In the past x86 raked in enough money to burn a lot of it on new fab tech but non-x86 has grown immensely and floods TSMC with money. The problem for intel is that their fab tech was fitted to their processor architecture and vice versa. It made sense in the past but in the future it might not. For the processor business it may be better to use TSMC for production. For the fab it may be necessary to manufacture for many customers and take a premium for being based in a country in need. So, a split-up may be inevitable and this fabbing a competitive ARM chip surely helps in attracting more customers. Customers who may pay a premium for political and security reasons.
Given Apple's history with Intel's ability to deliver, I'm guessing the confidence there isn't high.
The US government can wish and encourage all they want, as long as Samsung, TSMC and any other produces better chips for less, the money will flow there.
> the money will flow there
Which money? The CHIPS act [0] isn't only for the ones who produce "better chips for less".
The Chaebol model of Korea is a way to spin it while avoiding the less competitive part by forcing the companies to compete internationally while keeping the domestic market locked into the Chaebol offering.
For example the US gov could force (or subsidize) all datacenters in the US to use intel chips made in intel foundries located in the US. But on the international market intel would need to compete with its rivals.
This is all theoretically possible, but very hard to pull off politically. And it is not necessarily good for the country long term and certainly a tax to the country citizens/adjacent-companies in the short term.
My guess is, they're gonna let Intel rot a little further while doing their best to pressure for Intel to split off their fab biz (as AMD had done back then), and then invest just in the fab.
When the first tough about investing is to go to big corporations and the goverment instead of going to investors is a telling about how nowadays the economy works.
I love that the Orange guy has opened the door to the nationalization of big tech. I hope that the next president is bolder on this regard. If all these companies depend on monopolies to exists, they should be state owned/controlled.
They need an external customer for the fab so they can iterate and work out the issues. It’s anyone’s guess if someone trusts intel to manufacture on their behalf instead of sticking with an established player. They’re stuck in a chicken and egg situation - can’t reach high yields without a customer, but a customer only wants to sign up if the yields and future deliveries are guaranteed.
Intels only hope might be that someone, not naming names, coerces an established company to sign up.
As of this moment, the only company that is definitely going ahead with that next generation node is TSMC. The other two companies capable of doing so are both signalling that they will only do it if they get a partner who promises to use them for significant volume, not just as negotiating leverage against TSMC.
I guess you mean Intel to iterate using its own money to get the customer's chip right, no?
Like 75% off for the first run of chips?
https://semiwiki.com/forum/threads/nova-lake-to-use-tsmc-n2p...
If they themselves don't produce their chip there, why would anybody else do?
Plus, if the goal is to make more chips domestically (of all kinds), Intel will need to show that they can fab chips for other customers, not just their own designs.
CEO Lip-Bu Tan: "Job number one is ramping Intel 18A at scale. Intel 18A and Intel 18A-P are critical nodes for Intel Products and will drive meaningful wafer volumes well into the next decade – starting with Panther Lake later this year."
But they don't want to be the ONLY customer. Intel wants other companies to invest, and as early in the processes as possible, so Intel doesn't have to bankroll the whole thing.
"Going forward, our investment in Intel 14A will be based on confirmed customer commitments. There are no more blank checks. Every investment must make economic sense. We will build what our customers need, when they need it"
https://newsroom.intel.com/corporate/lip-bu-tan-steps-in-the...
I hope they don’t can it.
Intel also designs its own chips. Thus, it's hard for fabless players to buy in without worrying about their IPs being stolen. One of the strengths of TSMC is they only make chips. They don't do anything else. TSMC is highly trusted by its customers.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture_family#Archit...
They have since spun off Altera but I imagine they’d still have a license.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture_family#Histor...
it's an interesting article
These two articles are popular for the details of that history. ARM dominates the second.
https://www.theregister.com/2012/05/02/unsung_heroes_of_tech...
https://www.theregister.com/2012/05/03/unsung_heroes_of_tech...
And the answer isn't clear. The fact that it's been given an Intel code name ("Deer Creek Falls") implies that it's an internal design, so presumably it's an easily-licensed/synthesized core like a Cortex X1 or whatnot. Certainly Intel isn't expected to be designing custom ARM hardware.
Is this related to the rumors of softbank (ARM) money injection in Intel?
Why should it be that? What are your arguments?
You can start on risc-v wikipedia page and/or on the official risc-v web site.
Why is Intel manufacturing an Arm SoC as a reference platform? Probably because it's trying to attract external customers, and there's a whole lot more companies building Arm SoCs than there are firms pitching x86-64 processors.
They're not trying to build the next best thing. They're trying to attract customers.
This real hard part is transitioning the software stack, including games...
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/amds-desktop...
They have 17% overall according to this chart which includes Apple.
https://www.accio.com/business/best-selling-cpus
Read up on this young startup, as I think they are going places!
Makes sense since they were once popular in the NUC space and Apple has shown high-end ARM has a market.
In the past I understand that they did some custom implementation of Xeon cores for hyperscalers, but the meat and potatoes was the chip they designed.
Do we take this to mean that the current leadership assess the value proposition -of Intel- to be in the /making/ of the chips, akin to TSMC, and not in the /designing/ of them, as in all past seasons at Intel?
I suppose a key factor here is how far from reference this chip is. If they mean to innovate in ARM ISA territory, that's a development to ponder. But if this is a "we can also make those things" statement, I'm hearing bears in the woods.
The custom designs for hyperscalars don’t count as external customers, they’re just part of Intels own production set.
And since nobody but AMD or VIA can make x86, it has to be ARM or other ISAs instead.
The article title is a bit clickbait since ARM is the eventuality of having external customers. The real key point is that they have made chips that aren’t their own at all.
The 80386 was the first use of standard cells for x86, which also introduced "automatic place and route" via a graduate student project named "Timberwolf."
No, why?
The world desperately needs a TSMC competitor.
No… Gelsinger laid all of this out very clearly. He wanted the design side of the house and the manufacturing side of the house to stand on their own. He didn’t want the design side relying solely on process to maintain performance leads, and he also wanted them to have the flexibility to use any fab should manufacturing fall behind.
In order for manufacturing to survive design potentially going to competitors for certain generations, they need to also support outside business.
https://www.intc.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1451/...
Part of Intel’s problem is their ‘P Core’ team absolutely sucked for a decade.
For anyone familiar with Chinese culture, history, and mindset, and who views China through that lens rather than a Western one, the probability of this is lower than the probability of Intel’s collapsing entirely in the next two years.
“Supreme excellence is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”
“Victory without unsheathing the blade.”
“If swords are clashing, strategy has already failed.”
Their plan is to invade. Or at least, that's a plan they are spending significant resources on because it's in the top five plans.
Nobody is going to be switching their ARM-based chip provider from TSMC or anyone else (with whom they've only just built up enough trust) to even thinking of changing.
Without a track record of delivery, intel is just there to be used in leverage with price negotiations with TSMC.
Own a bunch of AMD shares so cheering for them naturally...but we don't need a monopoly in CPU space.
dlojudice•5mo ago
mort96•5mo ago
And I don't understand why you'd want a dual-ISA x86 and ARM rather than just an x86 chip. You wouldn't get whatever CPU front-end simplicity advantages there are from ARM, since your front-end would get significantly more complex and consume significantly more transistors than with a normal x86 chip. And I don't think there's a market of people who want ARM for compatibility reason; any Windows software which supports ARM also supports x86.
What they could do is to release an ARM chip with a slightly extended ISA to add the select features which are difficult to emulate in software, such as loads and stores with the memory ordering guarantees x86 provides but ARM doesn't. Apple does this AFAIK, and it's one part of why Rosetta 2 is so good. But any ARM CPU maker could do this.
LoganDark•5mo ago
Look at Apple's Rosetta 2 for an example. M-series Apple Silicon has special undocumented modes that mirror x86 architectural quirks that don't usually exist in ARM, in order to support AOT-translated machine code. The chip doesn't support x86 instructions, but it has the amenities to support x86 code. That could be what "native x86 translation" meant?
cromka•5mo ago
LoganDark•5mo ago
mort96•5mo ago
astrange•5mo ago
https://threedots.ovh/blog/2021/02/cpus-with-sequential-cons...
murderfs•5mo ago
monocasa•5mo ago
bee_rider•5mo ago
I’m not saying I want this, but it might be surprisingly not totally impractical.
monocasa•5mo ago
dlojudice•5mo ago
Intel's unique position with x86 IP could make this feasible where others can't, but whether the engineering effort is worth it for what might be a short-term market advantage is debatable.