There is a rumor making the rounds that Altera will leave Intel and return to TSMC. Rumors are just rumors but this one certainly has legs and I will tell you why and what I would have done if I were Altera CEO John Daane. Altera is a great company, one that I have enjoyed working with over the years, but I really think they made a serious mistake… Read More
Tag: intel
Intel is NOT Transparent Again!
Recent headlines suggest that Intel was not transparent about some of the products they showed at the CES keynote. Intel confirmed on Friday that they used ARM-based chips for some of the products but would not say which ones. When your company’s tag line is “Intel Inside” and you hold up a product during your keynote wouldn’t… Read More
Is Intel the Concorde of Semiconductor Companies?
An Intel executive recently told me that my Intel articles on SemiWiki are used to motivate employees to work hard and prove me wrong. The converse is also true. The senseless Intel fabless ecosystem bashing motivates me to continue to write so it is a win-win scenario, absolutely. In fact, I should credit Intel’s Mark Bohr… Read More
The State of 450mm Wafers. And Intel Gossip
Paul Farrar, the General Manager of the Global 450mm Consortium (G450C) presented at the SEMI ISS conference today. What is G450C, it is a public-private consortium to develop a cost-effective 450mm wafer fabrication infrastructure, develop equipment prototypes and coordinate the industry move to 450mm. It is located in Albany… Read More
Technology Challenges: Intel, IBM, Xilinx, GlobalFoundries, IMEC
I spent the day at the SEMI Industry Strategy Symposium in Half Moon Bay. The early part of the day was devoted to technology challenges. Obviously everyone did not say exactly the same things, and had a little bit of a different spin depending on what business they are in. But there was a lot of commonality between Intel, IBM, Xilinx… Read More
The Future of Intel
There have been a lot of articles and discussion on SemiWiki about Intel. These articles have all been written from the perspective of an outsider commenting on what Intel is doing, or should or shouldn’t be doing. I thought it would be interesting to take a look at how Intel got to where they currently are, what their current strengths… Read More
Intel Wafer Pricing Exposed!
One of the big questions on Intel’s foundry strategy is: Can they compete on wafer pricing? Fortunately there are now detailed reports that support what most of us fabless folks already know. The simple answer is no, Intel cannot compete with TSMC or Samsung on wafer pricing at 28nm, 20nm, and 14nm.
In fact, recent reports have shown… Read More
Intel Comes Clean on 14nm Yield!
Hopefully this blog will result in a meaningful discussion on truth and transparency, and how Intel can do better in regards to both. Take a close look at the manufacturing slides presented by William Holt, Executive Vice President General Manager, Intel Technology and Manufacturing Group. You can see the slide deck HERE. Slide… Read More
Intel’s Tale of Two Cities
It was a year ago that Paul Otellini made his surprise announcement that he was stepping down as CEO of Intel. Soon after, I wrote an article asserting that the only correct choice for his replacement was Nvidia’s CEO Jen Hsun Huang. I went beck to reread what I wroteand I can scarcely say I would change anything I put in the article assuming… Read More
QCOM delivers first TSMC 20nm mobile chips!
QCOM is now sampling the TSMC 20nm version of its market dominating Gobi LTE modem. The announcement also included a new turbo charged version of their 28nm Snapdragon 800 SoC with a Krait 450 quad core CPU and Adrino 420 GPU. Given the comparable benchmarks between the Intel 22nm SoC and the 28nm SoCs from Apple and QCOM, the new 20nm… Read More