Item — HN Reader

>> when they're the only semi company left still running their own fabs

Yes and even within that they are risk averse, no need to look beyond 10nm and their reluctance to EUV.

So they are really risk averse and they just want their success to continue infinitely. In fact, contrary to Pat G claiming that Nvidia is lucky; it's really Intel which was lucky.

>> commend them for not giving up on advancing their fab nodes despite the massive issues and setbacks(they could have spun it off like AMD did), and for building the ARC GPUs

even if the turn around time in semi market is longer, the way they faltered on their Arc timelines and no encouraging signs of their new fab nodes is not commendable!

3 comments

>even if the turn around time in semi market is longer, the way they faltered on their Arc timelines and no encouraging signs of their new fab nodes is not commendable!

Sure, Intel fucked up along the way, and it's easy to point fingers and laugh from the comfort of the armchair at Intel tripping over massively complex engineering challenges, but if designing and building successful GPUs and sub-7nm fabs was easy, everyone would be doing it.

It is unfortunate that you are equating pointing to the facts as finger pointing and laughing. It would be better if you substantiate instead with facts and data that imply/prove otherwise.

Further, neither do the facts nor my comment in any way implies building GPU's is easy. OTHO, when a company like Intel with their massive competitive advantage (when their fabs were the market leaders) thus leading to financial muscle fritter it away in what is supposedly their strength (fabs), don't you think that they in fact deserve to be laughed at?

>It is unfortunate that you are equating pointing to the facts as finger pointing and laughing. It would be better if you substantiate instead with facts and data that imply/prove otherwise.

Is it that unfortunate? Because if you knew how difficult semi fabrication or GPU design is, you probably wouldn't say these failures are such big deals worth pointing out as negatives, but part and parcel of the process of solving such complex problems only 3 players worldwide have mastered.

Do you see Nvidia trying to fab chips? Do you see TSMC trying to design GPUs? Imagine Intel is doing both at the same time. Of course they will fail at points along the way, the important thing is they stay in the game to provide us with competition.

In addition, what kind of risk are they alone taking when Biden is throwing billions upon billions at them and backstopping them.

The billions Biden threw their way isn’t really that much when their fabs cost billions to build. Don’t think the grants cover the full cost of their new fabs - it was 50 billion total right divided among all the corporations including TSMC, IIRC.

> Yes and even within that they are risk averse, no need to look beyond 10nm and their reluctance to EUV.

Actually from what I heard, their failures with their Intel 7 was partly due to trying too many unproven technologies - i.e. they pulled a Zumwalt. With their current Intel 4 & 3 I heard they were more conservative.

Intel actually had trouble getting 14nm off the ground and it was late to ramp up, that should have been a signal that past progress might be coming to an end. I believe that when things got difficult managements response was to try to catch back up by going crazy on the 10nm jump and it went horribly.

What was more shocking is how long them seemed to be in denial before putting contingency plans in place.

>their failures with their Intel 7 was partly due to trying too many unproven technologies

Everything about bleeding edge semi fabbing is unproven technology.

> Yes and even within [fab] they are risk averse, no need to look beyond 10nm and their reluctance to EUV.

Wasn't there an article on HN 2 days ago about Intel pushing 2 new technologies simultaneously in their next node? (ribbon gate and backside power?)

> Wasn't there an article on HN 2 days ago about Intel pushing 2 new technologies simultaneously in their next node? (ribbon gate and backside power?)

When I read "ribbon gate" just now, I assumed you were referring to some scandal.

Let's hope that's not prescient :)