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I can see multiple reasons why this makes sense.
1. Intel has had a customer relationship with TSMC for decades. It might be that for the short to intermediate term TSMC will be able to make a lower bid for low volume chips (hundreds of thousands to low millions) than IFS can do.
2. Since...
This is the biggest reason (but far from the only reason) why I'm mystified by Craig Barrett's call for re-hiring Gelsinger as CEO. I always thought of Barrett as one of the smartest people I've ever met, but not seeing the folly of the fab overbuilding strategy makes me wonder.
TSMC US fabs are not "big" facilities. They are low-volume operations compared to the fabs in Taiwan. Tens of thousands of wafers per month in the US versus over a million wafers per month in Taiwan. I don't think 99.99% of Americans or 95% of the popular press understand this.
Good point. I forgot about O'Buckley.
Unfortunately, PG really wasn't managing like it was a conglomerate. He was thinking he was the one CEO who could do both, but the reality is that he wasn't any good at either one. (IMO)
That's insightful.
I always thought that RISC-V would dominate the ASIC market, but it's taking a lot longer than I thought it would. Arm's ecosystem must be stickier than I anticipated.
I knew this would happen WRT China, from the first time I was introduced to RISC-V in a meeting at UC Berkeley. When I read that the RISC-V Foundation moved its home base to Switzerland, it was obvious they were targeting China. The original RISC-V program at Berkeley received DARPA funding...
I'm not following your line of reasoning. Chandrasekaran has no foundry experience whatsoever, either working for a foundry or being a user/customer of one, according to his Intel bio. For manufacturing, I'm not qualified to judge his experience. As for leading an IDM, I believe that the only...
The other thing I wonder about with IFS... who are the voices of the customer? Specifically, I mean senior people who were experienced foundry customers, both people with business and technical expertise, who will know specifically what foundry customers will want from their foundry. IMO, you...
TSMC sets the standard for shuttles, and they're widely available, though there's no getting around how expensive chipmaking is for sub-10nm processes. IMO, a great shuttle program is one reason why TSMC has been so successful, even with startups. I don't know what Samsung does.
One factor I've wondered about with IFS, and I've never seen a mention of it in the press or in Intel announcements, is whether or not they have a working process for multi-project wafers. Without MPWs, it must be slow and expensive to have multiple IP providers do test chips on 18A. To my...
I have always thought this concern was nonsense.
This concern is more legitimate, but is easily solvable with production capacity contractual commitments from Intel. The situation with TSMC is really no different. If I were a chip design company contracting with TSMC for production in a...
I suspect they are looking at TSMC 2nm process as a foundry process, and 18A as likely an internal-only process for high volume production for, well, I'm not sure how long. I think you hit the nail on the head with the guess that customers are leery of IFS and 18A because both are unproven as...
Barrett was never "asked to leave" to my knowledge. At age 66, in 2005, he was succeeded as CEO by Otellini, but Barrett became BoD chair after being CEO, a position he held until 2009. A brilliant guy in my experience, but proof if it ever existed that leading a chip fabrication company and...
The only reason to need fab shells on the scale of the Ohio site is you get a whale customer or multiple high volume customers. At the time Intel started building, they had neither on the horizon.
Aptly handled? I agree that breaking up Intel is not the best idea for years yet, but does Craig agree with the reckless fab spending with no customers? Or the lack of a leadership AI chip strategy? No leadership networking strategy? (Sorry, Intel, vRAN isn't anything like enough.)
Firing...
I agree.
Agree again.
I can't believe the chip designers were this clueless.
I don't believe this one either. My feeling is that the design teams were too risk averse to do the deep redesign work necessary to do tiled dies "properly".
Agreed. I think the biggest advantage the intel design...
In my decades in the high-tech industry, I worked with or for several senior managers who operated like this. A couple of them were brand-name "leaders" (ha!) many people would recognize. The pathetic part is that these same jackasses managed upward as shameless loyalists who would say and do...
