I wonder how this is possible? I imagine its partly due to manufacturing improvements (14nm vs 5nm) I mean how can Intel fall so far behind in only a couple years? I know they were one of the earliest investors in ASML’s EUV. Why couldn’t they push for smaller nodes? Is it because they were milking their current nodes too far? I saw them marketing freaking TEC’s to cool down their 500W Cpu gaming rigs on LTT and derbauer recently.
What made TSMC so successful? Is it primarily thanks to their business strategy? Or did Intel do something so wrong they tumbled down this far?
I know that Intel’s 10nm is closer to 7nm TSMC but still their competition is coming up with interesting and relevant technologies while Intel is like a junkyard of half baked ideas. 5g modems? Arduino competitor? Vaporware GPU’s since Larrabee? Claims of dominance in NN accelerators with nothing solid? Nirvana? Optane 600 series garbage SSDs? Stupid desktop computing form factor ideas? I can go on...
I don’t hate Intel or root for any other company. I’m just trying to understand how incompetence like this happens in companies
"What made TSMC so successful? Is it primarily thanks to their business strategy?"
Basically they are riding the new wave of cheap devices that outnumber the x86 devices by 10x 20x.
Basically everything uses an ARM CPU these days, not just tablets and phones, but microwaves, TVs, projectors, refrigerators, ovens, 3D printers...
That makes those devices extremely cheap on volume and make innovations to happen faster than o a single company like Intel, that was not interested on those low margin products.
Intel is far from incompetent, they just decided to get advantage of their monopoly position to reap as big profits and margins as they could get for the longest possible time, instead of cannibalizing themselves with lower margins.
And it was great for them. Their executives have done great. They have just ruled the semiconductor industry and wanted to enjoy it.
I suspect what Intel missed was that firms would be selling phones in very large volume for c$1000. That price includes enough margin to spend quite a lot on the SoC and associated research.
When the iPhone launched Steve Ballmer laughed [1] at the price and pushed a $99 competitor with MS software. The phone market was very, very different before the iPhone got real traction.
> Basically everything uses an ARM CPU these days, not just tablets and phones, but microwaves, TVs, projectors, refrigerators, ovens, 3D printers...
Most of these things are not on bleeding edge 5nm or 7nm process, though. Most microcontrollers are more like 90nm (e.g. STM32 up to F7 is 90nm; STM32H7 is 40nm... many smaller micros of the M0 variety are even 180nm...)
Basically, if you're not video processing, or a real computing device, or something power sensitive, 90nm is still a pretty sweet place to be-- ~$300k for a mask set, easy to have 5V tolerant I/O if that's something you need, high likelihood of common I/O and core voltage, &c.
Plus, if you are doing microcontrollers (cortex M) and not microprocessors (cortex A), the lower leakage current of >40 nm nodes is interesting. Batteries for infraed remotes last years, not days.
It's funny because this seems like a textbook case of the innovator's dilemma (from Clayton Christensen) in a nutshell - what worked for Intel was just working so well, that cannibalizing it with something new didn't make sense - until it was too late.
Ben Thompson on the latest Exponent[1]: "When you start out a company, you're walking around and you have complete freedom of movement. And then you get some processes in place, you get better at things, and now you're riding bike. And then you're driving a car. And eventually at some point, the best, most efficient companies are like bullet trains. They're so much faster than anybody else and so much more powerful and so much more efficient, it's like "how can I compete with that?" Well it's actually quite straightforward how you compete with it, you go somewhere there are no bullet train tracks."
Intel have tried time and time and time again to get away from x86; some of their efforts have been underwhelming (the i960) while others were genuinely radical and innovative (the iAXP 432), and others were at least interesting (the Itanium).
They tried a couple of times, but I wonder whether they tried hard enough. Admittedly, that the Itanium failed was partially AMDs fault, which breathed new life into x86 by their 64 bit extensions. But besides a slow start, Intel didn't seem to be in a hurry to push Itanium down the line and offer for example a cheap cpu+motherboard combo for enthusiasts. While Itanium for a while had a relatively large transistor count, by todays standards it is tiny, any smartphone cpu is way larger. The last Itanium was made in a 32nm process, imagine it in today 10nm. Especially with markets shifting, more computing in the cloud, Itanium based servers could be really strong, if Intel just would make them.
Also, Intel declined to make a cpu for the iPhone, dropped their own ARM line and also didn't get into fabbing for other companies when they still had a large lead in fab technology.
I do get the impression, Intel was far to happy selling x86 chips. Which worked and gave them lots of revenues, till they got stuck with the 10nm process. And of course while TSMC grew into the power it is today.
> Intel is far from incompetent, they just decided to get advantage of their monopoly position to reap as big profits and margins as they could get for the longest possible time
That sounds exactly like an incompetent strategy by being lazy ignoring possible competitors.
Nothing incompetent about making a fat profit. We'd like to imagine that companies should always innovate as hard as possible, but it's not always the winning strategy.
I think the point that they were trying to make is that sabotaging long term profits by maximizing short term profits is less profiterole over the long term. Which would make it incompetent for the company, but because of earlier cashing out, possibly not incompetent for the specific people making those decisions.
But Intel saw it coming when they're left out of the mobile market and ARM had been advancing rapidly for over a decade, not to mention x86 has been too old now.
That doesn't necessarily mean that there was a better path available to them. If Intel moved away from x86, a lot of their strategic advantages would disappear; they'd be one player among many, and they wouldn't have the vertical integration advantages of people actually making full ARM-based systems. Meanwhile there's plenty of money to be made from x86 for decades yet, from clients that put a high value on backward compatibility (which Apple don't, not in the same way - after all, they've done this twice already).
>If Intel moved away from x86, a lot of their strategic advantages would disappear; they'd be one player among many
They are in fact one player among many. Their strategic advantages have evaporated. The entire mobile space passed them by and now AMD is seriously threatening their x86 business. Something has clearly gone very wrong at Intel. Shareholders can't be happy about that.
True, but only a small minority of companies that went into that space made money on it. Any Intel mobile division could very easily have been the next Blackberry or Nokia. Staying out of that fight may well have been the best decision for their shareholders.
> AMD is seriously threatening their x86 business.
If they lose the profitable server segment to AMD then that's a serious problem, I'd agree with that. That's far from settled though.
I'm in no position to say but how about just make a division to develop ARM based CPU and take some part of the pie while keeping the x86 cash flow coming?
The conglomerate discount exists for a reason. People who want to invest in ARM know where to find it; it makes sense for Intel to stick to their strategic advantages.
Intel's current fab troubles are simply inexcusable. There are some factors that can account for part of the problem, but at this point Intel is 5+ years late on delivering a usable, profitable successor to their 14nm process. And 14nm got off to a slow, rocky start too. Intel's fab business has been horribly mismanaged, and the CPU design business has been forced to believe fab roadmaps that don't have any credibility.
Perhaps it is because all the latest Intel fabs are in the U.S. in Hillsboro, Oregon. Other foundries like TSMC benefit from the ecosystem and cheaper cost in East Asia ? i.e. they can afford to make more mistakes than Intel can if it is cheaper to do so.
I don't think cost of labor is a big factor here. Intel has no trouble maintaining a large enough workforce. They continually decided not to have parallel teams designing processors for their unproven 10nm and their successful 14nm nodes (or one team making a relatively portable design), even years after it was clear that 10nm was not going to work out as well as needed by their processor design roadmap. That wasn't for lack of staffing or inability to afford enough engineers. It was management hubris.
(On the other hand, I've often pointed out that Intel's attempts to develop two microarchitectures in parallel have always failed in the long run, with one project ending up woefully uncompetitive.)
Intel (or AMD for that matter who are using TSMC) isn't falling behind, it's just that geekbench is completely unrepresentative of real world performance across architectures, as Linus points out here[0] due to the test including hardware accelerated tasks that benefit specifically these modern arm chips.
>There’s been a lot of criticism about more common benchmark suites such as GeekBench, but frankly I've found these concerns or arguments to be quite unfounded. The only factual differences between workloads in SPEC and workloads in GB5 is that the latter has less outlier tests which are memory-heavy, meaning it’s more of a CPU benchmark whereas SPEC has more tendency towards CPU+DRAM.
In Geekbench5, they benchmark html5, SQLite reads, pdf rendering, text rendering etc. Seems somewhat relevant. They are providing an upper bound on this activity, and that’s good to know.
No idea but I suspect the "unified" on chip memory is very very quick.
Some friends and I were BSing about the "pro" level parts, it you can graft 2 or 4 M1s together, use off chip RAM and then treat that onboard 16GB like cache? We're talking about some game changing stuff.
The Xeon Phi had up to 16GB of fast memory in the same package as the main die. IIRC, it could be used as memory or as cache for external memory (which was much slower).
If Apple integrates two more memory chips, it'll be able to power a pretty solid desktop or laptop.
On the performance, Rosetta is most likely doing JIT so that most of the time it's running native ARM code. It did this with PPC binaries and DEC had it for Alpha.
We could also entertain the idea that if they would find some instruction particularly hard to emulate - they could have added new instructions on their own chip to cover it.
It is not on-chip memory, the dies are separate, they're just in the same package. They seem to use standard LPDDR4 connectivity, so I don't think its actually faster. The "unified" bit seems to matter more: having a single address space for both CPU & GPU, but this is pure speculation. I don't know if AMD or Intel APUs do this too.
The fact they are on the same package means that the electrical signals have a lot less far to travel from memory to cpu, and therefore you don’t have the signal losses or interference from the board having to route memory lines externally.
As a result you would be able to drive a higher bandwidth because you don’t need to be as limiting with the transfer time of signals.
Or you could use less power for the same speed. Hard to tell what Apple did, without some detailed benchmarks. I suppose one could bench memcpy and derive the clock rate from that.
It's unlikely you're going to transfer data any faster - they're using commodity drams like anyone else - they will however be able to save a clocks's worth of latency here and there which is useful
Didn’t Intel have a similar idea with Skylake? Those had very fast albeit smaller eDRAM die glued to the processor. It was dropped on subsequent generations.
It’s actually still surprisingly relevant in terms of performance [1], and I see it as a precursor to the gigantic caches we are seeing in the latest chips.
It might make sense to use very fast SSD as the main memory and on-chip RAM as cache. Huge amounts of RAM make only sense if your disks are slow or your workload actually needs the whole RAM which is rare.
>> I know they were one of the earliest investors in ASML’s EUV.
They may have been one of the earliest investors in EUV (along with TSMC, by the way), but in terms of adoption and roadmap they have been way behind both TSMC and Samsung. I don't know the exact numbers of machines but my educated guess is that TSMC and Samsung together probably have close to 10x the EUV wafer capacity compared to Intel. And have had it for much longer as well.
The problem Intel created for itself is that they have always had a very stubborn over-confidence in their own knowledge of process technology, and have driven tool manufacturers like ASML to work within Intels constraints, instead of working together to alleviate them. Their hubris has bitten them now that EUV has become economically viable compared to Intels process technology that relies heavily on triple and quadruple patterning, and very little of Intels 'old' process technology knowledge carries over to EUV.
TSMC has also had a lot of teething pains with EUV but they have been very determined to make it work, and that's paying off now.
> I don't know the exact numbers of machines but my educated guess is that TSMC and Samsung together probably have close to 10x the EUV wafer capacity compared to Intel.
There are currently zero EUV Wafer from Intel. Which means the answer to your question with would be close to infinite.
I'm pretty sure Intel has had some EUV tools installed for some time already, they're just not using them for any kind of HVM yet as they are ~3 years behind their own process technology roadmap by now.
> I mean how can Intel fall so far behind in only a couple years?
Arguably Intel has been falling behind since the delays in replacing Haswell (so, last six years or so). It just hasn’t been particularly visible, as the ARM vendors simply don’t compete in the same spaces, until now.
Though, in what might be an early sign in retrospect, x86 phone chips, after a lacklustre launch, vanished without a trace some years back.
There were some ex-Intel people commenting on a previous thread and they told about a lot if internal politics/fighting between inside groups. It might not be the main reason but part of it.
What made TSMC so successful? Is it primarily thanks to their business strategy? Or did Intel do something so wrong they tumbled down this far?
I know that Intel’s 10nm is closer to 7nm TSMC but still their competition is coming up with interesting and relevant technologies while Intel is like a junkyard of half baked ideas. 5g modems? Arduino competitor? Vaporware GPU’s since Larrabee? Claims of dominance in NN accelerators with nothing solid? Nirvana? Optane 600 series garbage SSDs? Stupid desktop computing form factor ideas? I can go on...
I don’t hate Intel or root for any other company. I’m just trying to understand how incompetence like this happens in companies