Comment by ThinkBeat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ThinkBeat | Hacker News Reader

It is weird to me how the perspective on Intel flipped a while back.

For a long time, the discussion was that Intel had failed, failed and failed again to get their next generation fabs operating at acceptable yields that they were a couple of generations behind TSMC.

Which was a huge departure from their decades of first or least competitive on fabs.

Intel announced they would start having some chips produced by TSMC, so they could try and harness benefits of the latest, or the generation behind latest for their chips.

In short Intel was seen as incompetent and could no longer compete with their competitors. The long Intel domination was sliding away.

Then people started worrying about Taiwan. Intel got a few billion dollars in a sweet contract with the military, building fabs in the US became the major push in tech.

Since then, the perspective has been much more positive for Intel and their role in building domestically.

Intels inability to build a latest generation fab has not changed.

New leadership and a more urgent geopolitical landscape has forced many to change their actions if not their outlook. We just need fabs. We have money. Intel has been saying for a long long time that we need fabs, so lets give them the money.

personally, I think the gloom and doom around Intel is hate-hype. It's so fun to look at the giants and laugh, but they're still the giants. If you look at the landscape right now, and ignore the past, you see Intel and AMD in a slugfest for domination, and no (?) real other contenders. If AMD were the incumbent, we'd all be cheering Intel, but they're still neck-and-neck regardless. And Intel has other focii, like compilers, HPC software, kiosk form factors, etc, that help round out the offerings (and those are just things I'm familiar with).

20 years ago Microsoft was evil and google was the little-man's angel. Now I'm much more a fan of MS than Google, and feel MS is moving in the right direction while Google is not. It seems generational.

> Intels inability to build a latest generation fab has not changed.

That is going to take ~5 years, according to Intel's publicly released roadmaps (and if they actually succeed, which they may not).

That being said, Intel's "Intel 7" manufacturing node that they are shipping Desktop and Laptop processors on currently is surprisingly competitive. In the markets Intel is competing in, only Apple is currently using a more advanced manufacturing process to my knowledge. TSMC's N7 process, used by AMD and many others seems to be pretty similar in performance and efficiency.

The problem is that N7 process, is from 2018. thats 4 years that TSMC have been developing their N6, N5, N4, N3 processes.

N5 (which Apple uses), was late 2019 with the A14 processor with AMD starting to jump in this year with it.

N3 should be out this year, more than likely with another flagship apple product.

Now. As per Intels roadmap, https://www.anandtech.com/show/16823/ , They should have Intel 4 out later this year. Which should be slightly faster than N5. The big question is whether they stick to their schedules.

This stuff takes years to turn around, before Zen AMD was in an even worse spot. Intel is down but not out, they have capital to spend and are making the right moves to get back on track.

well they have money now in what is a lot like a bailout with a different name. Intel was hurting after failing and failing to get fabs running.

There is no reason to expect success by infusing cash.

If you mean Chip ACT, they don’t have that money yet. All other announcements are tax breaks which they haven’t got any either; not until they started building the fabs they’ve announced

I think the sentiment always was that Intel would be doomed, if it were not for the fact that it’s too important an asset to the US gov. Same for Boeing.

What I’d say matters the most is whether Intel can keep up / take back the lead in terms of innovation with TSMC / AMD / all ARM things. The next 5 years will be super interesting to see how things develop.

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