That's a bit surprising (if not ironic) but I think it may make sense in a way. It's been pretty clear that Mudabala (an Abu Dhabi fund that bought AMD fabs in 2008 which then became GlobalFoundries) wanted to unload that investment after they stopped shoving money into failed process developments (GloFo licensed their 14nm from Samsung as a reminder after their own 14 failed, and their 7nm failed too), so no surprise on their end.
From Intel's perspective, there are also some US assets from IBM, which GloFo "acquired" in 2014 (for -1.5 billion at the time), which includes some oldish US fabs, but also a patent portfolio. It certainly goes into the current US political narrative that Gelsinger has been pushing.
But perhaps more importantly, I think that what Intel is buying is what was sorely lacking them : people and a methodology of working with external customers.
From all I've heard over the years, Intel's process and design teams are so insular and out of touch with the rest of the industry's practices that they had a terrible time just working with customers. It wasn't pretty when they tried the two previous time to open up their process. Loads of announcements, few products if any coming out, and when it worked, they ended up buying their customers anyway, see Altera.
If Intel truly wants to go in the foundry direction, they'll get some interesting outside experience, and while it may not make sense from a pure process point of view, considering how much of a sore point their inability to make it work has been on their previous attempts, the idea may have a lot of merit.
Perhaps a very smart move from Gelsinger, time will tell, in the meantime I'll have a laugh at Intel buying AMD's old fabs :)
> assets from IBM, which GloFo "acquired" in 2014 (for -1.5 billion at the time)
You used the term "acquired" along with a minus sign in front of 1.5 billion but just in case other people don't get the joke, IBM gave their fabs to Global Foundries and PAID them $1.5 billion to take them.
That is incredible. Why did GloFo think they could just take the 1.5B and not deliver? I guess if they don't have to pay too much damages it's a huge free loan...
Because example has shown time and again that you can take the $1500 million, spend $100 million on legal fees, settle for $400 million and keep a nice $billion
Yep. I'm glad others are aware of this. There were certain manufacturing processes that needed to be sustained for "national security" reasons. GF was an imperfect solution but it was better than the alternatives at the time.
Intel did offer foundry services, at least 3 years ago or so, albeit designing stuff for that node required putting everything in separated environment, and simulating in separate compute farms. Even TSMC which was and is far ahead does not demand this level of paranoia, only documentation is put in secure isolated environment, other stuff being managed in the more reasonable way of unix groups, which are, well, good enough.
Anyway I wonder if GlobalFoundries will be it's own business unit or otherwise get enough independence to do things the right way / differently than in the past? I often find large companies who are 'not good with customers' aren't really great at acquiring competency at being good with customers if they just buy and assimilate it.
Heck I've been a part of companies who had a big customer focus and they acquired smaller companies who weren't good with customers, and somehow the smaller company infected the organization and suddenly they became bad with customers :(
LOTS of companies are either suing or thinking of suing GF for failure to uphold technology development/adoption agreements. IBM is one of those.
This Intel situation is certainly part of "keeping it in the USA" though it would have been far easier and cheaper to prevent outsourcing back in the mid-1990s when Silicon Valley's silicon ebbed out of the country. It was a night-and-day change and lots of knowledgeable people were scattered to the wind back then. Now much of that knowledge is having to be reinvented and rediscovered from scratch (because it was tacit knowledge that never could be recorded into books or other writing).
This probably is the best way for Intel to become a foundry. They tried 10 years ago and the entire process was 100% Epic Fail. Not surprising given the pain seen when AMD split off its fabs to form GF, when it abandoned being an IDM vertical fab. When you are an IDM, many process-design interfaces break or have to be formalized in ways that were never imagined or learned by the organization. That's how Intel failed its foundry attempt before so simply avoid Intel culture by buying an already working culture makes a lot of sense.
> (GloFo licensed their 14nm from Samsung as a reminder after their own 14 failed, and their 7nm failed too)
Can someone with insight explain how this can happen? GloFo is a company worth billions, how can they just fail at this while Samsung succeeds. What's so hard about this in particular? I don't think I recall companies at this scale just failing at something that is supposed to be their area of expertise.
I‘m looking forward to historians writing a big post mortem about this in a few decades. For an outsider it is really hard to get to the bottom of what makes a company succeed or fail in this space. It seems like „throwing money at it“ is reaching its limits in this case
I think the charitable answer is that bleeding edge process development is getting very hard and many exited/stumbled. IBM failed at 14nm too, and Intel which famously called itself 2 years in front of the rest of the industry for decades has been stumbling hard since 2015 and still hasn't really replaced their 14nm on the most visible parts of their lineup.
As to what failing means, it can be many things, sometimes you just have way too many defects to have the process be commercially viable (if your cost is 10x your competition and you can't fix it, you don't have a process), some bad technical choices because there's been less and less cross industry cooperation (things like the ITRS that gave a rough roadmap hasn't been a thing for a while, last I checked), and introducing new technologies (EUV or new metals) may compound those. Sometimes chips in your new process are more dense (which is good), but perform poorly because of one of the previously mentioned stuff to the point it's hard selling new chips that perform worse than previous gen. In Intel's 10nm case there was a bit of everything and it will be very interesting to know exactly what factored in more (Cobalt is often rumoured, a very overconfident choice for MPP was my initial understanding, I haven't really followed on this).
In the case of GloFo, it's perhaps simpler than that : GloFo was part since 2007 of an alliance between them (initially as AMD), IBM and Samsung called the Common Platform [1] that had more or less standardised a process, with a lot of the heavy research done by IBM (I would say, out of spite for Intel) and then used by GloFo and Samsung.
14nm was the first that everyone was on their own, because IBM failed their research. In the end, Samsung managed to get it done, and GloFo either failed or... didn't try really hard ? This is where I'm gonna speculate a tiny bit and be less charitable, I don't think that GloFo was sufficiently funded in terms of process development, despite their parent owner being able to.
And it definitely looked like from the outside, at least from my point of view, they were always in dire need of money except for acquisitions, and late with everything (including the process inherited from the alliance). Most of the business decisions done (including buying Chartered and reverse buying IBM's 22nm fabs) seemed to be about pure business and missed the technical understanding of the business and what it required to keep it going.
At the end of the day, for them, licensing 14 from Samsung was a great out of that mess. But that didn't happen for 10, and we (at least I) don't really know why. My guess is that GloFo would probably have been happy to keep going on with that arrangement, but I may be completely wrong on that one.
At the time I seem to recall that both had some issues filling up their order book (which seems a bit insane today, considering the current shortage) and that may have played into it from Samsung's point of view.
> 14nm was the first that everyone was on their own, because IBM failed their research. In the end, Samsung managed to get it done, and GloFo either failed or... didn't try really hard ? This is where I'm gonna speculate a tiny bit and be less charitable, I don't think that GloFo was sufficiently funded in terms of process development, despite their parent owner being able to.
For whatever it's worth, it feels like GloFo has had various process issues for a -long- time. While there were issues with the Bulldozer design itself from a deep pipeline perspective etc, the other factor in it's lukewarm lifetime (especially the first couple gens) was issues with GloFo's processes even back then. I know some of that was that they were trying to gear more towards bulk silicon vs CPUs but I think there were other issues too.
> While there were issues with the Bulldozer design itself from a deep pipeline perspective etc, the other factor in it's lukewarm lifetime (especially the first couple gens) was issues with GloFo's processes even back then.
I think no process could have saved Bulldozer for AMD, it truly was a deeply flawed design IMO, but yep GloFo certainly didn't help. I think my "uncharitable" take was a bit too kind considering.
Specifically in the case of AMD, GloFo relied early on on guaranteed income from AMD through the Wafer Supply Agreement which was stupidly tight (my understanding is that it was part of the deal of selling to Mudabala, though exact details are not public), included a massive volume of must buy from AMD, and didn't include any penalties for GloFo missing deadlines or having their processes underperforming. They definitely coasted on this and I should probably have mentioned this above, since it led to many of their issues going forward till 14nm.
It took them years to manage to loosen the WSA up, the last step was (if I recall correctly ?) loosening the CPU core exclusive that I believe was part of it (they had a carve out for GPUs which were built at TSMC at the time of the sale, though that was supposed to be phased out if my memory is correct, before it was renegociated and AMD moved the low end GPUs there instead, except maybe one gen?).
To their credit, AMD pretty much never bad mouthed GloFo in public. Managing to do the original Ryzen at GloFo and getting as much out of the 14 process that they did is, I think, one of the most underrated engineering tour de force from those who worked on that. While supposedly "copied exact" from Samsung, it wasn't exactly fully there at the time.
I did read that the last renegotiated WSA between AMD and GloFo is supposed to be going on till 2024 (?) currently, so if this goes through, I hope there's a "in case of sale" carve out, if just so anyone can save face a bit ;)
(and that would be a pretty large unburden from AMD in any case, which makes the whole thing even more ironic)
Yes, I was surprised as well. That Global Foundries doesn't seem to know about this suggests to me some shenanigans on the street.
However, if they did buy GloFo it would give them a straight forward path to having a "Fab for hire" service ala TSMC and their own fabs as well. Kind of a have your cake and eat it too thing if you can bring GloFo's ability to bake chips up to the requisite standard.
No, Global foundries doesnt have a viable 5nm or 3nm node yet, yeah they have suspended all 7nm operations and researching on creating the 5nm node, but it will take time. It makes more sense to buy TSMC than GloFo.
Not all chip foundry customers want or need the latest greatest nodes. We can see this in the current chip shortages, all those dozens of embedded CPUs needed in cars, and in other consumer devices aren't sub-10nm designs. The vast majority of chip manufacturing is actually at fairly pedestrian nodes for cost reasons.
I sincerely doubt the US Government would allow such an acquisition. The only way I could see it happening would be a monumental failure of communication between DoD and the FTC. DoD absolutely requires a source of chips designed and fabbed on US soil. As long as they are aware of anything going on, they'll fight tooth-and-nail to keep Intel independent.
This is such a big deal that it presents problems for vendors working on even completely open, non-sensitive systems. Like my company. We are a foreign language instruction company that serves primarily DoD. Some of our customers are being super reluctant to approve a specific project of ours because it is nearly impossible to buy appropriate hardware that is not manufactured in China. We have to settle for a hardware vendor that is not our favorite choice because at least the design company is US owned.
It's not technically correct. It should be fine to use these systems for non-sensitive purposes, but you try negotiating a contract with a CO who won't explain themselves/refuses to clarify with his own command that this is OK.
The DoD probably wouldn't even have to get the FTC involved (directly), they have enough leverage in CFIUS to stop it there due to fabs being Critical Technology.
Not just buying their old fabs, I believe GlobalFoundries is still AMD's main foundry, so most of AMD's products would be built by Intel. The 'Intel Inside' stickers are going to get very confusing!
Theoretically, no two patents overlap, otherwise they'd infringe on each other. So any newly acquired patent covers something every existing patent does not, including your own portfolio's coverage.
Well, actually it's perfectly possible for an older patent to be broader than a newer and necessarily narrower patent. That is in fact the goal of writing a valuable patent. Even if only a narrow thing has already been claimed, but the spec enables something broader then only something narrower still can be patented after that publishes... otherwise it is not novel.
Of course not all prior art is in patents so any journal publication could also force narrowing of claims. Older patents are almost always broader... if they cover the thing you want at all.
Isn't that only the case when the patents cover two different parts of your own implementation? How could someone patent something that has already been patented?
Let’s say you invent the cart, and in the patent, you describe a platform with two wheels and two handles to push it.
Then, I can patent a cart with “a number of wheels” and “at least one handle”.
That’s why patents tend to be so vague.
You don’t want to keep the tiniest door open for such cases, so you don’t use a mirror, you use a light-reflecting device. If you’re smart, you don’t even use the term ‘light’. Your invention likely works with radar and röntgen, too. Maybe avoid electromagnetic fields, too. Who knows whether something similar, in the abstract, is possible with sound?
You also don’t say a device needs to do A, then B if there’s a tiny chance it might be possible to accomplish the same doing B first, then A.
That's not really a good example since a cart with two wheels and a two handles anticipates under 35 U.S.C Sec. 102 a cart with a number of wheels and at least one handle.
But yea generally you want to describe things with a billion examples, but no statements limiting the scope of your invention.
The most devious strategy is that you disclose vague and probably impossible embodiment. Wait 10 years and then write claims that that narrowly target big products that you really couldn't have invented ten years. But the burden is more or less on the accused infringer to provide you didn't describe the new invention in the old patent.
From my experience reading US patents/applications, they aren't just vague like that. They start out specific and then add additional claims which expand it. So they will have some claim about a cart with a specific number of wheels, but in later claims they'll add language to generalize so any number of wheels are covered. There are also figures and detailed descriptions which are separate from the claims which aim to make clearer. Pretty much any one I have read seems to make it clear enough create the device.
Makes sense but Team B's patent would be for their work, not for Team A's work, right? I get that you'd need to license both in this scenario, but the actual tech claimed by the patents wouldn't overlap.
> But perhaps more importantly, I think that what Intel is buying is what was sorely lacking them : people and a methodology of working with external customers. From all I've heard over the years, Intel's process and design teams are so insular and out of touch with the rest of the industry's practices that they had a terrible time just working with customers.
This is not a problem at all. If they wanted to go this direction it's as simple as dumbing down, cheapening their process a bit, and giving free reign to make decisions on what they will be fabbing to technically competent salespeople.
With Intel's resources they could've even developed such commodity process separately to their own process, and ran them in parallel.
They had almost a whole decade to do that. It's just they simply didn't.
They've wanted to go in this direction for many years and so far failed. We've had meetings with them over the years and both times their offering was uncompetitive. I'm not sure what the sales people are supposed to do if the core technologies fabless customers want are not available.
I lot of people don't realise Intel are already in the foundary business. I'm not surprised their customers are not shouting about it - why would you want to tell everyone you are using an arguably failed process.
Intel wants to get into the foundry business. 99% of what Intel does is for their own chips. They don't have the support infrastructure of being able to deal with external customers. Global Foundries has that.
You don't just decide to make a chip. There are hundreds of foundry specific libraries, design rules, and more. There are always problems with the EDA CAD tools for new processes and you need lots of support people to answer questions and help debug problems that your customers are having.
Intel has tried being a foundry before multiple times over the last 20 years. They always fail and give up after a couple of years.
Well, Globalfoundries was exactly in the same situation directly after they were spun off from AMD and they bought Chartered Semiconductors to get foundry knowledge into their company. They also hired a lot of ex-freescale and ex-IBM people.
Wait I thought GloFo essentially gave up the node race and was settling into 'not the latest and greatest' market a la TI. Is that not a correct assumption?
Given Intel wants to sell fab space it wouldn’t shock me if AMD keeps buying fab space at a soon to be Intel plant to make chipsets and other items that don’t need to be on the bleeding edge or constitute sharing much IP.
>>before multiple times over the last 20 years. They always fail and give up after a couple of years.
That would be the concern. What happens to the chip market when intel rediscovers its inherent anti-competitive nature and shuts down any non-intel product?
Intel is already in the foundry Business their operating nodes are very large 14nm and 10nm (Which is 12nm) and 7nm process node is broken due to poor yields.
Wow. This is the chipmaking side of AMD that got spun off in 2009.
I didn't realize they still had a sizable US presence. Malta NY (14nm fab) & outside of Burlington VT (90nm fab). The largest employer in VT! Also Singapore & Dresden (12nm).
Supposedly they were going to try to go public. To be honest I have a hard time understanding what's in this purchase for Intel, hard to see this as anything but anti-competitive, but Intel is trying to become a silicon foundry to others & GF knows how to do that. They also have a decent patent warchest.
The former IBM fabs are producing military parts. The US government needs them to stay in operation and they don't need to be on cutting edge processes since that presents problems in extreme conditions.
GlobalFoundries is the largest private employer in Vermont, but the University of Vermont and the University of Vermont Medical Center each has more employees.
Kind of makes you realize how small Vermont is. I just checked and the city of San Francisco alone has about 300k more residents than the entire state of Vermont; 900k to 600k.
The purchase would both increase Intel's manufacturing capacity and pricing power. There used to be half a dozen x86 manufacturers and I'm sure they've enjoyed having it down to two (especially when one of them was weak) much more. What's not to love, from their perspective?
That they'd be increasing capacity in non-cutting edge fabrication, which doesn't really move the needle for Intel's current position.
If the argument is facilities and staff, that's fine. But buying an outdated fab that won't compete with TSM isn't that big of a game changer, Intel already has tons of that.
tl;dr version: think like a monopolist. Intel has been successfully doing that for decades.
While semiconductor fabs don't have the useful life of say a railroad, they are valuable for far longer than the 2-3 years they are in the spotlight. I'm no expert in this area, but as the recent semi shortage demonstrates, it appears today's 'ancient' fab can be viable for at least 20 years if not longer.
Given the astronomical costs of both the fab and chip design for current nodes, we're likely to be seeing <=28nm sticking around for far longer to get their payback on the process nodes. So if you're Intel and you gobble up as much of the production capacity as possible, that would seem to be a prudent move as long as you don't overpay relative to how much you'll be able to increase prices with the greater share of the market. Think like Intel probably is: they're not thinking of being one of many semi players, they're thinking of being one of the last 2-3.
For non power sensitive embedded parts it makes a lot of sense - at least to the point that the pricing could be worked out with customers that want long term high volume commitments.
You're correct. They received a ton of money from government [0], and that money will be used for consolidation, not to improve competitiveness. Intel is buying a bunch of outdated fabs to increase its pricing power on older technology.
1) No money has been received. USICA ($52b number) has not even been passed through congress yet.
2) 12nm is hardly “outdated”, not every use case requires the most cutting edge node. There is plenty of value to be had at that process size.
3) There is more to running a foundry than process size, and Intel is likely interested as much/more in the customer relationship parts, as elaborated extensively in other threads
The $52b comes from USICA and it hasn't passed the House yet as far as I know. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
What are they supposed to do, not compete during the heyday of their industry because they expect a tax credit to be paid out over the next several years?
The CHIPS Act is not USICA. That $52B number comes from USICA, which has not yet passed the House. I was being deferential earlier out of politeness but you didn't take the hint and look it up. Here is some light reading on it:
And my comment specifically referred to the chips act, which has passed [1]. I'm not really sure why you would be distracting from the point by bringing up other legislation that has not yet passed? Like all good corruption, exactly how much money is moving around is obfuscated. I've seen both "$10-$50 billion" and "$52 billion" as numbers for the CHIPS Act. If you have a more accurate number I'd be more than happy to update my post.
So the question is did they get billions from the chips act like the senator that wrote it thinks they did or not? If they did then you're quibbling over exactly how many billions they got, which isn't a good look. That they potentially have more coming in doesn't really change the substance of my comment in the context of the original article at all. So thanks for the heads up on the next few billions they will be getting I guess?
I think that this is a really interesting move by Intel. The conspiracy theorist in me thinks this is an interesting way for Intel to get at TSMC. A few years back there was a cross licensing agreement between TSMC and GlobalFoundries. The agreement is broad, and covers all patents made by TSMC for the next 9 years [1]. It is easy to see how many problems this could create for TSMC. Either the deal is void, in which case TSMC is and has been likely infringing on Global Foundries' (with an acquisition Intel's) patents... Or Intel has a broad cross licensing agreement with TSMC... The deal was good for TSMC at the time, as Global Foundries had given up on more advanced nodes as the investment was just too much for their shareholders, but with new ownership I see it as an interesting weakness.
Intel has historically been willing to play dirty, like messing with compilers to benefit Intel over Amd[2]. Or like when they gave kickbacks to OEMS [2]. Or when they paid vendors to not support AMD fully in software[2]. Or just plain old false advertising [2]. Actions like these is what led to a 1.25 Billion dollar settlement with AMD [3].
Outside of playing dirty, it is a good strategic move for their new foundry business. You get the tools, know how, processes, and most importantly customers that can make the venture a success. Intel has had a foundry business before [4], but they closed it. "ecosystem is everything with the foundry business and that takes time, money, and technical intimacy," [4]. Intel has money, and they are buying the years in the foundry business they missed along with technical intimacy to more standard tools. So, I think it makes sense from a business perspective, as it gives Intel a recurring revenue for its older processes and in turn greater advantage from its vertical integration.
I would expect a cross licensing deal to include clauses to cover the situation where one of the parties gets acquired. For example, AMD would break their cross licensing deal with Intel if they were bought.
I would hope this is blocked simply due to the reduction in competition. Number one player should not be buying anyone.
OTOH my impression was that GloFo stopped short of EUV due to the cost, not that they couldn't do it. Intel might be able to fix that, but I think they're probably going the way of IBM.
I don't think this should be allowed. Intel is entered the public fab market with an insane amount of production capacity, they shouldn't also be allowed to gobble up the 3rd place industry supplier.
Of course it will happen, it was funded (directly or indirectly) with public money[1]. The only thing that surprises me is that I expected the ink to dry before they used my money to buy their competition.
It's not a done deal! Intel is just exploring a deal to buy GlobalFoundries. This is from the WSJ article: "It isn’t guaranteed one will come together, and GlobalFoundries could proceed with a planned initial public offering."
I wonder what the state and terms of long-running contracts are there, and if this could end up with Intel fulfilling old fab contracts for AMD...
(As far as I know, AMD always held long contracts, partially with exclusivity, with GF for fabrication, although this has weakened due GF falling behind and not meeting its promised process targets)
My understading is that AMD only used said contract for the I/O part of their chips or some entry level GPUs, as they moved the CPU cores to TMSC. I'm unclear on their current APU lineup.
AMD is also rumored to be backporting Zen3 and RDNA2 to GloFo 12+ for some low-end APU products, presumably due to cost - TSMC 7nm is quite expensive which makes it less appropriate for a certain segment of price-sensitive products.
Considering that AMD's flagship chips use GloFo i/o, this is a brilliant move. It will be interesting to see how the equity market absorbs these developments.
> AMD will see out its existing commitment to use GlobalFoundries through 2024, with the latest amendment setting purchase targets for 2022, 2023, and 2024. Beyond those new targets, however, the agreement releases AMD from all further exclusivity commitments to GlobalFoundries. AMD is now free to use any fab on any process node that it wants.
They traded exclusivity for a minimum order size. I'm not sure I would read that negotiation as setting a sunset date on their overall relationship at the end of 2024, and I definitely wouldn't read it as AMD being totally free prior to 2025.
1.6B is half a quarter's revenue for AMD. Milan has been a slam dunk; there's obviously some value over at GloFo for AMD, and it wouldn't be a no-tears breakup (hypothetically speaking).
I don't dispute that GloFo's role in AMD's strategy will necessarily change if it becomes part of Intel.
If I were Intel and a deal were really in the works contingent on antitrust, I would argue that:
(a) Intel is a distant third in fabrication and a merger with another also-ran would improve competitiveness against state-backed TSMC and the Samsung chaebol;
(b) the severity of the demand creation in the market justifies an acquisition that streamlines existing players and makes them more productive than the sum of the deal's parts; and
(c) bringing GloFo under a US-owned corporate umbrella is vastly beneficial to the national interest in a way that only Intel can fully enable.
I think (c) will be enough for intel to get the government off its back here. GF is currently owned by the UAE government. The military would love for American foundries to be owned by American companies.
I would not be surprised if the strategic thinking here is to buy GloFo to get in some outside business and the knowledge about how to run a fab as a service in preparation for spinning the foundry out as a separate business. That way it allows the foundry to scale to the size it needs to be to justify investing in the latest nodes, whilst freeing up the rest of Intel to run much leaner and not to be tied to an uncompetitive foundry.
That's certainly one way to get the expertise that they need in house to remain competitive (and to ensure their own supply) - certainly if rumors about their current capabilities being less than stellar are correct.
It'll be an interesting move if it comes through to fruition. TBH this would ironically probably be a good thing for Taiwan and may be a good thing for TSMC.
It is somewhat amusing that they're picking up AMD's scraps.
But, GloFo isnt competitive as is - their best process is a "12nm" process they licensed from Samsung 5 years ago. The only way this makes sense to me is if they are getting such a good deal on their assets that its cheaper to buy them and modernize their plants with Intel's technology than to build new plants of their own.
As far as I understand the leading edge nodes are a rather small percentage of global production. The demand for less advanced nodes is still massive e.g for automotive. For intel the know how of working for 3rd party clients along with the tooling is probably much more valuable.
I don’t invest in Intel, but I am bullish on their prospects in general. I love that they are an American company that has large production facilities in the US. I would have no qualms with increasing government aid and subsidies to them. I’m rooting for them to succeed. But I do follow the Warren Buffett methodology. I personally have had very good experiences with most Intel products. So that positive experience may color my views a little bit. It’s like all of my friends that have owned Toyota products, it’s almost universally a good experience from what I can tell. I wish Toyota was also an American company.
From what I've seen Intel has not been nice to consumers or smart with their chips so far. For many years they just pumped the prices with mediocre processors because of their dominance. However, now the tables have turned and AMD is crushing them almost everywhere! I feel like they get what they deserve for being lazy and not innovating and we shouldn't reward that.
That hasn't been my experience as a consumer. I've had 4 Ryzen systems over the last 4 years (owned nearly every generation), and also my Intel systems. My experience has been less "crushing Intel" and more "crushing me" and my time. From what I've experienced, the price increases in Intel platforms are just from added quality assurance in their engineering. Obviously I wanted my Zen, Zen+, and Zen3 systems to work well but they all had something ranging from weird idiosyncrasy to major flaw. I just sold off my last Zen3, as I greatly prefer my 11th gen board and chip. That's just my experience and my perspective at this point. Other people seem to love them so there's a market for everything.
> From what I've seen Intel has not been nice to consumers or smart with their chips so far. For many years they just pumped the prices with mediocre processors because of their dominance.
Intel was pretty aggressively driving down price-per-core up until the 6000 series/ 14nm chips. For example here's the price series for a 6-core chip from each of their series:
i7 970 (Nehalem-E, July 2010): $885
i7 3930K (Sandy Bridge-E, Nov 2011): $583
i7 5820K (Haswell-E, Aug 2014): $389
i7 6800K (Broadwell-E, May 2016): $434
So in basically 4 years (+1 month) they reduced the price of their entry-level 6-core processors by more than half (56% reduction), comparing 970 vs 5820K. It specifically is Broadwell (the first 14nm chip) where intel lost the plot and prices started increasing.
People also dump on Intel for not increasing core count in the consumer platform chips, which I think is a deeper subject than people treat it as. Certainly by the 6000 series they should have pushed the consumer platform up to 6 cores, but fundamentally the consumer socket is driven by the economics of office machines and walmart PCs. Up through Haswell, 4 cores was the right amount for an average desktop for the average office worker (not talking about powerful workstations for developers here, those users always had the option of the HEDT platform with more cores/memory) or the average home user (again, not talking about power gamers, and if you wanted more HEDT was always a fairly reasonably-priced option too, especially during the Haswell generation). There was, at the time, no 6-core die, the next step upwards was the 8-core HEDT die with quad-channel RAM and all that other stuff, and I doubt that would have fit into a consumer socket even if you wanted it to, and having 6-core chips with dual-channel RAM probably would have impacted performance until DDR4 came along with the 6000 series.
On the whole Intel didn't actually do too bad up until the 6000 series, when the combination of a complete shitshow of a 14nm node (in these latter years of 14++++ people forget what a mess early 14nm was), the lack of competition, and the beancounters gaining firm control of the company all combined. But that's really a specific, narrow range of time - 2016 and 2017 mostly. Then in 2017 Intel shit their pants after seeing Ryzen and released the 8700K, which was a wildly aggressive product for Intel at the time - same i7 pricing but 50% more cores, and such a solid product that it basically forced AMD into similar price reductions (abandoning the $500+ segment for a generation, and big price cuts on their existing products).
I really see the "intel got greedy" thing as being specifically 2016-2017. 5820K was extremely good value for a 6-core (even if it did need a "more expensive motherboard", those are cheaper than a high-end X570 now and far far cheaper than sTRX40), the problem was the 6000 series and failing to push core count up on the consumer socket at that time, and I think that is largely attributable to early 14nm woes. Certainly by the 7000 series yields would have improved and Intel could have pushed core counts up, 7000 series is arguably one of the worst releases Intel has done in terms of how rapidly it aged out of the market.
(although to be fair - up until like 2018/2019 you could easily sell a 7700K and get almost all your money back and do a straight upgrade to a 8700K, so it wasn't the end of the world from a user perspective.)
Yeah that's just the feelings I had. I literally am basing my opinion off zero data and just how I felt! It's actually funny because the years I was really into building my own computer was 2016-2017! I'm still looking but not as invested now.
It's OK I just feel like it's kind of a meme that "intel didn't try to do 4+ core before ryzens, they just sat back and milked it" when they literally pushed the price of their hexacores down by half in 4 years.
yeah there were still ridiculously priced processors (funny how the "$1000 processor" memes got forgotten when 3950X came around) but there were also serious dealz on higher core count processors, if you made the effort to buy them. The consumer platform didn't hop right up to hexacore+, but they were there on the HEDT platform if you wanted them.
but yea 6000 and 7000 series they were milking it.
6th gen was a new architecture, Skylake. Wouldn’t it appear like they’re milking it if core counts simply weren’t planned to be increased. If the focus was merging mobile and desktop designs, and R&D budgets needed replenished?
I can’t say either way for sure, I’m not an accountant at Intel. But I don’t think anyone else here is either.
That's been the general theme for years now. For their own products, as long as they maintain their quality levels, I think they'll be fine on design. My understanding is they've been pivoting to become an alternative to TSMC and Samsung as a foundry source, and will be assisting with 3rd party designs similar to ARM for interested parties such as cloud vendors. But potentially with x86 compatibility for some, which would only strengthen it. Intel has needed to do all of this for a while now but if they execute properly (which is the hard part), I think the future is bright.
I do agree they won't have "truly unprecedented grasp on the industry", because I think they lost that a long time ago with globalization. The existence of TSMC/Samsung etc. I do think that means simply a larger market with more players and customers, rather than a shrinking Intel.
Microsoft evolved their business with the times and came out stronger, I think Intel will as well.
I know they've been in talks with Nvidia to manufacture some of their stuff due to offshore supply being uncertain at best. If the world continues to be as uncertain as it has been, I think they're in a very different position than the widely held popular notions that you described.
It was all good, even preferable, to outsource that dirty manufacturing in the good times. I believe all the commonly held analysis that Intel is set for decline no longer has legs to stand on. I don't view fabless design firms like NV/AMD/Apple/ARM as competition. In these dark days, if you can't make things, you basically have nothing. Just a piece of paper.
At least TSMC has finally agreed to build a cutting-edge 5nm fab in the US. And more recently this has been increased to 100k wafers per month, so the capacity is much larger than originally planned - TSMC has 120k wafer/month at their plant in Taiwan (Fab 18) so this will almost double the current capacity (although TSMC is building more capacity in Taiwan as well so this probably will work out closer to a 1/3 split of capacity once it's operational).
This has always been national-security leverage for Taiwan - if China ever attacked, Taiwan would make sure TSMC was destroyed and utterly cripple worldwide chipmaking. Like if you think the current shortages are bad imagine the only cutting-edge fab in the world disappearing overnight. That leverage only works if all of TSMC's facilities are in Taiwan so the idea that they would ever agree to build one anywhere else was absolutely unthinkable even a year ago.
The US must be playing some serious hardball given the shortages that have sprung up this year and it looks like they're getting results. First it was a little fab for national-security stuff and it's morphed into the US getting a gigafab.
On top of that Japan is getting a TSMC specialty fab - not power stuff, but it'll do CMOS sensors for cameras and automotive/embedded type stuff, and the EU is negotiating for a cutting-edge fab of their own. It's a huge sea change in the last year.
yeah it boggles my mind US spends Trillions on Military... yet large % of the chips powering every digital device we use (incl military) is made right next to China. Can you build a chip factory with a fraction of their budget... cmon
The US military actually goes out of its way to source domestic chips where at all possible. Currently this means a lot of Intel (or the older AMD/IBM chips made at GlobalFoundries I suppose), and there is a pretty significant amount of trailing-edge fab capacity in the US still, but you're right that it's not everything and there's some stuff they have to source from other countries.
That is actually the consensus reason (not sure it was ever stated outright) for the original plan for the 20k wf/m fab TSMC was building in Arizona (that has since been upgraded to 100k). Even if it wasn't necessarily a huge plant in terms of global supply, it gave the US defense/intelligence community a guaranteed supply of chips with domestic manufacturing and chain of custody.
It is nuts just how much of cutting-edge production is concentrated in the pacific rim region there, and the current shortages have really driven that point home even harder. Even leaving aside Chinese invasion of Taiwan, there could be a tsunami or some other natural disaster that takes out TSMC and that would just absolutely gut the worldwide economy. Imagine the current shortages where everything is still running at capacity, and then imagine that TSMC or some other major fab would go offline (Samsung getting hit in Korea, etc), be destroyed and take years to come back online - there are the same limitations as bringing new capacity online, you have to wait years to source new machines from ASML and so on.
It potentially could happen anytime. It could happen tomorrow. Just another big earthquake that sends a tsunami at just the wrong place and compounds all the current shortages even worse. Even apart from the national defense aspect, it is a dangerous concentration of irreplaceable supply chain elements and I think the US, EU, etc are really pushing to mitigate that danger a bit.
What semiconductors are we talking about? Just big volume computer CPUs/GPUs? Then yes, intel is the only one left.
Big boys like Maxim, Marvel, Broadcom, Qualcomm, nVidia, AMD, Ti[1] don't have their own fabs.
What about memory? Samsung, Hynix, Micron all do their own stuff.
Analog ICs? National, Ti[1], NXP, Skyworks, ONsemi, ST, to name a few.
[1] Ti got rid of their fabs years ago to switch to TSMC but over the years they acquired a few companies small than them that have their own fabs. Those divisions still use them for fabbing those products.
TI has a bunch of fabs in Dallas, Maine, Germany, Japan and China. Most of the Dallas fabs have been part of TI since the beginning - some since the 1970s. They're building a new 300mm fab north of Dallas, and just acquired the Intel / Micron JV fab in Lodi Utah. They got out of the advanced logic game a while ago, and closed down one of their R&D fabs in ~2007.
> What other companies also do this? Are Nvidia, and AMD on this list?
No and no. IBM (for Power products) and arguably Samsung (for their mobile chips) are effectively the only ones left on their own leading edge nodes. Everyone else uses TSMC, GloFo, or SMIC.
No, neither manufactures chips. They both have a variety of fabs they get supply from, but Nvidia gets much of their supply from Samsung (but they do also source from TSMC and others) and AMD gets much of their supply from TSMC.
Their IO chiplets are still produced by GloFo, who has been carving out a niche in IO. It's a good strategy for GloFo, as driving a signal for IO can safely stay on older process nodes, it doesn't scale as well as compute or memory with transistor density.
Intel doesn't have much of a foundry business -- they build for themselves -- so if anything this increases competition in the foundry business, if Intel follows up by letting GloFo customers use Intel's best fabs.
Intel's market share in the foundry business currently rounds to zero. So no, it's not fewer independent companies in the foundry business, it's the same number, and now the underdog will have access to better fabs.
Like ISPs saying their mergers won't reduce competition because they stay out of each-other's territories.
And if we look at the entire chip-making business, instead of the narrow foundry-for-hire category? Or consider the possibility of Intel expanding (not just buying) into the foundry business?
The only high-end non-memory foundry-not-for-hire left is Intel. It doesn't seem that your comments reflect the actual market.
Also, note that anti-trust law isn't about the possibility of future expansion. Intel already tried to enter the non-memory foundry-for-hire business and failed.
And we can ALWAYS create some artificial distinction between business to justify obvious consolidation. Following parent's idea we would never have too few companies if at least two are left remaining.
Are you referring to me? No, I don't agree with that at all.
Mind you, I've been at 2 organizations that have purchased chips from foundries, and we turned down both Intel and IBM's offers. I'd love to see more competition in that industry, and Intel buying GloFo will add to competition on the high end.
Multiple American fabs--older nodes, but there's still plenty of stuff to be made on 14nm, let alone 90nm. Patents. A sales-pipeline team used to working with external partners instead of doing everything in-house.
Not everything is made in the newest processes. Upgrading existing fabs to newer processes has benefits over building new ones. GF might have useful experience, e.g. with being a contract fab for others, if Intel wants to go that route.
I don't think this has anything to do with next gen process. It points toward Intel needing help starting their foundry service in sales and external tooling.
I don't think it's related to making up the difference or not.
GF won't have much if anything that helps them in that regard, so I think it mostly means that Intel thinks they can use more capacity of their own, even for not top-end process.
