Is Gelsinger's One Year Cadence a good move?

[Arthur Hanson]

Gelsinger has told Barrons that Intel will go to a one-year cadence on its processor chips. Is this going to be an economic and efficient way to utilize resources or just a marketing ploy? It sounds good, but are the improvements going to be great enough for customers to justify the increased costs of new processors every year for too small an improvement to justify the costs of new models? Will Intel layout an entire new migration plan for their customers and support partners needed to justify these changes? Will TSM and Samsung have anything to say about this? Will this benefit Intel's current customers and win new ones? It seems to me this is a high-risk, high-cost, business move. Any thoughts and observations appreciated.

Intel Presents a $20 Billion Bill for a Turnaround. Investors Don’t Like It.

The semiconductor giant’s CEO presents a plan to build two new chip factories, create a division to manufacture for others, and seek partners on its own new chips. The cost isn’t small.

www.barrons.com

It's a paysite, but Gelsinger relayed this directly to them

 

[Daniel Nenni]

Gelsinger has told Barrons that Intel will go to a one-year cadence on its processor chips. Is this going to be an economic and efficient way to utilize resources or just a marketing ploy? It sounds good, but are the improvements going to be great enough for customers to justify the increased costs of new processors every year for too small an improvement to justify the costs of new models? Will Intel layout an entire new migration plan for their customers and support partners needed to justify these changes? Will TSM and Samsung have anything to say about this? Will this benefit Intel's current customers and win new ones? It seems to me this is a high-risk, high-cost, business move. Any thoughts and observations appreciated.

Intel Presents a $20 Billion Bill for a Turnaround. Investors Don’t Like It.

The semiconductor giant’s CEO presents a plan to build two new chip factories, create a division to manufacture for others, and seek partners on its own new chips. The cost isn’t small.

www.barrons.com

It's a paysite, but Gelsinger relayed this directly to them

Can you paste the section where it says a one year cadence? I have also heard it mentioned.

TSMC has perfected the one year cadence and Intel is following that. I have been pushing Intel to not only do the one year half steps but to also rename their processes to better match the others. Scotten wrote about this directly as well:

Intel Node Names - Semiwiki

There is a lot of interest right now in how Intel compares to the leading foundries and what the future may hold. Several years ago, I published several extremely popular articles converting processes from various companies to “Equivalent Nodes” (EN). Nodes were at one time based on actual...

semiwiki.com

 

[Arthur Hanson]

Dan, here is the statement from Intel

Intel CEO Patrick Gelsinger tells Barron’s. “We’re moving from a two-to-three year processor cadence to a one-year cycle,” he says, slashing the time needed to design and produce a new generations of chips.

 

[tooLongInEDA]

Taking the statement literally, this seems to be fundamentally about being more agile and efficient in design and getting the design cycle time down and not about silicon process. In fact, an increased emphasis on differentiation by design may be a result of lack of progress (in recent years) on process. Equally, if you end up on the same process as AMD, then surely you must differentiate on design. And if you are going to use TSMC and they're on a 1 year cadence, I guess you have to speed up.

So, to me at least, this seems to be about streamlining the design process. I would assume that a shorter design cycle time with less restrictive design rules would cost less and use less engineering resource per design.

 

[Daniel Nenni]

Dan, here is the statement from Intel

Intel CEO Patrick Gelsinger tells Barron’s. “We’re moving from a two-to-three year processor cadence to a one-year cycle,” he says, slashing the time needed to design and produce a new generations of chips.

I'm betting what he means is that Intel will no longer us the + for new processes. I think 14nm is up to four or five pluses? Let's see what the do. Make up more names like Trigate or SuperFin or use numbers like everyone else.