through your example, patently false. A
| good CTO can make all the difference in the product,
| while a good MBA-type CEO can focus on everything else.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| >In 2000, Cisco became the most valuable company in the
| world.
|
| And there definitely wasn't some bubble going on
| distorting that value
| sapiogram wrote:
| A rising tide lifts all boats. Maybe "most valuable tech
| company in the world" would be a more convincing
| argument, since the tide receded shortly afterwards.
| jryle70 wrote:
| At the time that Cisco was top of the world, there were
| plenty of other high profile tech companies -- Microsoft,
| IBM, Intel, Sun, HP, DEC. On the networking side there
| were 3Com, Nortel etc. They all rose the tide of the
| dotcom bubble, yet Cisco came out on top. You should
| wonder why.
| Hizonner wrote:
| Not sure Cisco had "two founding engineers", actually.
| Len would've qualified as an engineer, but Sandy was
| just... Sandy. And IIRC she thought of herself as the
| "business side" of the pair. Other pure engineers were of
| course there early on, but weren't running the company.
|
| On the other hand, it's not obvious Chambers can be
| counted as a success in running an "engineering company".
| Chambers ran an acquisition company. It's entirely
| possible that an acquisition company was a more
| profitable idea than an an engineering company, but
| still.
| wtallis wrote:
| You can't accurately describe Intel's 10nm disaster without
| mentioning that they were making a huge bet that EUV wasn't
| going to be ready anytime soon so they were trying everything
| they could to keep up with Moore's Law _except_ using EUV.
| But some of the things Intel planned for 10nm turned out to
| be harder to get working correctly than EUV.
|
| It wasn't simply the engineers going nuts trying to make a
| huge jump all at once. They were taking a bunch of unique
| risks in order to follow a different path from the rest of
| the industry. If Intel had planned to follow a similar EUV
| timeline to the rest of the industry, they would have been
| subject to the same risks as everyone else regarding EUV and
| probably could have maintained a moderate lead throughout
| that transition, with a worst-case outcome being that they
| would be part of an industry-wide failure to keep up with
| Moore's Law if EUV didn't work out. Instead, they ended up
| years behind.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| > But some of the things Intel planned for 10nm turned out
| to be harder to get working correctly than EUV.
|
| Is that actually true? The direct competitor to Intel 10nm
| is TSMC N7, which is an overall similar process - DUV,
| multiple patterning etc. -, achieves similar performance
| and power efficiency, and had a similar timeline to how the
| Intel process played out (as opposed to how it was
| originally scheduled). TSMC also only began using EUV for
| processes following N7.
| wtallis wrote:
| Don't indulge Intel's attempts to erase Cannon Lake from
| history. The 10nm that Intel shipped in 2019 was
| significantly scaled back from what they originally
| planned for their 10nm node, but was still a year later
| to the market than TSMC N7 and was never good enough to
| be competitive for desktop CPUs. By the time they had
| iterated enough to have a new process that _could_ be
| used to offer faster desktop CPUs than their mature 14nm
| process, they decided to rename it to "Intel 7" and
| shipped it at the same time as TSMC N5 products (though
| still before _AMD 's_ N5 products).
| blackoil wrote:
| Yeah, I find the thought similar to other trope assuming a
| lone engineer could have built the startup's product over
| weekend.
|
| In both cases loudest voices would be from someone who has
| not experienced them and seeing only top of iceberg.
| akira2501 wrote:
| A business where one unit thinks it can make decisions in a
| vacuum is going to suffer regardless of the particular field
| of training that the leadership comes from.
|
| If Engineering and Business work _together_ it doesn't matter
| who's in the lead position.
| isthatafact wrote:
| The Intel roadmap is a nice work of optimistic investor-
| targeted marketing, but I have no idea how to interpret it.
|
| I can see in the roadmap slide that 10A "arrives" in late 2027.
| However, the Intel roadmap also shows both intel4/3 and intel
| 20A/18A present from the start of 2023. The article mentions
| that 18A/20A nodes have been in "some form of production since
| 2023". Meanwhile, current Intel chips are still partially
| outsourced to TSMC, and Intel has promised zetta-scale systems
| by 2027.
| dheera wrote:
| Why aren't these companies investing more into 3-dimensional
| chips instead of trying to squeeze more on the same
| 2-dimensional die when we're so close to hard atom-size limits?
|
| A 3cm x 3cm x 3cm cube could fit a hell of a lot of transistors
| and gates even if it is 20nm.
| abhayhegde wrote:
| At what point do the effects of quantum tunneling are seen? I
| don't think they actually mean 1nm as the thickness, do they?
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| no. 3nm for reference has minimum sizes of roughly 25nm
| clot27 wrote:
| is it really 1nm in size? like which dimension?
| Legend2440 wrote:
| No. Process size is pure marketing and hasn't represented the
| size of any physical feature since the 90s.
| cletus wrote:
| Story time: I worked on Google Fiber. I believed in the project
| and it did a lot of good work but here, ultimately, was the
| problem: leadership couldn't decide if the future of Internet
| delivery was wired or wireless. If it was wireless then an
| investment of billions of dollars might be made valueless. If it
| was wired and the company pursued wireless, then this would also
| lose.
|
| But here's the thing: if you decide to do neither then you
| definitely lose. But, more importantly, no executive would lose
| their head from making a wrong decision. It's one of these
| situations where doing anything, even the wrong thing, is better
| than doing nothing because doing nothing will definitely lose.
|
| Intel's 10nm process seemed like a similar kind of inflection
| point. Back in the mid-2010s it wasn't clear what the future of
| lithography would be. Was it EUV? Was in X-ray lithography?
| Something else? Intel seemed unable to commit. I bet no executive
| wanted to put their ass on the line and be wrong. So Intel loses
| to ASML and TSMC but it's OK because all the executives kept
| getting paid.
|
| I forget the exact timelines but Intel's 10nm transition was
| first predicted in 2014 (?) and it got delayed at least 5 years.
| Prior to this, Intel's process improvements were its secret
| weapon. It constantly stayed ahead of the competition. There were
| hiccups though, most notably the Pentium 4 transition in the
| Gigahertz race (only saved by the Pentium 3 -> Centrino -> Core
| architecture transition) and pushing EPIC/Itanium where they got
| killed by Athlon 64 and it's x86_64 architecture.
|
| I see the same problems at Boeing: once engineering-driven people
| companies get taken over by finance leeches. This usually follows
| an actual or virtual monopoly, just as Steve Jobs described [1].
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGKsbt5wii0
| bastardoperator wrote:
| I used to work with an old Sun Microsystems dude, he was an
| executive at the company I was at. We used to have these
| meetings every week and he ended up attending one. We had been
| trying to come to a conclusion for weeks on a specific piece of
| tech. He stopped the meeting dead in its tracks and said we're
| going to make a decision right now, if it's wrong, we'll learn
| from it, if it's right, awesome. Not making this decision is
| more costly than making the wrong decision.
|
| I just remember thinking, finally, someone with some authority
| is getting this ball moving.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Reminds me of a story that happened at my company.
|
| We needed and had purchased a rather expensive database
| software license, however, we didn't have the hardware yet to
| run that database. The guys doing hardware spent MONTHS
| debating on which $10k piece of hardware they'd pick to run
| the DB. The DB license cost? Something like $0.5 mill.
|
| As one engineer said to me "I don't care what hardware you
| guys get, purchase them all! We are wasting god knows how
| much money on a license we can't use because we don't have
| the hardware to install it on!"
| cj wrote:
| I've noticed a lot of people, even ones making $200k+ in
| salary, are really bad when it comes to making decisions
| that involve any amount of money.
|
| E.g. I've been in meetings with multiple developers who, if
| you add up everyone's salary, is well over $1 million/year,
| debating for way too much time on whether it's worth it to
| buy a $500/month service to help automate some aspect of
| devops.
|
| Maybe this wasn't the case for your specific anecdote, but
| in the scenario I'm describing I got the feeling that a lot
| of people think about business purchases in the context of
| their own personal finances rather than in the context of
| the business's finances. Leading people to be extremely
| cautious with things like a $10k purchase that would be
| "expensive" if purchased as an individual and "cheap" if
| purchased as a company.
|
| In those cases, getting an exec to come in and pull the
| trigger can help. The exec is used to looking at big
| picture budgets/strategy, which IC's aren't. (Although I'm
| sure someone here can come up with another anecdote proving
| that wrong)
| cogman10 wrote:
| Lol, that reminds me of another fun one.
|
| Every so often my company would provide lunches for the
| developers. However, they didn't want to spend too much
| money doing this. So how did they resolve it? They put
| together a committee of devs to discuss lunch
| options/etc. Easily 1+million/year of salary in one room
| debating whether we do Jimmy Johns or McDonalds and how
| they'd get the food to the office.
|
| For $2000, you can get some pretty nice catering for 100
| people. But like you said, people just seem bad at
| thinking of that sort of big picture.
| pants2 wrote:
| Providing daily lunches to developers is an insane ROI
| and I don't know why it's not standard practice. It's
| pennies compared to their salary, and they are happier,
| spend more time thinking about work instead of what/where
| to get lunch, spend more time eating together and
| conversing, and probably eat healthier food which
| mitigates the post-lunch coma.
| mnahkies wrote:
| +1 to this, I had one job where lunch was provided and it
| very much brought people together, particularly across
| team boundaries / job levels, and often "tricked" you
| into having pseudo meetings over lunch.
|
| I find that still happens organically in smaller
| companies without, but in larger companies things trend
| towards more clique like behaviour without it (caveat
| small sample size)
| cogman10 wrote:
| Used to be something that companies just generally
| recognized as a good thing. Look at workplaces built in
| the 60 to 80s and basically all of them had cafeterias as
| part of the building plan. [1]
|
| [1] https://www.nytimes.com/1985/11/24/nyregion/company-
| cafeteri...
| jdsully wrote:
| They were generally paid cafeterias though.
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| When I worked at a merchant bank in London in the 90s
| there was a very good cafeteria with great food that was
| not free, but it was so subsidised that it might as well
| be.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Subsidized. The trick was striking a balance in making
| the food cheap enough that the employees would eat it but
| not so cheap that the company is footing the entire bill.
| phonon wrote:
| In part since it's a taxable benefit to the employee,
| absent extenuating circumstances. Not all employees want
| to "pay" for "free" food.
|
| https://taxnews.ey.com/news/2019-0493-employer-must-
| substant...
| ajacksified wrote:
| Same thing with hardware in every company I've worked at.
| Really, "Sr. Staff Engineer Alice" makes $300k/yr, but
| only gets a budget of $2k for a laptop that's meant to
| last four years and is their primary tool? How does this
| make sense?
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| I see devs that are paid a fortune and they use these
| silly 20 or 24 inch monitors and I don't understand it. A
| large 4K monitor is a very cheap and really increases
| productivity. Give them 3 ffs.
|
| Meanwhile, there is an accountant somewhere that thinks
| he's a genius for keeping the hardware budget in check.
| rmckayfleming wrote:
| Yea, people generally don't think about these things.
| People were genuinely surprised to find out that 70% of
| our expenses as a software business were... salaries. The
| next largest category? Rent. Everything else was
| effectively a rounding error.
| mnahkies wrote:
| Internalising what's a reasonable business expense
| compared to personal expenses is a skill I feel I've only
| fairly recently developed.
|
| It's super important to consider the human cost and
| opportunity cost of each decision, and it's scaling
| characteristics.
|
| Eg: spending $20+k on a ci system like circleci, GitHub
| actions, whatever might feel like a big purchase, but if
| you consider that split by the number of developers using
| it, their salaries, and that in general it scales with
| your head count rather than user count suddenly it's
| pretty attractive.
|
| On the other hand some other seemingly small (unit) cost
| that applies per user of your product might be worth
| optimizing/eliminating as that can have a big impact on
| your margins - but even then you need to balance it
| against opportunity cost. We could increase margins by x%
| with y investment, or increase revenue by z doing
| something else where the delta of revenue outweighs the
| better margins.
|
| Basically it's a big juggling act involving numbers that
| we're not used to dealing with in our personal finance
| and you need to ground your thinking in terms scaling
| characteristics and the companies overall revenue/burn to
| appreciate what actually moves the needle.
| sonicanatidae wrote:
| At least they didn't throw it onto some wholly under-
| specced machine, then yell at OPs because the response
| speed was measured in days.
| ghaff wrote:
| When I was a hardware product manager, there were a ton of
| decisions people asked for and a heck of a lot of them
| basically _didn 't matter_. If we needed to course correct,
| we'd course correct. The main thing was not sitting around
| twiddling our thumbs for weeks or longer.
| epolanski wrote:
| I mean isn't all of that obvious?
|
| A crap boss is one that doesn't make choices, a good boss is
| one that does, a great boss is one that makes sure that the
| best of the possible choices is made giving the data at hand.
|
| Having careers and heads depending on making the wrong choice
| just pushed to paralysis.
| cogman10 wrote:
| > leadership couldn't decide if the future of Internet delivery
| was wired or wireless.
|
| Weird way to think of this problem (IMO). I'd think there would
| always be a mixed wired and wireless world.
|
| Even if customers don't end up using wired connections to their
| homes, you'd still need wired connection to the antennas
| servicing a home, neighborhood, apartment building. That's
| where a lot of Telcos today are making their money. Not to the
| customer, but to Tmobile or At&t as the put in a fiber line
| directly to the antenna towers.
|
| And even if google wanted to be the end to end ISP for someone,
| they'd benefit from a vast fiber network even if they later
| decided it wireless was the best, because they already have the
| fiber wherever they'd need their wireless antenna.
| cletus wrote:
| The last mile is expensive. Even hooking up the customer to
| the line running outside their house is expensive. I've seen
| different customers estimate this at anywhere between $2000
| and $5000 per premises. This assumes ~40% customer take-up
| rate so with more competitors, the cost to each goes up. It's
| one reason why overbuilds make no sense and municipal
| broadband is the best model for last mile Internet delivery.
|
| Wireless bandwidth keeps going up. Wireless is already >1Gbps
| inside a building. What if instead of spending $5000 per
| house, you could use tightbeam wireless or highly cellular
| network with >1Gbps bandwidth? You may have spent billions on
| a network that it would take decades to amortize and have it
| be made worthless by wireless last mile delivery.
| cogman10 wrote:
| > Wireless bandwidth keeps going up. Wireless is already
| >1Gbps inside a building. What if instead of spending $5000
| per house, you could use tightbeam wireless or highly
| cellular network with >1Gbps bandwidth? You may have spent
| billions on a network that it would take decades to
| amortize and have it be made worthless by wireless last
| mile delivery.
|
| I'd presume you'd not cut the existing wired customers over
| to wireless. So it's not like the $5000 spent is lost, it's
| just that you can do new customers for cheaper (if you
| expect a lot of growth in an area).
|
| Overbuilds is a weird one. They can make sense if it's a
| brand new community as you can get a BUNCH of homes done
| for cheap and can pretty much immediately turn on internet
| when someone moves in.
| cletus wrote:
| If the wireless last mile option costs $500/household
| then you'll get destroyed by a competitor who can come in
| and offer the same or better service at substantially
| lower cost. So yes, it does matter.
|
| I'm not sure what you mean by "overbuild" here. I mean it
| in the sense that both AT&T Fiber and Verizon provide
| services to the same homes. US policy notionally tries to
| encourage this (because, you know, markets solve
| everything) but if you have 100K homes and 40% of them
| get service regardless, having 2 competitors means each
| ISP has to recoup their costs from half as many homes.
| cogman10 wrote:
| I'm talking about wiring brand new builds for an ISP.
| Getting the coax, fiber, telephone line right to the home
| before the lawn is sodded and drywall is installed is a
| really fast/cheap job. It costs basically nothing to do
| because there aren't a whole bunch of easements and
| property rights problems to navigate.
|
| Generally, a developer already owns the rights to
| everything so it's just working with them to get
| everything done. And they like it because who doesn't
| want an internet ready community to sell?
|
| You end up talking $100 per unit vs the $2000 or $5000.
| Which is a great discount for the ISP.
| bcrl wrote:
| Moreover, builders often pay the cost to hook homes up to
| fibre during construction. Locally (in eastern Ontario,
| Canada) I have seen the incumbent quote and get $500k to
| fibre up new rural subdivisions.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > If the wireless last mile option costs $500/household
| then you'll get destroyed by a competitor who can come in
| and offer the same or better service at substantially
| lower cost.
|
| That's not even necessarily true. The $2000-$5000 is a
| one time cost, and then that piece of fiber could last
| for 50 years. Having to amortize $40-$100/year against a
| service that costs around that much a month isn't fatal.
| Meanwhile they're offering service for whatever maximum
| speed so you set your price for that $1 below theirs and
| then charge $10-$20/month more for double that speed
| which they can't offer at all. Half the customers take
| you up on the higher speeds and you make back your costs,
| the other half take the $1/month discount and your
| competitor is the one who gets destroyed.
| altruios wrote:
| > I see the same problems at Boeing: once engineering-driven
| people companies get taken over by finance leeches. This
| usually follows an actual or virtual monopoly, just as Steve
| Jobs described [1].
|
| There is a nice mental framework for viewing such things. It
| has a bit of a religious origin, but it effectively explains
| and describes what you're seeing (I'm viewing it through an
| atheistic lens). I mean, the egregore.
|
| This is the natural life cycle of an egregore! Which is
| explained by having two groups, those that serve the purpose
| the egregore was created for (engineers, people that provide
| value), and those that serve the egregore itself (financials,
| people that extract value). Both these groups need to exist for
| a healthy entity to exist. But the balance (seems to) always
| tip - the egregore eventually chooses the group that serves the
| egregore to lead - when that happens, the original vision is
| often lost, and the company looses customer trust by altering
| the relation the customer has with the egregore (how much value
| the customer extracts from the egregore vs how much value the
| egregore extracts from the customer).
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egregore#:~:text=Egregore%20(a...
| .
|
| This pattern comes up, an possible indication of this flip:
| when the original owners of a company are pushed out, or leave.
| 5- wrote:
| related:
| https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html
|
| from this recent thread, which is rather relevant:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39491863
| sahaj wrote:
| The Google Fiber project was always meant to push the carriers
| into competition. Google knew that if they didn't launch Google
| Fiber, none of their other ventures or the internet as a whole,
| could be as successful. Google paid big money for YouTube and
| the plan was always to turn it into the service it is today. At
| the time, there were also worries whether the carriers would
| restrict services (aka net neutrality) or if they would charge
| by GB. Launching Google Fiber made it such that the carriers
| had to start competing and upgrade their infrastructure.
|
| If it wasn't for Google Fiber, I'm certain that we'd be stuck
| with 20mbps speeds, the cable/DSL monopoly, and we wouldn't
| have the likes of the OTT services and the choices that we have
| today. Or at least it would have been delayed by quite a bit.
|
| I worked for a company that was an equipment vendor for Google
| Fiber and other service providers.
| swores wrote:
| Plenty of countries have better (faster and/or cheaper)
| broadband options than most of the US, without having any
| Google involvement. Competition (or government enforced
| requirements and price caps) are what's needed, Google Fiber
| had a bit more of an incentive than most for aiming to
| undercut their competitors but ultimately I think you're
| overstating their importance.
| toast0 wrote:
| Competition would be nice, but just the appearance of
| credible competition was enough to induce the incumbents to
| do better.
|
| Google Fiber deployed to the Kansas Cities, making
| themselves credible competition. Then, they announced 20
| cities they would deploy to. Suddenly, incumbents in 20
| cities had deployment plans and deployed before Google
| Fiber got anywhere, and then Google Fiber decided not to do
| any new deployments.
|
| Would the incumbents have deployed without Google Fiber's
| credible competitive announcements? Maybe? We'd need inside
| information to know for sure. It sure doesn't feel like
| they would have though.
| rangerelf wrote:
| > Would the incumbents have deployed without Google
| Fiber's credible competitive announcements?
|
| Of COURSE they wouldn't!
|
| If google fiber hadn't happened, all providers would have
| continued sitting on their collective asses, soaking as
| much money as possible, doing the least possible legally
| permissible work, nickle-and-diming customers as much as
| possible.
| genericone wrote:
| A commoditize your complements strategy that worked!
| hnav wrote:
| Usually those countries have some combination of lower
| labor costs, higher density (you can run fiber and then
| hang 5x as many subscribers off it) and a more lax
| regulatory landscape (try getting permits to dig in a US
| city).
| ajross wrote:
| > Plenty of countries have better (faster and/or cheaper)
| broadband options than most of the US, without having any
| Google involvement.
|
| Those countries have governments willing to regulate for
| the benefit of the consumer, or else to provide the service
| directly[1]. That there are better ways to do something
| doesn't mean it's not valuable to have done.
|
| [1] Almost nowhere, in any market, had competing gigabit
| landlines in residential areas over the timeframe
| discussed. "Competition" is absolutely not the solution
| here.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| Most countries have policies that expressly _prohibit_
| competition, or make it unnecessarily expensive.
|
| Suppose the government owned the utility poles or
| trenches along the roads, paid for them in the same way
| as they pay for the roads, and access to use them was
| provided to all comers for free. All you have to do is
| fill out some basic paperwork and follow some basic rules
| to make sure you're not cutting someone else's lines etc.
|
| People would install it. You -- an individual -- could go
| out and put fiber in the trench on your street, wire up
| the whole street, pool everybody's monthly fee and use it
| to pay for transit.
|
| The reason people don't do this is that it's illegal, or
| to do it without it being illegal would require millions
| of dollars in legal fees and compliance costs and pole
| access charges.
| eertami wrote:
| You don't necessarily need competition either.
| Switzerland's state owned telecoms provider provides 25gbit
| symmetrical fibre to practically all homes in all cities
| and it is very affordable.
| swores wrote:
| That falls under my "or government..." point, no?
| epolanski wrote:
| That seems a very US-centric way of seeing the internet
| evolution.
|
| The rest of the world moved to higher speeds and didn't count
| Gabs (except on mobile) decades ago and I mean decades.
|
| In 2004 in Italy I had a 20 Mbit/s fiber connection, I still
| remember pinging 4, literally 4 ms, on Counter Strike 1.6.
|
| One thing that I noticed is that while speeds increased in
| the decades since then, latency became worse. Even with the
| fastest connection I can use I rarely if ever ping below 30
| Ms on the very same Counter strike 1.6 or newer versions.
| throw0101c wrote:
| > _Was it EUV? Was in X-ray lithography? Something else? Intel
| seemed unable to commit._
|
| Per the book _Chip War_ , Intel put a lot of money into EUV
| (going back to the late 1990s):
|
| *
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chip_War:_The_Fight_for_the_Wo...
|
| Per the book, and other sources:
|
| > _Intel seemed primed to dominate the chip industry as it
| transitioned into the era of Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography
| (EUV). The company had played a pivotal role in the development
| of EUV technology, with Andy Grove's early investment of $200
| million in the 1990s being a crucial factor._
|
| * https://techovedas.com/intel-lost-decade-5-reasons-why-
| chip-...
| agumonkey wrote:
| I know nothing, but it felt like intel paid the price of
| being the first. They picked something hard and pricey.. and
| it didn't pan out in time, allowing other competitors to
| catch up and adapt to markets (mobile) nicely.
| throw0101c wrote:
| > _I know nothing, but it felt like intel paid the price of
| being the first._
|
| As the book goes into, there were other things in question:
| since TSMC only did fab, and did not design, they had more
| customers/opportunities to iterate the process and get good
| at it (more focus).
|
| There was internal-to-Intel stuff that led to lead loss as
| well.
|
| I'm only partially through the book currently, and there's
| a lot of chip history being described (going back to the
| 1950s), so I'm not going to retain all of it in a single
| pass.
| mdasen wrote:
| One difference I'd point to is that Intel was doing "fine" not
| committing to future lithography. I put that in quotes because
| clearly it wasn't a fine plan over the long run, but not
| spending money on the future is a fine plan in the short/medium
| term. AMD had been struggling for years and Intel continued to
| handily beat them. ARM processors weren't a threat at the time
| either. Intel certainly had the better part of a decade where
| they weren't committing to future lithography and doing fine.
|
| Before someone says, "but they lost mobile to ARM during that
| period," lithography isn't why they lost mobile to ARM. Apple
| was using TSMC's 16nm process in their September 2016 iPhone
| while Intel started shipping 14nm processors 2 years earlier.
| Mobile chose ARM when Intel wasn't behind on lithography.
|
| With Google Fiber, not choosing had immediate repercussions.
| With Intel, the repercussions took the better part of a decade
| to manifest. Google just decided it didn't really care about
| the home internet business. No one at Google could say "yea,
| we're not rolling out wired or wireless home internet and the
| business is booming." Intel didn't decide that they were
| exiting the processor business, but their processor business
| was doing "fine" without this decision being made. Intel could
| say, "we aren't investing in future lithography and the
| business is booming anyway. Maybe future lithography is just a
| big waste of money."
|
| You're correct that not choosing means you lose. However,
| sometimes it isn't obvious for a while. Google Fiber's lack of
| decision had obvious, immediate results and you couldn't delude
| yourself otherwise. Intel could delude itself. Execs could
| write reports about how they were still ahead of the
| competition (they were) and how they weren't wasting money on
| unproven technology. Fast forward a decade and they're not
| fine, but it took a while for that to manifest.
|
| Plus, if Apple hadn't helped push TSMC forward so much, would
| Intel be in quite as bad a situation? Qualcomm has been happy
| to just package together ARM reference designs with their
| modems and it's really just their poor performance compared to
| Apple really pushing them forward. While Android users on HN
| might be buying Snapdragon 8 series processors, the vast
| majority of Android devices aren't using high-end ARM cores.
| The vast majority of the market for high-end ARM cores is
| Apple. If Apple hadn't made a long-term commitment to TSMC for
| 2016-2021, would TSMC have pushed as hard on EUV? It's a lot
| easier to invest when you have a guaranteed customer like TSMC
| had in Apple.
|
| If Apple hadn't pushed performance so strongly, would we have
| seen as much EUV investment as quickly? It's unlikely it would
| be pushed by the Android ecosystem where most processors are
| low-end. TSMC serving Apple meant EUV investment. Once Apple
| was shipping extremely fast processors, Qualcomm and others
| wanted to be able to get to at least 50-70% of what Apple was
| offering (so there were more buyers). Once it was available,
| AMD could use it to push hard against Intel. Once there were
| more buyers, Samsung wanted to make sure that its fabrication
| business was at least in the ballpark.
|
| But if Apple hadn't been focused on taking a strong performance
| lead, it might have been another 5+ years before Intel's lack
| of decision came back to haunt it. If it had taken 12-17 years
| instead of 7-9 years for others to put the screws to Intel,
| they would have basked in its profits for a long time as its
| execs were touted as having amazing insight. Of course: you're
| right. Eventually, Intel would have gotten its comeuppance. But
| Intel could have pretended it didn't need to invest in the
| future for a long time. By contrast, when Google didn't make a
| decision on wireless or wired, that was just the end of
| expanding that business.
| WoahNoun wrote:
| Boeing's previous CEO was an engineer.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > I believed in the project and it did a lot of good work but
| here, ultimately, was the problem: leadership couldn't decide
| if the future of Internet delivery was wired or wireless. If it
| was wireless then an investment of billions of dollars might be
| made valueless. If it was wired and the company pursued
| wireless, then this would also lose.
|
| This one is particularly amusing because the difference is
| primarily a business distinction and not a technical one.
|
| Here's how your tablet gets internet via fiber: There is a
| strand of fiber that comes near your house and then you attach
| an 802.11 wireless access point to it. Every few years the
| latter has to be replaced as new standards are created.
|
| Here's how your tablet gets internet via 5G: There is a strand
| of fiber that comes near your house and then the telco attaches
| a cellular wireless access point to it. Every few years the
| latter has to be replaced as new standards are created.
|
| They should have just built the fiber network and put cell
| sites on some of the poles. Then you sell fiber to anybody who
| buys it and cellular to anybody who buys it and you don't have
| to care which one wins.
| etempleton wrote:
| You start with product people, but if you do well enough making
| your product better doesn't really move the needle any more, so
| organizations tend to promote...
|
| marketing / sales /operations people. These people usually are
| pretty good at understanding what the customer wants and so has
| a decent feel for the product, perhaps innovation goes down,
| but the customer is getting what they want, but then once you
| saturate the market sales and marketing are no longer going to
| move the needle so you promote...
|
| Finance people. They usually don't have a great feel for
| product nor even what the customer wants, but they understand
| how to increase revenue and decrease costs and at this point in
| the company lifestyle that is what matters most. The risk is
| that you are in a competitive space where competitors are
| willing to jump on any product stumble. Often companies get
| stuck at this stage and stagnate, but usually they are so large
| and entrenched they keep doing just fine anyway.
| ebruchez wrote:
| I posted this link as a comment below but it might be worth
| linking from the top what I have always thought is a very good
| article, "The Node is Nonsense":
|
| https://read.nxtbook.com/ieee/spectrum/spectrum_na_august_20...
| ginko wrote:
| Am I the only one that's really bothered by Intel using A for
| angstrom in their marketing? It should be A. A is a completely
| different letter and the unit symbol for ampere.
|
| Everything supports unicode these days so the only reason they
| don't use the correct letter is laziness.
| beej71 wrote:
| Not bothered, exactly, but I can't stop reading "10 amp", "24
| amp".
|
| Gonna be a hot chip... ;)
| ginko wrote:
| Modern CPUs draw significantly more current than that,
| actually.
| wmf wrote:
| I wonder if that's on purpose because nothing is really 20
| Angstroms. Like how TSMC uses N2 instead of 2 nm.
| hereme888 wrote:
| Ok, I learned that nm does not = density and other aspects.
| blackoil wrote:
| > their competitors actually decrease the size of their
| transistors.
|
| No. All of them have similar densities. Some difference but no
| one has actual 5nm transistor.
|
| Also deception it's only for forum commenter who know that nm
| means nothing but still are upset about it for reason.
| neurostimulant wrote:
| > Esfarjani also shared details about Intel's globe-spanning
| operations. In addition to its existing facilities, the company
| plans to invest $100 billion over the next five years on
| expansions and new production sites.
|
| Isn't the pc market shrinking? Or is Intel expecting the server
| market growth to more than make up for it?
| rubyn00bie wrote:
| I said this yesterday in a different thread, but Intel needs to
| jettison its design business and just be a foundry. Pulling a
| reverse AMD. I don't think they'll be able to meaningfully
| acquire customers for their foundry business unless they split
| the company. I also think their foundry business is the one thing
| that could cause the stock to soar, and was historically what
| gave them their edge. I think there is a lot of demand for
| another possible fab outside of TSMC[1] because of the risk China
| poses to Taiwan but only if there is a process advantage. Right
| now TSMC has proven itself to be stable and continues to deliver
| for its customers. Intel is playing catch up, and sort of needs
| to prove it's dedicated to innovating its fab business. I don't
| think competing with its potential customers is a way of doing
| that.
|
| [1] I know Samsung has foundry services (among others) but I
| don't think they have the leading node capabilities that really
| compete with TSMC.
| ein0p wrote:
| That's awesome but their current most advanced Intel 4 process is
| still 7nm. So it's unlikely that this is going to happen on the
| timeline they promised.
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