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Comment by thu2111 | Hacker News Reader

I'm bullish on Intel. Having an engineer at the top will fix all sorts of subtle problems quite quickly. Their manufacturing process for both 10nm and 7nm are now supposedly back on track, and yet they have a large backlog of designs waiting for the new processes to ramp up. We may see rapid performance increases from them now their pipeline is unblocked.

Additionally, US politics is now aligning across the aisle against China, and relying too heavily on TSMC looks like a potential future geopolitical problem. Intel is the only firm that can realistically keep up or out-fab TSMC and thus the USG will be loathe to let it even look like it might fail. Simply having fabs physically within your territory but managed by a remote firm, is clearly no substitute for having fabs actually managed by a domestic company (consider how many ways there must be to do the equivalent of SSH-ing into a fab, or otherwise subtly sabotage it from HQ).

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> Intel is the only firm that can realistically keep up or out-fab TSMC

Samsung?

Realistically, Intel needs a route to actually playing at TSMC's game, currently they are instead working on paying TSMC to make them chips.

Also, nitpick here, but the TSMC problem is that China might roll in tanks, not that China controls it. Realistically speaking, it's a reasonable cause for US millitary involvement if China did. Lol, there's my World War III Shark-jump Theory: TSMC.

>TSMC problem is that China might roll in tanks

TSMC have fab in China and currently building one in the US. TSMC is also opening an expansion in Japan. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-taiwan-tsmc/tsmc-to-raise...

the latest tech is probably going to stay in Taiwan but judging from all the recent moves by TSMC. it look like they are spreading their wings to reduce the risk.

Intel's new GPU's need the all the advantages they can get to survive market entry. When Intel's process is ready, shipping, and better then they can switch.

From a product perspective, totally agree, but from a strategy perspective, Intel getting to a level of beating TSMC is very very far off. Currently they are funding the development of the next chip that will beat them elsewhere.

Personally, if Xe production funds TSMC's 3nm node that will be bought out by Apple and AMD then Intel probably should realize that the limited money they will make from GPUs will be dwarfed by the losses from improving their competition.

Through don't forget that due to TSCM being overloaded with requests and Intel having their own fabs they can still sell chips for (for them) good prices even if they are worse.

In the end getting a CPU is normally more important then getting the best CPU.

Just shipping much amount is fine in shortage situation (if lasts until DG2 is released).

If China rolls in tanks in Taiwan, then the least of our concerns will be iphone cpu manufacturing. Taiwan is not Crimea, to just look at other way.

> Having an engineer at the top will fix all sorts of subtle problems quite quickly.

Note that Intel's current fab problems were well underway when there was an engineer on top, and that engineer was a fab person. Pat is not.

Not just the US. 8% of the manufacturing is done in EU when like 90% of the global supply is made with European ASML machines... I don't think it was a coincidence that Gelsinger mentioned national security, EU, and ASML in his speech.

Keep in mind, a semiconductor fab has hundreds of other machines and equipment involved, and US companies are some of the biggest suppliers (Applied Materials, Lam Research, KLA-Tencor--all multi-billion dollar companies).

Lithography is definitely key, but all the equipment and process must work together.

> Their manufacturing process for both 10nm and 7nm are now supposedly back on track, and yet they have a large backlog of designs waiting for the new processes to ramp up

From what (little) I know of the industry this isn't a good sign. Engineers working on the fab processes and packaging have to work closely with designers throughout the product design cycle, repeatedly taping out variations to fit onto the process as it is built out.

That's part of why Intel historically used the tick/tock design cycle, designing a new thing to be built on a new process has a multiplicative effect on the time to market because of the way the unknown-unknowns of both sides impact each other, and the large amount of specialized labor to mitigate everything.

It doesn't help that they lost a ton of institutional knowledge over the last decade to their competitors through layoffs disproportionately hitting senior staff.

The way I've heard it is that the layoffs were strategically/discriminatorily targeting senior staff, because of course they are the ones with the most institutional knowledge and therefore paid the most.

Same here. This looks like the exactly the right move Intel needed.

I don't think enough people fully appreciate that just about the entire world's leading edge supply is located within cruise missile range of China. The CCP could cripple the global economy in under an hour. Having supply chains out of their reach is not a nice to have, it is a must.

I assume that China uses some TSMC chips. Though their “Made in China 2025” plan involves creating more of their own chips.

Is this year's claim of "supposedly back on track" more credible than every previous year's? (Honest question!)

If the first thing Gelsinger does in the new role is to lie about progress, his credibility will be ruined.

Conversely, if he were to say "it's worse than I feared," he won't personally be blamed because the problem preceded his return to Intel.

So I think the claim can be viewed with a greater sense of honesty than before.

He just announced another delay to 7 nm.

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