Political Chips

https://stratechery.com/2022/political-chips/

by simonpure • 4 years ago

167 140 4 years ago

rossdavidh3• 4 years ago

Full disclosure: I worked for AMD for about a decade.

I agree with the bottom line here (we should spend gov't $$ to make sure significant amounts of chip manufacturing still get made in the US, and Intel has to be a big part of that). However, it misses the real reason for Intel's decline.

For most of it's existence, if Intel had missed a manufacturing node in Moore's Law, it would have been rightly recognized as an existential threat, and it would have become the #1 focus of the CEO and the rest of the company. Intel fell behind Moore's Law for years in its manufacturing, and it never caused them to appropriately panic until that hit the bottom line. This is a problem of an executive suite too focused on this quarter's results, and not focused enough on the engineering that drives those results. Previous generations of Intel executives understood that. It is likely that the current CEO, brought in once the board saw problems in their stock price, realizes it. If they had been run by executives who cared more about the underlying engineering, they would have had a 5-year head start in fixing the situation.

amelius• 4 years ago

Sounds similar to Boeing. You begin to wonder when these kind of lessons start entering management textbooks.

jimkleiber• 4 years ago

I was just gonna say that the Intel case may fit well in this book called Obliquity[0], which ironically discusses Boeing.

I believe it said that Boeing was less profitable when it focused on increasing profits and more profitable when it focused on improving engineering.

[0] https://www.johnkay.com/product/obliquity/

alexashka• 4 years ago

They can't. It'd undermine the very existence of the ruling elite class that doesn't know how to do anything, besides 'managing' by following a magic formula taught at Harvard, Stanford, etc.

The problem is the existence of a business management layer as an idea - it's an attempt to get back to the good old days of feudalism, whose chief characteristics are nepotism, stagnation, corruption and nihilism, now that we've gotten rid of the mental pacifier of 'heaven' for the oppressed and hell for the ruling elites (religion).

cjbgkagh• 4 years ago

I read a lot of creative accounting case studies and am repeatedly surprised when others fall for the same simple tricks over and over again. At some point I have to assume willful ignorance.

I’m sure there are plenty of case studies in text books that management could read. Either they don’t read them or they take away the wrong message. Don’t forget the execs at these companies probably cashed in some big bonuses.

throwaway4good9• 4 years ago

The accountants took over the company, and the good engineers left.

I have witnessed this with other companies; and I am sorry they are never going to return to what they once were.

It is kind of obvious when you chat with all the sad employees: Why didn't you leave? And then you realise that the ones, who are left, are the ones who couldn't get a job elsewhere.

georgeecollins4• 4 years ago

I went to business school. The management textbooks used to tell you that steady profits were the most important thing. When I think about the things I was taught, particularly this incredible reverence for GE, I laugh.

mandevil3• 4 years ago

In general I don't believe that being an engineer is necessary to run a technology business (some of my best leaders were not), but I have come around to believing that Intel and Boeing are exceptions: the nature of their business requires new massive bets- not quite 'bet the company' but definitely 'bet the next 10 years of company performance' every so often (new fabs and new planes), and that one decision really needs to be made by an experienced engineer, due to the nature of the underlying evaluation. If not, then people who think they can bafflegab mother nature the same way they can auditors will make the decisions.

neuronexmachina• 4 years ago

An interesting example is Dennis Muilenberg, who was Boeing CEO from 2015-2019, during the 737 Max debacle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Muilenburg

He started at Boeing in 1985 as an engineering intern, earned a masters in Aeronautics, and worked his way through management and engineering positions until he became CEO. I have no idea how much of the 737 Max issues could be placed on him directly, but he was CEO during its launch and the crashes.

spaetzleesser2• 4 years ago

I think it boils down to the messaging that comes from top. Do they mainly talk about creating the best products or do they talk about shareholder value?

mandevil3• 4 years ago

Just wanted to clarify that singling out Boeing and Intel specifically was not my intention: I really meant commercial aircraft and semiconductors industries as a whole, using those two companies as a syndoche, because of the massive investment and large time delays between the commitment of money and the result in the market. Those two in particular seem to require regular, hugely expensive (10+ billion dollar) efforts of 5-10 years in duration to keep up the pace of technical development, so picking the wrong horse is catastrophic for a long while.

(Obviously the A380 never killed anyone like the 737Max did, but it definitely was a massive, 25 billion dollar sinkhole for the company- some estimates are that Airbus never even turned a profit on the flyaway cost of the airplane, excluding development costs! If Boeing hadn't simultaneously had the 737Max actual disaster, it would have been much worse for Airbus. Intel has seen TSMC power ahead, which has made their problems more obvious.)

formerkrogemp3• 4 years ago

You could apply this with slightly different specifics to many US national and multinational corporations.

The efficient market rewards inefficient stock buybacks, record debt fueled dividends, years of underinvestment, low wages, and most of all no strings attached bailouts. They may be a loser, but we'll pay for their loss. Socialize the losses/costs and privatize the gains.

lotsofpulp2• 4 years ago

Based on the performance of publicly listed companies in the last 15 years, the stock market has rewarded companies with great cash flow, high profits, and relatively rosy outlooks.

Of course there is an underlying assumption the government will bail out simultaneous/systemic big failures, but it does not seem accurate to assume any random business will be bailed out.

Edit : fixed typo

georgeecollins4• 4 years ago

I think this is a result of the problem of financializaton. I don't think that an engineer has to run a company like Intel, Boeing or Apple. But if the growth of steady profits becomes a higher priority than what you actually produce, you are likely to milk the business at the expense of its long term prospects.

sanxiyn6• 4 years ago

I mostly disagree with this line of reasoning. Yes, financialization is bad, but Intel would have been fine if its process went fine.

We probably will never know what exactly went wrong, but I think the current best guess is this: Intel set minimum metal pitch target for its 10 nm process at 36 nm, while TSMC set minimum metal pitch target for its 7 nm process (equivalent to Intel 10 nm process) at 40 nm. These processes were the last before EUV, pushing DUV to its limit. It turned out that you can do 40 nm but not 36 nm. That's it.

It was an extremely technical issue, with justifications on both sides, and Intel's decision wasn't obviously mistaken, even in retrospect. 36 nm was usual scaling to Moore's law. It was 40 nm that was unusual, TSMC underscaled metal relative to fin and gate. Why 40 nm? Because it was the limit of DUV double patterning. But Intel also knew that! That's why Intel went with quadruple patterning. It was a conservative choice to underscale metal to the limit of double patterning, but quadruple patterning wasn't crazy either. Everyone was using quadruple patterning for fin at this point, so it wasn't thought that risky.

Should Intel have reconsidered this once they encountered yield issues? Yes, but that's hindsight. All processes experience yield issues. Intel probably thought they can be solved, faster than going back to drawing board and doing everything again. Unfortunately they couldn't.

(Above analysis was informed by lots of reading on this topic I did over the years, but https://semiwiki.com/semiconductor-manufacturers/intel/7433-... in particular.)

lazulicurio• 4 years ago

A big part of this is investors demanding financializaton. Unless you're in a sector that investors have decided is a "growth" sector, it's all about capital efficiency and headcount and how much "fat" you can trim. See, for example, the recent gas price situation. Companies are far more worried about becoming overcapitalized than they are worried about losing out on some sales volume.

throwaway4good9• 4 years ago

For an example of a broken company:

https://twitter.com/dylan522p/status/1554889887630761985

Intel with a bunch of Optane related presentations at #FlashMemorySummit

Some the Intel folks I spoke to about this (not pictured) had no clue it was going to be cancelled until they read it on an article from Toms Hardware.

fomine3• 4 years ago

Could it be opposite? Intel gave up Optane products so they release their research to community without worrying competitors catch up. No disclosure is due to pre-IR compliance.

lr19702• 4 years ago

For most of it's existence, if Intel had missed a manufacturing node in Moore's Law, it would have been rightly recognized as an existential threat, and it would have become the #1 focus of the CEO and the rest of the company.

Former Intel-er here. You hit it on the nail. Andy Grove used to say "Only paranoid survive" and acted accordingly. But when Paul Otellini became the CEO it was downhill ever since.

midoridensha3• 4 years ago

No, it was going downhill when Craig Barrett was CEO. He made lots of stupid mistakes, getting involved in too many risky and unnecessary ventures (like consumer products: remember the Intel keyboard and mouse? Or music player? Or worse, microscope?). The big one was tying the P4 processor to RAMBUS memory.

deehouie• 4 years ago

I heard this so many times. These goddamn CEOs are so myopic; all they care is next quarter's earnings. After the fall of every megacap, tech or otherwise (recently GE), someone always blames them for short sightedness. Is that really? Well, many CEOs of many huge corporations just plan for the next quarter, and they seem to be doing just fine.

dmix2• 4 years ago

The average large corporation is typically in a stable/stagnant industry that is nowhere near as competitive as chips, where the stakes are 100x higher.

They get by being the largest kid on the block and few young companies chomping at the bit, and a series of B/C-tier competitors even dumber and poorly run that they can't even do the next quarter effectively.

Countless mega-corps are just floating by with the ebbs and flows of a market, burning off some early moment of success. Staying at the top longer than a decade or two (usually the timeframe where other market entrants take notice of your weakness) is the real test.

Otherwise just being a decent manager/leader that keeps the existing established business model chugging along and hiring slightly above average executives to put out fires is good enough.

rossdavidh3• 4 years ago

Well not all CEOs are so myopic; Andy Grove of Intel was not, for example.

Whether or not a next-quarter focus works, probably depends on the industry. In semiconductors, especially high-performance semiconductors, the R&D on manufacturing this year determines whether the design several years from now is able to be competitive, so there is a need to be more forward looking.

eru3• 4 years ago

we should spend gov't $$ to make sure significant amounts of chip manufacturing still get made in the US, [...]

Why?

And would your rationale apply to other countries as well?

Thorrez• 4 years ago

Regarding your first question:

The reason this matters is because chips matter for many use cases outside of PCs and servers — Intel’s focus — which is to say that TSMC matters. Nearly every piece of equipment these days, military or otherwise, has a processor inside. Some of these don’t require particularly high performance, and can be manufactured by fabs built years ago all over the U.S. and across the world; others, though, require the most advanced processes, which means they must be manufactured in Taiwan by TSMC.
This is a big problem if you are a U.S. military planner. Your job is not to figure out if there will ever be a war between the U.S. and China, but to plan for an eventuality you hope never occurs. And in that planning the fact that TSMC’s foundries — and Samsung’s — are within easy reach of Chinese missiles is a major issue.

Regarding your second question, what companies and countries do you have in mind?

dash23• 4 years ago

Because you can't make war without chips. During war, global supply chains are cut off. And if you can't make war, then you can't have a global order on your terms. Instead, you have a global order on the terms of the Chinese. They become powerful and rich. You (and your allies) become weak and poor.

You make chips in the US for the same reason you make nukes in the US.

It applies to other countries only insofar as they want to be independent. Most Western countries can shelter under the US umbrella. Again, same as with nukes.

rossdavidh3• 4 years ago

I think that rationale would apply to some other countries, but not all. For example, Japan should want to maintain a viable semiconductor manufacturing capacity (and might be at risk, currently). Now obviously Luxembourg cannot. Where exactly in between the size of Japan and Luxembourg one draws the line is a tough question, but probably western Europe has at least a couple countries (Germany, France, UK) who are big enough.

Lower-income countries like Brazil, South Africa, Argentina, India probably want to, but may have to work their way up to that; it's an expensive business to be in.

I notice that China has absolutely made it a top priority to try to get into this, despite having some difficulty doing so.

mhh__• 4 years ago

Intel's engineers apparently got too ambitious rather than got lazy.

photochemsyn• 4 years ago

"The most important decision was shifting to extreme ultraviolet lithography at a time when Intel thought it was much too expensive and difficult to implement; TSMC, backed by Apple’s commitment to buy the best chips it could make, committed to EUV in 2014, and delivered the first EUV-derived chips in 2019 for the iPhone. Those EUV machines are made by one company — ASML. They’re worth more than Intel too (and Intel is a customer)."

CNBC toured ASML clean rooms in a very interesting video. IIRC, the only thing keeping ASML from exporting these machines to China is some EU/USA export control rule:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSVHp6CAyQ8

mark_l_watson2• 4 years ago

I am a Libertarian so this may seem like an odd comment: I support some government intervention to design and manufacture of at least low tech chips (adequate for laptops, tractors, industrial uses in general).

I am not a hardware expert, but given that the Open RISC projects seem very worthy of support, both in design efforts and multiple inside the US fab facilities.

TSMC’s new 5nm factory just opened 60 miles south of where I live in Arizona is also the kind of progress I want to see. I am a fan of globalization but we need to balance that with good “Plan B’s” for building what we really need inside the US.

lotsofpulp2• 4 years ago

It is not odd to be Libertarian and support government intervention that benefits one’s self. Hypocritical, maybe, but a common sentiment.

mark_l_watson2• 4 years ago

That is how I see it. I often drift into hypocrisy: I am 100% anti-war except if my country was directly attacked, but in the financial interests of me and my family, I do own “defense” stocks.

Also in my own self interest: I am for our government massively supporting poor kids with meals at schools, special tutoring, etc. in order for us to have a larger and better educated work force in the future.

Anyway sorry for the rant.

edmcnulty101• 4 years ago

I'm a 'government using funding to improve the world' vs 'govt using funding to control people' libertarian.

Scientific r and d falls strongly into the former category.

DEA, FBI, NSA, CIA, TSA, ATF, DoD, state police, county police, municipal police, neighborhood police, and other organizations used to control people. Plus the literally uncountable number of criminal and regulatory laws on the books that keep growing exponentially without congress taking time to go back and review old laws...

sanxiyn6• 4 years ago

US is not lacking in CPU design. I agree OpenRISC (and RISC-V) is worthy of support, but they benefit China more than US, and it would be poor use of US tax money to benefit China more than US.

tcmart14• 4 years ago

May be similar along my lines. I am for doing something for the silicon industry, I am just not into dumping into established giants. I’d love to see us throw money at people with novel ideas, new and interesting designs not though of before. The problem is, that is playing the long game when all we care about is winning the short game.

klelatti7• 4 years ago

Great piece but it seems that Ben doesn't quite finish joining the dots.

If Intel is to have a successful foundry business at the cutting edge then its customers will be those firms that are designing cutting edge CPUs, SoCs and GPUs.

That means Apple & Qualcomm (possibly OK) but also Nvidia, AMD and other Arm based competitors with Intel's CPUs and GPUs.

Can't see how this will work with Intel in its current form.

hyperation• 4 years ago

Perhaps a duopoly in domestic chip fabrication, with both Intel and TSMC operating fabs in the continental U.S.

sanxiyn6• 4 years ago

I think klelatti is doubting whether AMD could trust Intel to pursue AMD's best interest.

bombcar• 4 years ago

Intel contract manufacturing for AMD would be a fun turn of the tables.

throwaway4good9• 4 years ago

Intel tried very hard to get Apple as a customer for the iPhone. They knew very well of mr. Christensen but they simply could not deliver hinting that Intel's problems are not that of strategy but at a lower more fundamental level of competence and ability to organise.

(The stuff about RISC/CISC is a red herring - it basically doesn't matter on a modern cpu.)

Here is an article about Intel and Christensen with clip of him from 2012 (or earlier) where he mentions his work with Intel.

https://www.edgementoring.org/leadership-blog/clayten-christ...

Christensen Taught Intel CEO How To Think And Why It's Important

aidenn02• 4 years ago

I think Intel "tried very hard" from the point of view of a small company, but the fraction of Intel's resources put behind it was minuscule and felt very perfunctory.

Right or wrong, they had zero interest in betting the future of the company on low-power chips for mobile, or any other market.

[edit]

I just read the wikipedia summary of the prescription for incumbents in The Innovator's Dillema and the one thing Intel was missing was:

They allow the disruption organization to utilize all of the company's resources when needed but are careful to make sure the processes and values were not those of the company.

To a certain extent, it feels like buying a cloud offering from AWS vs. Google. Google might have a lot of resources dedicated in absolute terms to the cloud offering, but it feels like an afterthought that might go away at any moment. The AWS offering feels like a real product that Amazon plans on making money from.

In both the cases of Intel and Google, I can't say which is true, but customers can only make their plans based on appearances, not reality.

throwaway4good9• 4 years ago

The textbook solution is for the incumbent to spin off companies to deal with the disruptor. And one of the textbook examples is Intel.

alain94040• 4 years ago

I'm usually a big fan of stratechery, but for once I disagree with the explanation of Intel's decline.

I think it's much simpler: being number one in fab technology is mostly driven by volume: whoever has the most volume wins. During the PC era, Intel had the most volume, so they also had the best fabs. It's a winner-take-all, self-reinforcing ecosystem.

But in the last 10 years, mobile has had the highest volume. That's what allows TSMC to have the best fabs, and Intel is struggling. That's all there is to it. Nothing to do with services or software.

klelatti7• 4 years ago

The CISC vs RISC point Ben makes is key here. Intel could have been a big player in mobile: it put too much focus on x86 though when it could have been making (its own or others) Arm based SoCs.

Edit: not that Arm is necessarily RISC - but it certainly takes an approach that is different to x86 and better suited to mobile.

jjtheblunt2• 4 years ago

Intel was making its own ARM chips called Xscale 20 years ago, no?

reindeerer• 4 years ago

I've lost count how many misguided bids of taking x86 to low-power they made. Also the apparent unshakeable confidence that ARM will never become viable on server and desktop.

marcosdumay3• 4 years ago

Intel tried to make Arm SoCs. But their customer management sucked, so in the end they only manufactured the SoCs that they designed, and didn't sell enough of them to be sustainable.

caycep• 4 years ago

Also perhaps there's a role where software/architecture just got better - they didn't have LLVM or other forms of code translation (if I'm phrasing that right) back then which seems to make the cpu architecture less of a critical issue.

aidenn02• 4 years ago

That is one of several reasons proposed in TFA; in particular TFA mentions TSMC's earlier investment in EUV being due to the guaranteed volume of smartphone chips.

Throwawayaerlei10• 4 years ago

Did not read TFA and if it doesn't focus a lot on the 10 nm/Intel 7 botch it's not fine, but I've read TSMC's very roughly equivalent 7 nm node was also non-EUV but less aggressive than Intel's. And it succeeded unlike Intel, which then made it natural to start introducing in production EUV in their 7+ node. Here I suspect gaining real experience in chips delivered to customers trumps whatever volume you'll end up doing.

sanxiyn6• 4 years ago

I very much doubt this. When EUV decision was made Intel was at the top of the world and had more volume than TSMC. As I understand Intel's reluctance was mostly about doubt whether ASML could deliver, and while ASML delivered I must say, even in retrospect, Intel's doubt was justified.

adrian_b3• 4 years ago

This would the correct explanation if Intel would have made no mistakes.

However, it is beyond reasonable doubt that Intel has made some extremely ugly management mistakes during their failed attempts to transition from 14 nm to 10 nm, which have absolutely nothing to do with the competition from TSMC or others.

Maybe Intel would have lost their technological advance regardless how the company had been managed, due to the difference in volume between smartphone chips and PC chips, but now we cannot know which has mattered more, the internal mismanagement or the change of the semiconductor device market favoring their competition.

I wonder if it will ever become public knowledge which were exactly the technology problems of Intel and who are those guilty for the decline at the company, because the failures could not have had any real technical causes but only bad management causes.

During their worst years Intel has been capable even of presenting to the public fake technical presentations about the alleged great characteristics of their future 10 nm CMOS process, which is something that I would never have expected from a company like Intel. The marketing messages from any company are expected to be full of lies, but the technical presentations are expected to match reality.

During many years, unlike TSMC, Intel has behaved as if it were completely unable to predict the precise characteristics of the CMOS process that they will able to manufacture in the following year.

How could this happen is very hard to understand, as the manufacturing processes and the future devices made with them can be simulated long in advance of their implementation, and the models can be tuned continuously while the processes evolve, by fabricating and measuring various test structures. Unlike for Intel, for TSMC the performance predictions for future processes have always been reasonably accurate.

klelatti7• 4 years ago

There was the infamous demo when they ‘forgot’ to mention a CPU was overclocked. Bit of a red flag for the culture that permits that.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-28-core-cpu-5ghz,372...

sanxiyn6• 4 years ago

I wonder if it will ever become public knowledge which were exactly the technology problems of Intel and who are those guilty for the decline at the company, because the failures could not have had any real technical causes but only bad management causes.

Why do you think this? It was a yield issue, and the best guess is it was caused by multi patterning. (Intel themselves said so.)

I found an analysis from SemiWiki titled "Intel 10nm Yield Issues" pretty convincing. See https://semiwiki.com/semiconductor-manufacturers/intel/7433-...

babypuncher• 4 years ago

Which is probably why Pat Gelsinger wants to turn Intel into a fab for hire just like TSMC and Samsung.

throwaway4good9• 4 years ago

Intel is in big trouble and the only card they have left is the nationalism card. And that card is for losers.

We are about to enter a silicon slump with low demand and oversupply; for Intel things will get worse.

What will happen when it is clear to everyone including politicians that all that subsidy money is going into a black hole? And people finally figure out that a rocket that blows up stuff doesn't need a 2nm chip?

They are going to lose interest and those subsidies that is Intel's last hope will end.

groby_b• 4 years ago

"We are about to enter a silicon slump with low demand and oversupply"

What causes you to assume that?

"What will happen [if...] people finally figure out that a rocket that blows up stuff doesn't need a 2nm chip?"

One, they'll learn that we're not doing too hot on custom chip fabs in general? They'll also, if they're really that dense, learn that we need chips for a few more things than to make things go boom. (FWIW, they're not that dense.)

"They are going to lose interest and those subsidies that is Intel's last hope will end."

Even if the rest of your statements were correct (and I don't think they are), that is absolutely not how subsidies work. Local subsidies translate to local jobs translate to votes. Keeping them running is rather important to politicians. So, no, "lose interest" is not exactly the most likely failure mode here.

JonChesterfield• 4 years ago

This one seems to have translated into dividends while intel posts substantial losses.

marcosdumay3• 4 years ago

What causes you to assume that?

Companies have been filling their stockpiling, and anticipating years of demand so they have a safety buffer for many months already. It's natural that this is followed by low demand.

At the same time, the world seems to be entering a recession.

est• 4 years ago

What causes you to assume that?

Those 2nm 5nm 7nm shit has been driven by people's need for new mobile phones, and people are getting tired of buying new phone every year without much persuading new features.

Also cryptocurrency mining has lost its momentum, lots of networks will switch to PoS to replace the CPU/GPU hungry hashing.

hotpotamus• 4 years ago

I've read that the problems with chips for cars are actually old processes (greater than 100nm) that are commodity and so no one really cares to make them and the equipment has one foot in the grave and such, so I don't think anyone cares too much about putting chips into rockets since that stuff was figured out awhile ago.

My perception of national defense types is somewhat influenced by reading their press stuff and somewhat influenced by General Buck Turgidson from Dr Strangelove. He would say, "We must not have a $weapon gap!" (missiles, mineshafts, whatever he perceived to be in the national interest at the moment). And today, what occupies the minds of these types is AI which means latest gen chips and problems with pesky nerds and their ethical considerations. They greatly fear that China has surpassed the US in AI and has us outgunned. To be fair to them, AI could certainly be a potent weapon, but I have no idea how their perceptions of China reflect reality.

dash23• 4 years ago

Intel is in big trouble and the only card they have left is the nationalism card. And that card is for losers.

No. It's 2022 not 2006. That card will win big, and deserves to.

kipchak• 4 years ago

"the goal should be to counteract the fundamental forces pushing manufacturing to geopolitically risky regions, and Intel is the only real conduit available to do that."

I wonder if it's fair to assume based on this the US gov will prop up intel as a foundry for as long as necessary, to secure it's own supply and reduce reliance on Taiwan/TSMC.

adamsvystun• 4 years ago

The most important decision was shifting to extreme ultraviolet lithography at a time when Intel thought it was much too expensive and difficult to implement; TSMC, backed by Apple’s commitment to buy the best chips it could make, committed to EUV in 2014, and delivered the first EUV-derived chips in 2019 for the iPhone.

Can somebody here correct me if I am wrong, but my impression was that Intel did commit early to EUV, with initial plans to start high volume manufacturing in line with other fabs (initial schedule was to introduce EUV in 2017 [1], it just got postponed many times), but they just failed in their execution.

[1] https://wccftech.com/idf13-intel-ship-10nm-chips-2015-7nm-ch...

Throwawayaerlei10• 4 years ago

I think your citation is 9 years old. What I've always heard is what they called 10 nm was non-EUV. You are correct that what they called 7 nm was going to use EUV, pretty much had to, but 10 nm catastrophically failed and the company responded very poorly to that.

Not that long ago I remember reading, forget at what confidence level, that their old 7 mn was believed to have the potential to leapfrog their 10 nm and save the company, but others said they had some problematic things in common (not counting the very poorly run company!) that made that unlikely. In any event what was 7 nm did not ride to the company's rescue.

adrian_b3• 4 years ago

Their 7 nm process has been renamed now as "Intel 4" and there is a presentation of it at Anandtech, which looks more credible than the fake presentations of the 10 nm process of some years ago.

The first product using this process, Meteor Lake, is expected 1 year from now.

pphysch5• 4 years ago

I wonder to what extent Washington's fuss over Taiwan is simply TSMC lobbying at work. They're an important company that is gonna get their lunch eaten by the mainland. But what can Washington even do about it?

Beyond the "unsinkable aircraft carrier" angle, that is.

Throwawayaerlei10• 4 years ago

"[TSMC is] an important company that is gonna get their lunch eaten by the mainland."

How so? Not for the foreseeable future in bleeding and leading edge nodes, where the PRC is some unknown but very long distance away from making their own EUV machines.

An invasion of Taiwan just means an end to TSMC production there, a point its chairman Mark Liu made a few days ago in a CNN interview. That would have really bad effects on the PRC's narrow economy with its export focus.

tshadley• 4 years ago

Very good points. Here's the link.

https://transcripts.cnn.com/show/fzgps/date/2022-07-31/segme...

LIU: Nobody can control TSMC by force. If you take a military force or invasion you will render TSMC's factory non-operable because this is such a sophisticated manufacturing facility. It depends on the real time [correlation] with the outside world, with Europe, with Japan, with the U.S., from materials to chemicals to spare parts to engineering software diagnosis. And it's everybody's effort to maybe this factory operable. So if you take it over by force you can no longer make it operable.

pphysch5• 4 years ago

PRC's narrow economy

Come on. There is not a less "narrow" major economy on the planet than China's. This is just silly.

USA would collapse in weeks if China blocked all exports. China would run out of dollars, which coincidentally would become worthless at the same time.

trynumber9• 4 years ago

The US has been sending carrier groups to support Taiwan long before they were a leading edge semiconductor manufacturer. So it's geopolitics as normal.

As for getting crushed by SMIC, this is only with possible massive government investment from the PRC. Now you see many other governments reacting with subsidies in kind. It will be a totally distorted market in 10 years time.

pphysch5• 4 years ago

Hence "to what extent". TFA implies that TSMC leaders were VIPs at the Pelosi meeting. What does this have to do with Washington's long-standing policy of militarizing Taiwan?

keepquestioning• 4 years ago

How would one profit off the next few years of political chipmaking?

throwaway4good9• 4 years ago

Pork futures.

throwaway4good9• 4 years ago

Chinese semiconductor companies. If this insanity continues (nationalism and sanctions), the massive Chinese market will end up being serviced only by Chinese chip companies. Some of these are investable via the Chinese or Hong Kong stock markets.

robocat• 4 years ago

AMDs spin-off of Global Foundries only gets mentioned once as an aside, yet surely there are multiple important reasons why that story is relevant to Intel.

mikewarot• 4 years ago

Chips are great, but you need discrete components, circuit boards, and other support, and the manufacturing infrastructure for all of that. Do we really have all of that in sufficient quantity domestically any more?

zbird2• 4 years ago

This is why Intel’s shift to being not simply an integrated device manufacturer but also a foundry is important: yes, it’s the right thing to do for Intel’s business, but it’s also good for the West if Intel can pull it off.

It's good for the US, not "the West".

MauranKilom• 4 years ago

Intel is also building a new fab in Germany. So no, it's not just the US.

zbird2• 4 years ago

The article is in the context of the US and the CHIPS Act, it doesn't even mention Europe.

Or is the CHIPS Act also funding fabs in Europe?

I'm not sure it does Europe good to make US-surveillance-ridden chips either.

Political Chips

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