- Aug 4, 2008
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Intel has a lot of fab issues, which appears to be giving them indigestion throughout their product design pipeline. It seems like all options are on the table to solve the problem, with a decision possibly coming as soon as early 2021, including using external foundries. But of course nobody has the spare capacity to make all of Intel's new products, and Intel can't afford to idle all of their fabs anyway.
The obvious solution is to develop/buy/license/sell all the engineers' souls for the recipe for a state of the art process. Let's say they managed to do this. How easy would it be to reconfigure their fabs for the new process, and how long would you expect this to take?
By the way, what are the institutional issues that led to Intel manufacturing slipping in such a major way? Prior to 14nm these guys were kicking ass and taking names. 14 nm was late but 14+++++ products still competes favorably with TSMC 7nm in limited ways. It's easy to say "they were on top, and so nobody innovated". That's certainly true on the design front (nobody wants to make a clean sheet chip design if the previous one is still the best), but on the manufacturing side, the need of a better process every 2 years should have been obvious to everyone, even in the C-suite. Does anyone have any insight?
The obvious solution is to develop/buy/license/sell all the engineers' souls for the recipe for a state of the art process. Let's say they managed to do this. How easy would it be to reconfigure their fabs for the new process, and how long would you expect this to take?
By the way, what are the institutional issues that led to Intel manufacturing slipping in such a major way? Prior to 14nm these guys were kicking ass and taking names. 14 nm was late but 14+++++ products still competes favorably with TSMC 7nm in limited ways. It's easy to say "they were on top, and so nobody innovated". That's certainly true on the design front (nobody wants to make a clean sheet chip design if the previous one is still the best), but on the manufacturing side, the need of a better process every 2 years should have been obvious to everyone, even in the C-suite. Does anyone have any insight?