News Intel executive says spinning off manufacturing unit is an 'open question

[Admin]

Intel's co-CEO thinks that spinning off fabs is not a wise idea, but the actual decision will be made by 'someone.'

Intel executive says spinning off manufacturing unit is an 'open question : Read more

 

[expunged]

This data is incorrect. TSMC and Samsung are now producing 3-nm chips, while Intel is at the 5-nm mark. All three are racing to produce 2-nm chips by 2025. NO ONE has broken the 2nm mark yet, and i highly doubt it will happen in 2025 (at least for intel) as they are still working the TSMC chips For those still drinking the kool-aid, Intels 13th gen was on the 10nm ESF node.

 

[jp7189]

Spinning off the foundry side would be bad for the tech world... though I understand why bean counters would want to do it.

Its pretty clear IFS can't be profitable on their own.. at least not at the leading edge. Which means they'd either go the glo flo route and step back to mature processes only or rely entirely on US government funding.

While IFS is a boat anchor currently, they are also Intel's best shot at regaining a competitive advantage. If Intel design is on the same TSMC node, and paying the same costs as AMD, ARM designers, RISC V designers, then i don't see where's there's room in the CPU market for them down the road. The other teams are just too efficient and agile compared to Intel.

 

[3en88]

Spinning off the foundry side would be bad for the tech world... though I understand why bean counters would want to do it.

It's inevitable. The major chip designers likely won't hand their chip designs to their design competitor. There are trade secrets in those designs which intel can examine more easily if they're handed the full blueprint. Clients can and often do obfuscate the transistor logic to make it harder to reverse engineer (eg. sensitive parts like backdoors) but there is a performance and efficiency cost to it.