Hacker News Reader

GloFo was never long-term sustainable, so they basically had a choice between going bankrupt in 1-2 years trying to do 7 nm or coasting on 14 nm and slowly withering away over 5-10 years.

View on HN

GloFo is long-term sustainable, just not as a leading edge foundry. Old process tech doesn't go away, they just move to producing lower-margin products. 65nm is still in mass production. 14nm and, more importantly the fdx processes (as they have lower chip development costs and therefore are more attractive for the low-end market) will still be in full production 20 years from now.

Just not making fast cpus.

Exactly. GF is making lots of chips on 130 and 180 nm process. There’s a lot out there that isn’t bleeding edge CPUs. We’ve got power chips, port controllers, high speed linear re-drivers. Not every ASIC needs tiny transistors, in fact many use comparatively huge ones and it makes no sense to use an expensive process.

I don’t see GF going away any time soon. They’re a huge player with a lot of customers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com