News Intel outlines a plan to get back in the game — pause fab projects in Europe, make the foundry unit an independent subsidiary, and streamline the x...

[Admin]

Intel reviews its projects and product plans as part of the turnaround plan introduced in August.

Intel outlines a plan to get back in the game — pause fab projects in Europe, make the foundry unit an independent subsidiary, and streamline the x... : Read more

 

[Marlin1975]

Seems this is more about moving the chairs on the deck as the ship sinks.

May fool some investor's but does not change anything of substance.

 

[JamesJones44]

Seems this is more about moving the chairs on the deck as the ship sinks.

May fool some investor's but does not change anything of substance.

I'm not sure I would call splitting into two companies just moving chairs. Intel sheds the responsibility of producing chips and just becomes a design house just like AMD. Intel Foundry or whatever it ends up being called will not slave to whatever Intel wants.

How that works out is anyones guess, but it's more than just shifting assets around and saying we're new.

 

[Jimbojan]

Intel's revenue is better than AMD's, it makes more money than most the companies. The only problem Intel has now is to invest heavily, because the foundry, but the investment is not lost, these investment values will be able to recover when Intel uses its foundry to make the chips for itself and for customers.

 

[thestryker]

I don't think any of this is meant to be revolutionary, but rather an explanation of what is going on and signs for the future. Intel needed to officially announce an external design win for 18A pretty badly so that's a big deal for the foundry side. While there aren't any huge guarantees with the AWS deal it gives them a good opportunity to show publicly what they can deliver.

I fully expect "investors" to really push short term hard which tends to undermine long term success so delaying the European fabs as opposed to canceling was a welcome surprise. Building a foundry business requires fab space which Intel doesn't really have enough of, but it also requires customers to fill them. Hopefully the delay doesn't put them too far behind the curve though with ASML's rate of production on High-NA machines it also might not be an issue if they are targeting 14A.

Moving edge and auto over to client seemed weird, but I think it's probably mostly a sign of the marketing layoffs. It's likely this was solely done for cost cutting measures.

Hopefully the real estate changes aren't of the "we'll sell the property and lease" variety that idiot investors love pushing for to get those short term gains, but I won't be holding my breath on that one.

 

[why_wolf]

Basically they are doing the prep work to sell the foundry business. You always spin a division off as fully separate subsidiary first to get the books clean. Then you sell it.

Short term this might make sense to Wall Street investors. Long term this is Intel giving up on the ability to ever have a technologically superior product to anyone else as they will all be using TSMC which puts the same ceiling on anything they design.

From a government and industry perspective it is vastly more important that Intel Foundry survives, not Intel Design.

 

[thestryker]

Basically they are doing the prep work to sell the foundry business. You always spin a division off as fully separate subsidiary first to get the books clean. Then you sell it.

This is absolutely the way things usually go, but there is something to be said for making the lines very clear from a public perception stance. I hope this is the anomaly where the reason they're doing it is for the perception shift as I don't think it can stand as a leading edge foundry on its own any time soon.

The Tower deal falling through was a huge blow and the new "12nm" node with UMC won't be online until 2027. We won't know about the full cost/benefit of High-NA machines until probably 2027 at the earliest. There are simply too many variables until probably the next decade.

 

[bit_user]

I'm really worried what this could mean for their dGPUs.

Also, it seems like a big lift to keep their datacenter GPUs (e.g. Falcon Shores) alive, given their datacenter AI strategy seems centered around Habana/Gaudi. That leaves Falcon Shores as something of a HPC-specific product, which doesn't seem like a market that's been doing very well for Intel, lately.

 

[Root Canal]

Intel should first use its own fabs for all its major client and serve tiles. Credibility, customers and revenue will follow.

 

[joeer77]

Intel took too long to adopt EUV lithography. They pushed FinFETs too long. There is where they went wrong.

TSMC and Samsung are making gate all around logic chips for some time. Get with the program Intel or get crushed. Start taking risks again. Accept some lower wafer yields. Accept lower margins.

 

[thestryker]

Intel took too long to adopt EUV lithography.

This is correct.

They pushed FinFETs too long...

TSMC and Samsung are making gate all around logic chips for some time.

This is not correct as there are zero volume production nodes today using GAAFET.

 

[bit_user]

This is not correct as there are zero volume production nodes today using GAAFET.

Really? I thought Samsung was set to be first with a GAAFET node. Did it hit delays?

Also, why don't you count 20A as a GAAFET node, or are we certain that even Arrow Lake isn't using it?

 

[thestryker]

Really? I thought Samsung was set to be first with a GAAFET node. Did it hit delays?

Yeah they "finished" it a two years ago, but there has been nothing complex identified as actually being volume produced using it and word has been nothing but atrocious yields. Pretty sure the first Exynos using their 3nm were just announced this year with the W1000 probably being the first of the more complex to come out of it and then the 2500 series. So I suppose those would classify as volume production using GAAFET.

Also, why don't you count 20A as a GAAFET node, or are we certain that even Arrow Lake isn't using it?

I'm approaching it from the standpoint of until there's a product on the market it may as well not exist sort of thing, but you're definitely right.

 

[watzupken]

I'm not sure I would call splitting into two companies just moving chairs. Intel sheds the responsibility of producing chips and just becomes a design house just like AMD. Intel Foundry or whatever it ends up being called will not slave to whatever Intel wants.

How that works out is anyones guess, but it's more than just shifting assets around and saying we're new.

At face value, it sounds like 2 companies since they said the P and L are separate. But it sounds to me more like they don't want to hammer Intel's shares the next time they report their financial positions because their foundry business continues to bleed heavily and becoming a heavy burden. Ultimately, the foundry business is still directly reporting to the CEO of Intel and if it tanks, it also means that Intel's investment in the foundry business is gone.

 

[watzupken]

Basically they are doing the prep work to sell the foundry business. You always spin a division off as fully separate subsidiary first to get the books clean. Then you sell it.

Short term this might make sense to Wall Street investors. Long term this is Intel giving up on the ability to ever have a technologically superior product to anyone else as they will all be using TSMC which puts the same ceiling on anything they design.

From a government and industry perspective it is vastly more important that Intel Foundry survives, not Intel Design.

I feel the spin off is just to clean their books so that the foundry business don't become a drag to the entire Intel entity. I am not so sure about selling it here because after taking a bunch of government money of late, it is hard to say you are not going to deliver something. Moreover, the foundry business itself is not even in a good state for any US companies to consider taking over this burden. Only Intel wanted to aggressively expand this business because their chip business is under severe threat.

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

I'm not sure I would call splitting into two companies just moving chairs. Intel sheds the responsibility of producing chips and just becomes a design house just like AMD. Intel Foundry or whatever it ends up being called will not slave to whatever Intel wants.

How that works out is anyones guess, but it's more than just shifting assets around and saying we're new.

Pat stated he wants to make it a "Independent Subsidiary".

That's just shuffling the decks, as long as they are under the same ownership, nothing about IFS can be trusted.

If they want to compete with TSMC at the highest level, it must become 100% Fully Spun Off, just like "GlobalFoundries" was spun off when AMD sold them outright.

If they're in the Corporate Ownership chain, no matter if it's vertical, horizontal, Tree Style, etc,...
there can be 0% trust from the vast majority of clients to IFS.

The chances of IFS leaking info to the design team is too great and it's not the same level of seperation that TSMC has proven to abide by.

The ONLY practical way for IFS to succeed as a Contract Manufacturer is to follow TSMC and become a Manufacturing ONLY company and have ZERO Design teams to compete with ANY customers.

As long as their is a chip design team within the ownership structure, there can NEVER / EVER be any trust between most commercial partners and IFS / Intel.

 

[hotaru251]

imagine the $ they could save if they started to cut the executives pay until they turn it around

 

[thestryker]

That's just shuffling the decks, as long as they are under the same ownership, nothing about IFS can be trusted.

If they want to compete with TSMC at the highest level, it must become 100% Fully Spun Off, just like "GlobalFoundries" was spun off when AMD sold them outright.

If they're in the Corporate Ownership chain, no matter if it's vertical, horizontal, Tree Style, etc,...
there can be 0% trust from the vast majority of clients to IFS.

The chances of IFS leaking info to the design team is too great and it's not the same level of seperation that TSMC has proven to abide by.

The ONLY practical way for IFS to succeed as a Contract Manufacturer is to follow TSMC and become a Manufacturing ONLY company and have ZERO Design teams to compete with ANY customers.

As long as their is a chip design team within the ownership structure, there can NEVER / EVER be any trust between most commercial partners and IFS / Intel.

Can you just stop with this nonsense? You repeatedly say it all the time despite people explaining why this is a nonsensical stance to take. Doing what you describe would kill Intel's foundry business pretty much immediately given how they've never done leading edge contracting before. All you have to do for an example of this is look at what happened with the accusations by Apple towards Samsung and the lasting damage that did. Not to mention how little of an advantage any of this information would be to Intel's design team. It has been mentioned before that pretty much the only advantage Intel could hope to glean is potentially knowing what a competitor is bringing to the market earlier than they might otherwise.

All Intel really needs to do for prospective customers is show how the two operate separately as their own entities.

 

[JRStern]

Just so 18a works, and yields.

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

Can you just stop with this nonsense? You repeatedly say it all the time despite people explaining why this is a nonsensical stance to take.

How is it non-sensical?

The #1 reason they don't trust the current Intel is the leaking of ANY information from the Fab side to the Design side.

Doing what you describe would kill Intel's foundry business pretty much immediately given how they've never done leading edge contracting before.

And stealing information or tech that could give Intel ANY sort of advantage would immediately benefit them and they can delay any damages from lawsuits by delaying it for god knows how many decades.

We only need to see actual Anti-Trust history to know how slow the courts move.

All you have to do for an example of this is look at what happened with the accusations by Apple towards Samsung and the lasting damage that did. Not to mention how little of an advantage any of this information would be to Intel's design team.

BS, any knowledge of what a competitor is doing could easily guide their design teams to a more advantageous design for their own gains.

You know how Intel cheated and stiffled AMD back in the day when AMD was ahead with the Athlon family.

AMD couldn't even give away AMD CPU's to Dell, they were literally Bought/Paid for by Intel to ignore AMD. That's the kind of dirty tactics that Intel plays. They do whatever they can to prevent AMD from gaining marketshare, including rigging the Tier 1 PC vendors to not buy AMD if possible.

You don't think Intel won't take ANY/ALL advantages by knowing what a competitor is doing and swoop in on their business? You're naive if you think that isn't the case.

Splitting Intel’s Fabs From Its Design Business Now Doesn’t Make Sense

Intel is facing intense competitive pressure and needs time to complete its turnaround under CEO Pat Gelsinger. It's a bad moment for a spinoff of its foundry business.

www.forbes.com

The Potential Upside Of A Freestanding Intel Foundry Business​

The only thing Intel stands to gain from this split is the chance that an independent foundry business could bring in new customers that compete with Intel products—and that don’t trust Intel’s design side not to snoop on their own chip designs.




AMD and Qualcomm are at the head of this list. I believe that if Intel’s new 18A process node is as strong as Intel says—and the defect density numbers do look good so far—AMD might need to adopt it. At least, that could happen if AMD can’t get the second-sourcing foundry capacity it needs from Samsung as we see TSMC continuing to raise prices. Mind you that AMD really will need a second source for production capacity to match its ambitions, which I recently discussed in the context of AMD’s planned acquisition of ZT Systems.


Meanwhile, Qualcomm has a strong tendency to go with the best available production technology wherever it’s available, so Intel’s more advanced 14A process node might be a fit—though it’s also likely more than a year away from production. It’s worth remembering that Qualcomm contracted with Samsung in an arrangement like this for a few production cycles. Qualcomm also multi-sources its RF across many vendors. But Qualcomm doesn’t have any reason to trust Intel if a fab spinoff is essentially a tracking stock; it would have to be a genuine split into a fully independent foundry company.


I will add that Intel 14A is likely a more appropriate node for mobile SoCs. 18A does have a low-power flow, but I’m not hearing anything positive for smartphone or IoT mobility. If Intel announces a smartphone SoC or IoT vendor as a customer, my opinion would change. There is promising news out of Intel about 18A. Intel’s AI PC client processor (Panther Lake) and its server processor (Clearwater Forest), are out of the fab and have powered on and booted operating systems. Additionally, Intel announced that the first external customer tapeouts are coming in the first half of 2025. Microsoft is one of those, and I am guessing it is for Maia, its homegrown datacenter AI accelerator.


Keep in mind that any scenarios with AMD, Qualcomm and other potential foundry customers beyond what’s already been announced are hypotheticals. There could be a future in which Intel Foundry picks up more new and sizable customers like these, but that future would look very different from the status quo. Today, Intel Foundry mostly produces Intel’s own chips; there aren’t many other customers, at least so far.

Even Forbes Article writers have similar doubts as I do about Intel's lack of seperation with it's Foundary Business.

It has been mentioned before that pretty much the only advantage Intel could hope to glean is potentially knowing what a competitor is bringing to the market earlier than they might otherwise.

That knowledge is HUGELY invaluable.

All Intel really needs to do for prospective customers is show how the two operate separately as their own entities.

You can't do that when you're playing shuffle the cards.

It'll never be truly seperate until they're 100% sold off and forced to Feast/Famine under their own w/o Intel's Design team.

If AMD can survive while spinning off GlobalFoundries, there's really no real excuse why Intel can't do the same.

 

[thestryker]

How is it non-sensical?

The #1 reason they don't trust the current Intel is the leaking of ANY information from the Fab side to the Design side.

You are literally just making this up based on no facts just your feelings.

And stealing information or tech that could give Intel ANY sort of advantage would immediately benefit them and they can delay any damages from lawsuits by delaying it for god knows how many decades.

We only need to see actual Anti-Trust history to know how slow the courts move.

You clearly have no clue how design works of you're spouting this stupidity still. CPU design is usually known quantity + 2 generations at minimum. Nobody can just turn and redesign based on some esoteric knowledge gained from an overview of someone else's technology.

This also isn't antitrust it's intellectual property theft which is taken rather seriously.

BS, any knowledge of what a competitor is doing could easily guide their design teams to a more advantageous design for their own gains.

How? Please explain how in reality this would work.

You know how Intel cheated and stiffled AMD back in the day when AMD was ahead with the Athlon family.

AMD couldn't even give away AMD CPU's to Dell, they were literally Bought/Paid for by Intel to ignore AMD. That's the kind of dirty tactics that Intel plays. They do whatever they can to prevent AMD from gaining marketshare, including rigging the Tier 1 PC vendors to not buy AMD if possible.

You don't think Intel won't take ANY/ALL advantages by knowing what a competitor is doing and swoop in on their business? You're naive if you think that isn't the case.

That had literally nothing to do with IP or technology in any way. That was a pure illegal pay to play scheme that they got nailed for. I'm merely smart enough to understand that companies will do what's beneficial to them, but not what will kill their own business.

That knowledge is HUGELY invaluable.

No it really isn't. The time from production to launch is short enough that even if they were to engage in this sort of stupidity the gain would be minimal maybe a quarter tops.

You can't do that when you're playing shuffle the cards.

It'll never be truly seperate until they're 100% sold off and forced to Feast/Famine under their own w/o Intel's Design team.

Yeah you really can, and Samsung does it all the time (they're the second largest in the world if you weren't aware). Thankfully your feelings don't dictate how the industry works.

If AMD can survive while spinning off GlobalFoundries, there's really no real excuse why Intel can't do the same.

Intel isn't the questionmark here smart guy it's the foundry services. How's GloFo doing these days for leading edge? Oh yeah they aren't because they ditched 7nm when they were spun off because it cost money. Now they're relegated to older/custom nodes which are important, but nowhere near as important as breaking the existing monopoly on leading edge.

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

You are literally just making this up based on no facts just your feelings.

How TSMC convinced Apple it would be a trustworthy partner, landing the Taiwan company its most significant semiconductor contract to date

Operational Secrecy are the literal Life-Blood of a company.

“I don’t think Apple could ever really trust Samsung,” TSMC’s former general counsel, Richard Thurston, told me over the phone last week.


Back in 2011, Apple was reliant on its rival smartphone maker, Samsung, for manufacturing the iPhone’s most cutting-edge processor chips. But the two companies were also locked in a bitter feud over patent infringements.


Apple accused Samsung of copying design features from the iPhone—features Samsung could have gotten wise to through its manufacturing work—and sued the Korean electronics maker. In 2012, a U.S. court ruled in Apple’s favor and awarded the company $1 billion in damages. But Samsung appealed the ruling and kicked the issue back to the courts, where the case stretched on for seven years until it was settled out of court in 2018. In the meantime, Apple had to find a manufacturer it could trust to replace its rival.


Enter Foxconn founder and CEO, Terry Gou, who had a suggestion for his partners at Apple.


“Really the impetus, as I recall, for Apple and TSMC coming together was Terry Gou recommending to [TSMC founder] Morris Chang and Apple that the two companies should talk,” Thurston says.


By 2011, Foxconn had already established itself as a reliable partner to Apple, as the assembler of iPhones. The Taiwanese company’s founder and CEO, Gou, is also a compatriot and family friend of TSMC founder, Chang.


According to Thurston, Gou even sat in on some initial negotiations between TSMC and Apple, which were quickly elevated to the executive level, with future Apple COO Jeff Williams and future CEO Tim Cook attending at different times. Thurston says establishing those high-level, executive relationships early on was integral to developing trust between the two companies.


By putting its key people in the room, TSMC demonstrated its commitment to a “long-term relationship” with Apple, Thurston says, and assured Apple’s management that the manufacturer was taking Apple’s concerns seriously.


Once the introductions had been made, then came the more practical aspect of building trust: demonstrating competence.


“I don’t think TSMC’s manufacturing skills were ever in doubt,” Thurston says. “But Apple had serious concerns about corporate leaks, and it was because of the strength of TSMC’s trade secret protections that I think Apple really decided to go with us.”



Thurston helped implement many of TSMC’s airtight IP-protection protocols. Employees, customers, and suppliers all sign nondisclosure agreements when working with TSMC. The company’s 16 manufacturing sites in Taiwan are all firewalled from each other, preventing hackers from finding a singular point of access to steal designs. To prevent more low-tech theft, the printer paper in some fabs is lined with metallic strips that activate airport-style gate sensors at the exits if an employee tries to leave with notes in their pocket.


“We were doing things even Apple wasn’t doing,” Thurston says.


By 2013, Apple was satisfied enough with TSMC’s practices that the iPhone maker decided to split its chip manufacturing orders between Samsung and TSMC. It was a test, sort of like “kicking the tires,” Thurston says. Of course, TSMC passed with flying colors and, soon after, became the sole manufacturer of processor chips for Apple’s iPhones and iPads.


Scoring the Apple contract was a game changer for TSMC, helping balloon the company’s share price 600% from 2011 to today. Apple now accounts for roughly 23% of TSMC’s business and, in return, Apple has secured preferred customer status at the world’s largest and most advanced contract chip manufacturer.


“It was very special in my mind, you know, the TSMC and Apple relationship,” Thurston says. “It’s not just something you could create on paper. The relationships between key personalities were essential.”

Apple literally jumped ship from Samsung to TSMC because of Secrecy Issues & Samsung dragging the lawsuits out in court.

Notice how Apple Leaks are far fewer in the recent years compared to the earlier years when it was under Samsung.

You clearly have no clue how design works of you're spouting this stupidity still. CPU design is usually known quantity + 2 generations at minimum. Nobody can just turn and redesign based on some esoteric knowledge gained from an overview of someone else's technology.

Yet Intel's 13th & 14th Gen was literally Copied, Pasted, & rushed out of the fabs in 1 years design time.
If they didn't bungle up the design, it would've been an amazing accomplishment.
But we're seeing the fruits of their incompetence with the Chip Degradation & Instability issues.

This also isn't antitrust it's intellectual property theft which is taken rather seriously.

Both are equally important.

How? Please explain how in reality this would work.

https://www.nytimes.com/1997/05/14/business/suit-by-digital-says-intel-stole-pentium-design.html

Intel stealing Patents or implementing others patented technology that goes undiscovered for quite a while.

VLSI is the most recent case.

That had literally nothing to do with IP or technology in any way. That was a pure illegal pay to play scheme that they got nailed for. I'm merely smart enough to understand that companies will do what's beneficial to them, but not what will kill their own business.

Yet Dell still snubs AMD to this day. I'm pretty sure Intel has ALOT to do with that.
nVIDIA also got MSI to back away from AMD's Radeon GPU's as well.
They still participate in these illegal pay to play schemes.
MS continues to not use AMD chips in their Surface lineup. Guess who benefits, Intel.

No it really isn't. The time from production to launch is short enough that even if they were to engage in this sort of stupidity the gain would be minimal maybe a quarter tops.

Or it could be far more, just look at how Digital went out of business and Intel managed to outlive them & steal from them at the same time.

Yeah you really can, and Samsung does it all the time (they're the second largest in the world if you weren't aware). Thankfully your feelings don't dictate how the industry works.

I know they're the 2nd Largest in the World, and Apple left because of IP / Design theft.
Luckily other companies have enough sense to not trust certain companies.

That's why Apple left Samsung & Jumped Ship to TSMC.
That's why IFS is still struggling to acquire customers.
Nobody with Common Sense will trust IFS in it's current incarnation that has any linkage to Intel's Design team.

Intel isn't the questionmark here smart guy it's the foundry services.

Is it, cause if you want IFS & Intel to survive, the best option is to spin it off and let it acquire it's own financing.
Intel Design can still contract out manufacturing to IFS, just like AMD did with GloFo.
IFS can finally make the TSMC promise and have ZERO Conflicts of Interest for all it's customers.

How's GloFo doing these days for leading edge? Oh yeah they aren't because they ditched 7nm when they were spun off because it cost money.

Yeah, their investors (Mubadala) didn't want to invest into more R&D, they wanted immediate ROI.
They don't realize that they can't get immediate ROI, so they have to invest or IPO.
Which is what they did. There's now a secondary IPO.

Now they're relegated to older/custom nodes which are important, but nowhere near as important as breaking the existing monopoly on leading edge.

But now they can focus on profitability and stabilizing.

TSMC manages to stay on top because they have a combination of ALOT of old fabs printing money & heavy investment into R&D along with having the more cost effective labor in Taiwan and the Asian Supply Chain.

 

[thestryker]

How TSMC convinced Apple it would be a trustworthy partner, landing the Taiwan company its most significant semiconductor contract to date

Operational Secrecy are the literal Life-Blood of a company.

Apple literally jumped ship from Samsung to TSMC because of Secrecy Issues & Samsung dragging the lawsuits out in court.

Notice how Apple Leaks are far fewer in the recent years compared to the earlier years when it was under Samsung.

Yes and I already noted Samsung screwed up and it cost them in very real terms so why would Intel be stupid enough to follow?

They literally saw how it played out even though nobody knew at the time how lucrative the Apple contracts would end up being.

Yet Intel's 13th & 14th Gen was literally Copied, Pasted, & rushed out of the fabs in 1 years design time.
If they didn't bungle up the design, it would've been an amazing accomplishment.
But we're seeing the fruits of their incompetence with the Chip Degradation & Instability issues.

This was a design Intel themselves made which means Intel had all of the design work with which to modify it. This has literally nothing to do with reverse engineering someone else's product and what it would entail.

Both are equally important.

That is irrelevant you were referring to the wrong thing.

https://www.nytimes.com/1997/05/14/business/suit-by-digital-says-intel-stole-pentium-design.html

Intel stealing Patents or implementing others patented technology that goes undiscovered for quite a while.

That ended with a long term agreement much like the deal between AMD and Intel that had happened earlier in the 90s.

VLSI is the most recent case.

A patent troll is not a worthwhile example.

Yet Dell still snubs AMD to this day. I'm pretty sure Intel has ALOT to do with that.

Maybe, maybe not, you have no evidence but your feelings again. Dell certainly uses AMD in Enterprise and has in Alienware (this seems to be random) it's the laptop area where they don't particularly and this could be due to the issues brought up here: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-i...due-to-poor-execution-claims-multiple-reports

nVIDIA also got MSI to back away from AMD's Radeon GPU's as well.

Not sure what nvidia has to do with Intel, but they control the spigot on 80%+ of the discrete GPU business (and all of the top end) they're effectively a monopoly which means they don't really need to do much of anything to accomplish this. I've certainly read about how they threaten priority and volume though which one would assume isn't legal, but it could very well be covered by the obtuse way they do supply.

They still participate in these illegal pay to play schemes.

They're very good at hiding it then unless you have facts to back this claim up.

MS continues to not use AMD chips in their Surface lineup. Guess who benefits, Intel.

They used AMD on the laptop side a generation or two ago, but again see the above link about AMD and laptop OEMs. Also I'm sure Intel loves the Qualcomm Surface Pro/Laptop shift for this current generation.

I know they're the 2nd Largest in the World, and Apple left because of IP / Design theft.

Apple left over a decade ago, but keep beating that drum dude.

Luckily other companies have enough sense to not trust certain companies.

Not sure what this nonsense means, but that's on brand for you at this point.

That's why IFS is still struggling to acquire customers.
Nobody with Common Sense will trust IFS in it's current incarnation that has any linkage to Intel's Design team.

This is your feelings talking not facts, but by all means just keep going back to this repeatedly as if it actually holds any water.

Is it, cause if you want IFS & Intel to survive, the best option is to spin it off and let it acquire it's own financing.

There is zero evidence to back up continued investment into advanced manufacturing nodes if it's sold off. The only evidence we actually have shows that nobody is interested in spending the money required to do leading edge nodes.

Intel Design can still contract out manufacturing to IFS, just like AMD did with GloFo.

This, again, had zero positive impact on GloFo continuing on the path to advanced manufacturing. In fact it ended up dragging AMD down because they had to meet the contracted amount of wafers which required them to use "14nm" GloFo for the IO die when they could have moved on.

Yeah, their investors (Mubadala) didn't want to invest into more R&D, they wanted immediate ROI.
They don't realize that they can't get immediate ROI, so they have to invest or IPO.
Which is what they did. There's now a secondary IPO.

This is how all investors work when staring down the barrel of huge capital expenditure that won't see returns for years.

But now they can focus on profitability and stabilizing.

Meanwhile leading edge nodes are dead which is what matters here. Good for the company and the rich people behind it, but awful for the market and consumers who have to live with it. There's very little chance that if IFS were spun off the required investment to advance nodes would continue. I'd be surprised if they continued to buy High-NA machines and if they even bothered finishing work on 14A rather than maximizing profits on Intel 16, 3, 18A and the forthcoming "12nm" node with UMC.

TSMC manages to stay on top because they have a combination of ALOT of old fabs printing money & heavy investment into R&D along with having the more cost effective labor in Taiwan and the Asian Supply Chain.

TSMC is on top because Intel was insular when they were on top and also fell flat on its face during the financial CEO days. The first time they went to open up their fabs they didn't want to do leading edge nodes and they didn't use industry standard design tools which made it effectively impossible to design without Intel's help. Apple being able to buy out entire nodes also drove TSMC's business as it allowed them to charge more than everyone else so long as they were leading the charge.

IFS is a threat to that lead, but spinning it off now would absolutely end that threat entirely. Samsung if they ever get their nodes back on track could be as well, but I've read nothing but bad tidings there

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

Yes and I already noted Samsung screwed up and it cost them in very real terms so why would Intel be stupid enough to follow?

Why does Intel do alot of things that seem stupid after the fact.

They think they can get away with it and benefit from it in the short term.

They want to have their cake & eat it to.

They literally saw how it played out even though nobody knew at the time how lucrative the Apple contracts would end up being.

Doesn't mean everybody inside Intel has learned that lesson.

This was a design Intel themselves made which means Intel had all of the design work with which to modify it. This has literally nothing to do with reverse engineering someone else's product and what it would entail.

But it does mean they were able to get New Chip Production done in 1 year. Even if it was a bad rush job.

That is irrelevant you were referring to the wrong thing.

Both ends up benefiting Intel in the end.

That ended with a long term agreement much like the deal between AMD and Intel that had happened earlier in the 90s.

More like forced over a barrel to agree, DEC went out of business soon after and they didn't have the financial funds to duke it out with Intel in the courts.

A patent troll is not a worthwhile example.

So you automatically take Intel's side on that?
How sad that you think so little of VLSI and other Patent Holders.

Maybe, maybe not, you have no evidence but your feelings again. Dell certainly uses AMD in Enterprise and has in Alienware (this seems to be random) it's the laptop area where they don't particularly and this could be due to the issues brought up here: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-i...due-to-poor-execution-claims-multiple-reports

Or maybe AMD wouldn't have fab supply/allocation issues if Intel stayed on their own node and not bother eating up fab allocation at TSMC, same with nVIDIA. They could've stuck with Samsung, but no, they came crawling back to TSMC and eating up a giant chunk of the waffer allocation.
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-i...due-to-poor-execution-claims-multiple-reports

Not sure what nvidia has to do with Intel, but they control the spigot on 80%+ of the discrete GPU business (and all of the top end) they're effectively a monopoly which means they don't really need to do much of anything to accomplish this. I've certainly read about how they threaten priority and volume though which one would assume isn't legal, but it could very well be covered by the obtuse way they do supply.

You should already know about nVIDIA's tactics to control the market.

They're very good at hiding it then unless you have facts to back this claim up.

Usually that requires legal investigations to uncover, so I only have previous historical claims/actions to fall upon. But the end result is the same.

They used AMD on the laptop side a generation or two ago, but again see the above link about AMD and laptop OEMs. Also I'm sure Intel loves the Qualcomm Surface Pro/Laptop shift for this current generation.

That's MS betraying the WinTel pact that they made decades ago.

Apple left over a decade ago, but keep beating that drum dude.

Apple is a VERY important customer, we both know it.

Not sure what this nonsense means, but that's on brand for you at this point.

All you have to do is see who has "Signed On" with IFS to prove my point.
It's not like you have a army of companies begging to sign with IFS and leave TSMC or Samsung.

This is your feelings talking not facts, but by all means just keep going back to this repeatedly as if it actually holds any water.

Pat Gelsinger has made it known for quite a while that IFS is open for business, yet companies aren't lining up in droves to beg him for production capacity, what does that say.

There is zero evidence to back up continued investment into advanced manufacturing nodes if it's sold off. The only evidence we actually have shows that nobody is interested in spending the money required to do leading edge nodes.

If you want leading edge products, you need a leading edge node.
Any Financier would understand that if they understood the economics of the SemiConductor market.
You can't have leading edge w/o financial investment & R&D.

This, again, had zero positive impact on GloFo continuing on the path to advanced manufacturing. In fact it ended up dragging AMD down because they had to meet the contracted amount of wafers which required them to use "14nm" GloFo for the IO die when they could have moved on.

So what, being married to the hip, a giant financial anchor is a better situation for Intel?

This is how all investors work when staring down the barrel of huge capital expenditure that won't see returns for years.

That's how R&D works, if you want to be a leader in any field, it costs significant expenditure.
That's ALL industries.

Meanwhile leading edge nodes are dead which is what matters here. Good for the company and the rich people behind it, but awful for the market and consumers who have to live with it. There's very little chance that if IFS were spun off the required investment to advance nodes would continue. I'd be surprised if they continued to buy High-NA machines and if they even bothered finishing work on 14A rather than maximizing profits on Intel 16, 3, 18A and the forthcoming "12nm" node with UMC.

So what's the other option, continue the sinking pace that Intel is going at?
How much financial burn do you think Intel can withstand right now?

TSMC is on top because Intel was insular when they were on top and also fell flat on its face during the financial CEO days. The first time they went to open up their fabs they didn't want to do leading edge nodes and they didn't use industry standard design tools which made it effectively impossible to design without Intel's help. Apple being able to buy out entire nodes also drove TSMC's business as it allowed them to charge more than everyone else so long as they were leading the charge.

That's competition for you. It's on Intel to show how it's done. If they didn't want to meet customer demands to use industry standard tools, they were foolish in thinking they can dictate the SemiConductor Contract Manufacturing market. One that TSMC has long established the behaviors & expectations of.

IFS is a threat to that lead, but spinning it off now would absolutely end that threat entirely. Samsung if they ever get their nodes back on track could be as well, but I've read nothing but bad tidings there

Sure, it could be a threat, but right now, it seems Intel bit off more than it can chew and expanded rapidly WAY too much, too fast. They don't have the cash flow to keep that Fab Expansion & R&D up. That's on Pat & previous CEO's for mis-managing Intel's funds.

 

[TheSecondPower]

Global Foundries is a failed experiment. Spinning off Global Foundries didn't save AMD, instead AMD went through its worst years afterwards. After many years of stagnation at Intel (probably from overconfidence at being so far ahead) Global Foundries finally caught up with 14nm (As I recall, deals with IBM and Samsung helped get there) and AMD designed Zen for it and became successful for the first time in years. Immediately Global Foundries responded by abandoning leading-edge nodes because the company had been unprofitable for years and apparently Mubadala was too stupid to see that Global Foundries' primary customer's fortunes had changed. A few yeara later revenue fell more than expected because Global Foundries customers had quickly moved to leading-edge foundries. I believe the company is unprofitable today.

Samsung and Apple certainly had a falling out at one time. I don't remember hearing about Samsung foundries being invloved except that Apple ultimately abandoned Samsung foundries. What I do remember is that Samsung had made a long document systematically comparing Galaxy to iPhone and saying Galaxy needed to be like iPhone in more ways.

AMD does have less market presence than their product abiltity would suggest. But AMD doesn't have its own foundries and consistently fails or is unable to get the supply to meet demand. The launch of the Ryzen 7840 was virtually a paper launch at first as almost no laptops included it for the first few months. Several months in most manufacturers used it somewhere. But the Core 155 appeared on store shelves from at least 3 manufacturers in the month it was launched. (The 7840 beat it to market and to high volume, but the 155 went from launch to volume much faster.)

Intel is not at risk of leaking things in many of the ways Samsung was. Intel only designs and makes processors. Samsung designs and makes processors and phones, which makes them a competitor directly to Apple's iPhone. But Intel only designs CPUs, not laptops or phones or servers. Processor designs are insanely complex. In my world, in software, if I have the choice to borrow from existing code, I often pass because it's faster to build a new thing than to understand another thing and borrow from it. Moreover the culture in the US is different from Korea which is different from Taiwan. And some of the leak risk still exists with TSMC. By using TSMC itself, Intel can compare TSMC's availability to Intel with the market and better guess what capacity TSMC's customers are getting. And lastly, companies routinely do business with places that will steal their IP. Practically everyone who makes something in China has suffered from this and most of them were smart enough to know this would happen.