News Intel might be too big to fail — Washington policymakers are already discussing potential solutions if the chipmaker cannot recover

[Admin]

American lawmakers are setting up backup plans to support Intel if it fails.

Intel might be too big to fail — Washington policymakers are already discussing potential solutions if the chipmaker cannot recover : Read more

 

[NinoPino]

After this news Pat should immediately increase his salary and restore dividends.

 

[umeng2002_2]

Don't make STEM degrees easier to afford. Don't pay to train workers in America. Don't stimulate science and technology education and careers. Just hand out money to a multi-billion dollar corporation who look overseas for workers and manufacturing. Washington DC at it's finest.

With a robust technology industry in America, having leading edge chip manufacturing in America wouldn't be like pulling teeth. Too big to fail is code for your country has already failed because there isn't marketplace competition.

 

[ezst036]

CHIPS act 2 incoming - followed by CHIPS 3

More bailouts for billionaires and kickbacks for lobbyists

 

[derekullo]

The biggest reason Intel is failing is because it is hard to create those chips at such nanoscopic angscopic? scales.
A silicon atom is only 2.1 angstroms in size and 18 angstroms is less than a single order of magnitude larger.
TSMC hasn't had nearly as many problems as Intel, but eventually going smaller will be physically impossible.

 

[tommo1982]

Current Intel situation is a good thing. It forces internal changes, which it seems were long overdue. What is worrying is stock and press foolishness. Let the company stand on its own feet. It's stupid to allow it to be sold to some other entity. Perhaps merger or closer ties with AMD might be required. Whatever comes, I don't see Intel going bankrupt, not if they see what brought them where they are.

 

[Gururu]

An intelligent article concerning a looming national security nightmare. Right now, Intel is probably the only relatively secure major IP holder for CPU chip design the U.S. has. Everyone else sending IP to Taiwan, which is like 10 feet from China.

 

[bit_user]

sources say policymakers are shying away from lump sum bailout payments as the White House did for Chrysler and General Motors in 2008.

The author is either trolling or being very sloppy. Those were loans, and they got repaid.
@JarredWaltonGPU Jowi isn't trolling, is he?

The design side of Intel is fine. It's profitable, even. In a pinch, Intel will find a buyer for its fabs and continue to design CPUs, GPUs, and AI chips.

The fabs are the big concern, because it's the last leading-edge US-owned foundry. The Department of Commerce should simply ensure that whomever ends up with them is US-based and committed to continuing to invest in new nodes. If government-backed loans are needed to facilitate that, I think it's a worthwhile insurance policy to mitigate against over-dependence on Asian fabs.

 

[bit_user]

Right now, Intel is probably the only relatively secure major IP holder for CPU chip design the U.S. has. Everyone else sending IP to Taiwan, which is like 10 feet from China.

Apparently, you didn't hear that Intel's latest consumer CPUs (Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake) are also being manufactured by TSMC. So, Intel has now joined the club of designers "sending IP to Taiwan".

That said, you're apparently under the mistaken impression that what a fab receives is of much use to competing chip designers. It's not. Trying to reverse engineer a design from those masks is worse than trying to disassemble the binary code that ends up on your machine, when you install a piece of software. It's effectively impossible.

 

[bit_user]

Let the company stand on its own feet. It's stupid to allow it to be sold to some other entity.

They might need to do something, in order to gain access to the finances necessary to continue developing the foundry business. If they're unable to borrow money to make the necessary investments, then all new fab buildouts and manufacturing technology development would promptly grind to a halt and the fabs would just continue to make products on their existing nodes, as long as that much remains profitable.

Whatever comes, I don't see Intel going bankrupt, not if they see what brought them where they are.

The world is changing. Semiconductor fabrication is massively more expensive than it used to be. Intel's biggest customers and markets are all splintering and turning away from x86. Apple is no longer an Intel customer. China is turning inward, for its CPU needs. Much of the enterprise IT sector has migrated to the cloud, which is in turn migrating to ARM. A lot of the remaining datacenter x86 market is going to AMD.

So far, desktops and laptops are still a strong market for Intel, but maybe next year will finally be when Windows-on-ARM cracks the corporate PC market?

So, you tell me: what do you do when your costs start increasing and your customers all begin to scatter?

 

[bit_user]

CHIPS act 2 incoming - followed by CHIPS 3

More bailouts for billionaires and kickbacks for lobbyists

CHIPS has specific provisions to avoid the funds flowing through to investors' pockets. It's meant as an investment in technology and infrastructure, not a giveaway. It was actually a pretty well-crafted bit of legislation and doesn't deserve to get dragged through the mud, like this.

This knee-jerk, uninformed cynicism is pretty lame.

 

[Gururu]

Apparently, you didn't hear that Intel's latest consumer CPUs (Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake) are also being manufactured by TSMC. So, Intel has now joined the club of designers "sending IP to Taiwan".

That said, you're apparently under the mistaken impression that what a fab receives is of much use to competing chip designers. It's not. Trying to reverse engineer a design from those masks is worse than trying to disassemble the binary code that ends up on your machine, when you install a piece of software. It's effectively impossible.

Temporary and limited in scope. Nothing is impossible with high stakes like this. How do you think so many countries developed nuclear weapons without U.S. or Russia state sponsored outreach?

 

[NinoPino]

An intelligent article concerning a looming national security nightmare. Right now, Intel is probably the only relatively secure major IP holder for CPU chip design the U.S. has. Everyone else sending IP to Taiwan, which is like 10 feet from China.

Sure, Intel is the only one that do not use Taiwan to produce CPUs.

 

[bit_user]

Temporary and limited in scope. Nothing is impossible with high stakes like this. How do you think so many countries developed nuclear weapons without U.S. or Russia state sponsored outreach?

This is an insane argument, because the premise is invalid. Fabbing something at TSMC doesn't give them the information needed to replicate elements of the design, in any meaningful sense.

Furthermore, your counterargument is itself a contradiction. If you're using the analogy of nuclear weapons, then once a country has the information to build one, they're basically self-sufficient. So, if there were any basis for your concerns, the analogy should suggest that once the masks for Intel's latest & greatest CPU cores are out there, then (presumably China) could immediately catch up and wouldn't even need a continual feed, since they would then be self-sufficient.

But, again, you have no idea what you're talking about. Try learning even the most basic facts about semiconductor design and manufacturing, before stoking such paranoia.

 

[NinoPino]

Temporary and limited in scope. Nothing is impossible with high stakes like this. How do you think so many countries developed nuclear weapons without U.S. or Russia state sponsored outreach?

Because physics rules are the same all over the world ?

 

[bit_user]

Sure, Intel is the only one that do not use Taiwan to produce CPUs.

You're joking, right? Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake are entirely made on TSMC, and only the base and packaging are done by Intel!

https://www.pcmag.com/news/intel-signals-arrow-lake-desktop-cpus-will-be-built-mainly-using-tsmc
​

You read this site more than enough to know that!

 

[tommo1982]

They might need to do something, in order to gain access to the finances necessary to continue developing the foundry business. If they're unable to borrow money to make the necessary investments, then all new fab buildouts and manufacturing technology development would promptly grind to a halt and the fabs would just continue to make products on their existing nodes, as long as that much remains profitable.


The world is changing. Semiconductor fabrication is massively more expensive than it used to be. Intel's biggest customers and markets are all splintering and turning away from x86. Apple is no longer an Intel customer. China is turning inward, for its CPU needs. Much of the enterprise IT sector has migrated to the cloud, which is in turn migrating to ARM. A lot of the remaining datacenter x86 market is going to AMD.

So far, desktops and laptops are still a strong market for Intel, but maybe next year will finally be when Windows-on-ARM cracks the corporate PC market?

So, you tell me: what do you do when your costs start increasing and your customers all begin to scatter?

I'm concerned that "something" will be forced, not besomething that's right for Intel. Intel is in dire situation, yes, but I am not the one to say what they should do. A crisis in a compang is always seen as bad thing, which is not. It shows there was something wrong to beging with and it's up to the company concerned to work things out (knowing corporate cuture, the voices of reason rarely are heard). Unfortunately what is right and profit are not synonymous and with current political pressure Intel is an entity others are sharpening their teeth to sink into, so to speek. Whatever comes it's not to our benefit.

 

[thestryker]

The problem isn't Intel failing so much as it is Intel cutting off the money sink that is fabrication. So long as progress is being made on the foundry side it's in everyone's best interest to make sure it doesn't get divested until it's self sustainable. 18A is absolutely going to determine the fate of fabrication.

I do think Intel can make foundry service work as a subsidiary, but they should absolutely be continually reaching out to the volume players to find out concerns. While I doubt there's anything that would stop a huge company from using whatever the best leading edge node is silicon is increasingly not being fabbed on leading edge.

In an ideal world we wouldn't even be worried about it yet because investors would have understood the business they invested in and allowed Pat's plan they supposedly believed in play out before panicking.

 

[hotaru251]

If a company (or bank) is going to fail and needs GOV cash then the Gov should obtain half of the company as they prvent it from goign entirely away.

Gov should not be responsible for other companies bad business choices w/o gettign a very lucrative deal out of it.

 

[abufrejoval]

I sure hope they don't apply this type of logic to individuals like Mr. Musk!

He should have had taken certain things from his hands long ago.

Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absoluetely.

 

[umeng2002_2]

Yes. Intel is falling behind because a decade or so ago Intel thought it would be better to cut research and/ or not set good enough goals. This is typical institutional decline. Blame the managers of the company, and the end of the day, the Board of Directors. CEOs are not kings of their companies. The Board is.

I think if they just ate into their profit margins and launched on not-ideal yields, they would probably have just worked it out and been as competitive as TSMC. But the Board wanted certain profit margins, damn the future of the company. This is why public companies can be a bad thing. Steam is private, has FU money, and an FU owner, Gaben Claus. They are still on the cutting edge of content delivery.

 

[plutarchheavensbee62]

Maybe instead of talking about all of the extra money they need to give they can start by giving the Chips act money that Intel was depending on in the first place instead of tying it up with oversight committees that are setting up obstacles for payment that have nothing to do with chip manufacturing? What a bureaucratic mess.

 

[kjfatl]

The biggest reason Intel is failing is because it is hard to create those chips at such nanoscopic angscopic? scales.
A silicon atom is only 2.1 angstroms in size and 18 angstroms is less than a single order of magnitude larger.
TSMC hasn't had nearly as many problems as Intel, but eventually going smaller will be physically impossible.

Intel's 18a process has metal pitch in the order of 150a. The naming comes from Intel realigning their process names to be in line with the names used by TSMC, Samsung and others.
Intel fell apart when the Wall Street bean counters took over and got rid of the old expensive engineers, replacing them with PhD wizards who supposedly knew more than the old crusty engineers that made huge profits for decades.
The mess at Intel is forcing them to abandon the fiefdoms like home brewed layout tools that were past their prime and incompatible with the rest of the industry. If Intel can survive 3 more years, they will be fine for at least a decade.

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

Intel's biggest issues are that they don't have a track record nearly as long as TSMCs and Samsung's, and their Forevos packaging may need to be accounted for vs the others as well. When delays and shortages can result in the losses of millions, if not billions, of dollars, there's no incentive for companies to go all in with IFS for some time.

As far as a merger is concerned, I wonder if the dark horse in the room is Texas Instruments? They're an American company with a very reliable track record and produces of tens of billions of chips a year. Perhaps if IFS were spun off from Intel it'd be something like a 50/40/10 ownership between TI, Apollo, and Intel.

 

[-Fran-]

The author is either trolling or being very sloppy. Those were loans, and they got repaid.
@JarredWaltonGPU Jowi isn't trolling, is he?

The design side of Intel is fine. It's profitable, even. In a pinch, Intel will find a buyer for its fabs and continue to design CPUs, GPUs, and AI chips.

The fabs are the big concern, because it's the last leading-edge US-owned foundry. The Department of Commerce should simply ensure that whomever ends up with them is US-based and omitted to continuing to invest in new nodes. If government-backed loans are needed to facilitate that, I think it's a worthwhile insurance policy to mitigate against over-dependence on Asian fabs.

Weeeell... It's not entirely wrong. A Loan to a Company that has zero chance of getting one via Banks or other "normal" means does qualify to be catalogued as a "bailout".

It's both tongue-in-cheek and semantics, but unfortunately for GM, the term applies I'd say. I'm not sure if it applies just yet for Intel, though.

Regards.