(Disclaimer, I work for Intel but have no non public information about this and naturally don’t speak for them. I am a little more biased towards wishing them be successful than the average person perhaps.)
Yes, by all accounts the latest node (Intel 18a, which ought to be competitive with the latest tsmc node) is healthy and on schedule. Very Recent pronouncements by the cfo support this (I think it’s extra significant that it’s the cfo because he knows like nobody else how much hot water he’d be in if he were misrepresenting the likelihood of success).
That’s one thing I don’t understand about the Intel negativity; the whole world is lining up for tsmc (rightfully so). Either directly if you’re one of the major customers who can’t produce products fast enough to sell them (nvidia) or indirectly (if you want to buy nvidia). but the only realistic near-future competitor to tsmc isn’t seen as such, despite the great need (ie worth the time to investigate and worth the risk to try as a fab).
If the current stock price is to believed, Intel should be bought for its assets, which makes absolutely no sense to me personally. As far as I’m concerned its the only possible short term path to breaking open the silicon supply chain gridlock, exacerbated by the ai hype.
Ben Thompson has been covering Intel’s precarious position for over a decade (well before the market finally realized it) and the latest update is not looking good:
Intel’s is technically on pace to achieve the five nodes in four years Gelsinger promised (in truth two of those nodes were iterations), but they haven’t truly scaled any of them; the first attempt to do so, with Intel 3, destroyed their margins. This isn’t a surprise: the reason why it is hard to skip steps is not just because technology advances, but because you have to actually learn on the line how to implement new technology at scale, with sustainable yield. Go back to Intel’s 10nm failure: the company could technically make a 10nm chip, they just couldn’t do so economically; there are now open questions about Intel 3, much less next year’s promised 18A.
I know that post, but the problem is he is just extrapolating from history. Not a bad thing in absence of real information, but... Well, let's hope he's wrong. :-)
Yes, by all accounts the latest node (Intel 18a, which ought to be competitive with the latest tsmc node) is healthy and on schedule. Very Recent pronouncements by the cfo support this (I think it’s extra significant that it’s the cfo because he knows like nobody else how much hot water he’d be in if he were misrepresenting the likelihood of success).
That’s one thing I don’t understand about the Intel negativity; the whole world is lining up for tsmc (rightfully so). Either directly if you’re one of the major customers who can’t produce products fast enough to sell them (nvidia) or indirectly (if you want to buy nvidia). but the only realistic near-future competitor to tsmc isn’t seen as such, despite the great need (ie worth the time to investigate and worth the risk to try as a fab).
If the current stock price is to believed, Intel should be bought for its assets, which makes absolutely no sense to me personally. As far as I’m concerned its the only possible short term path to breaking open the silicon supply chain gridlock, exacerbated by the ai hype.