News Intel Says it Fixed 7nm, But Will Still Outsource Some Parts

[Admin]

Incoming Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger announced that the company is on-track to fixing its 7nm process.

Intel Says it Fixed 7nm, But Will Still Outsource Some Parts : Read more

 

[Makaveli]

The timing of this is a little too convenient just before the new CEO is taking over to spin some positive light. After taking a beating in 2020 from AMD.

And don't get me wrong I have faith in PAT he looks like the man for the job and will right the ship.

I'm just going to hold my judgement on 7nm from Intel until I see it.

 

[Gurg]

After taking a beating in 2020 from AMD.

TH "Intel reported its fourth quarter 2020 earnings today, marking a stronger-than-expected quarter and the fifth consecutive record-breaking year, largely propelled by sales of PC chips. ""Intel's earnings beat expectations as the company enjoyed record revenue for the fifth straight year. The company's client, data center, memory, and mobileye businesses all set revenue records. "Intel's PC sales were powerful, with the company noting that it sold 33% more PC chips than it did the year prior. "

Meanwhile AMD market share took a dive in both CPUs and GPUs at end of 2020 in Steam Hardware Survey.

Steam Hardware & Software Survey

store.steampowered.com

LOL That is a beating Intel stockholders want every year!

 

[Math Geek]

i'm inclined to believe this report since they are staying with the 2023 release. if they all of a sudden claimed they would be out in 6 months, i'd be waving my BS flag all over the place. but figuring out the problem was eventually going to happen. seems they may know how to fix it now and if they don't rush it, they may have 7 nm ready to go by the time, everyone else is on 3 nm.

but if they can bring some ipc gain and much lower power draw, then they'll still be good to go. look at what they can still do with 14nm which other than the crazy high power draw, is still good performance.

 

[watzupken]

I think the question is how much compromise do they need to accept to bring 7nm past the finish line. I don't believe this was the same 7nm which they envisioned many years back.

 

[watzupken]

TH "Intel reported its fourth quarter 2020 earnings today, marking a stronger-than-expected quarter and the fifth consecutive record-breaking year, largely propelled by sales of PC chips. ""Intel's earnings beat expectations as the company enjoyed record revenue for the fifth straight year. The company's client, data center, memory, and mobileye businesses all set revenue records. "Intel's PC sales were powerful, with the company noting that it sold 33% more PC chips than it did the year prior. "

Meanwhile AMD market share took a dive in both CPUs and GPUs at end of 2020 in Steam Hardware Survey.

Steam Hardware & Software Survey

store.steampowered.com

LOL That is a beating Intel stockholders want every year!

I think it is not a good comparison just looking at Steam's hardware survey to conclude that AMD is losing steam. To be fair, PC sold very well in 2020, which Nvidia and AMD have also confirmed. So if Intel is not making a record profit, then something is terribly wrong.

The problem with AMD however is that they can barely produce enough CPU and GPU to satisfy demand. Since the Ryzen 5000 series start with a fairly significant premium over the older 3000 series, the shortage just made the prices go through the roof, further making things worst in a sense there is no stock and prices are too high. Both these contributed to a lower demand.

 

[jasonf2]

Intel leaves itself in good position by locking up the fab volumes, regardless of what they make with it. AMD is dependent on TSMC production. TSMC isn't going to build additional capacity knowing Intel is a short term game. So AMD is left with quantity issues in the near term. Intel is bringing back star players in key leadership positions and from the looks of it is going to give those keys the resources they need to reestablish performance dominance. AMD's magic right now is a process node advantage that they neither own, control or created. Intel still has managed to maintain near parity on 14nm which is really pretty impressive all things considered. Assuming that Intel gets its process nodes online the designs are already there to maintain parity or pull back into the lead. Unfortunately for them 10nm is pretty much DOA for Intel because they simply took too long. Parity or a minor IPC lead isn't going to be the target though. We are in for a wild ride in the next three years as AMD continues to drop the hammer trying to mitigate Intel's response. Intel's response, though delayed, plays out much like the Nehalem response to Athlon 64 that reestablished the baseline computing experience for the following decade. Intel's major problem was abandoning tick, tock. The people they are bringing back established it in the first place. This plays out well for X86 in a time where ARM continues to threaten its PC dominance. The next three years are going to be exciting release cycles on both sides. Intel is going to going to trail moderately for the next 18-24 months and then things are going to get interesting.

 

[quadibloc2]

I'm glad to hear that they feel they have fixed their 7nm process, which I presume is equivalent to everyone else's 5nm, just as their 10nm process is equivalent to everyone else's 7nm. Given the shortages of Nvidia and AMD product, if Intel tried to rely on TSMC and/or Samsung, their products would be unobtainable too. But if they can produce chips themselves on an advanced process in quantity, they could have a key advantage, at least for a while.

 

[digitalgriffin]

TH "Intel reported its fourth quarter 2020 earnings today, marking a stronger-than-expected quarter and the fifth consecutive record-breaking year, largely propelled by sales of PC chips. ""Intel's earnings beat expectations as the company enjoyed record revenue for the fifth straight year. The company's client, data center, memory, and mobileye businesses all set revenue records. "Intel's PC sales were powerful, with the company noting that it sold 33% more PC chips than it did the year prior. "

Meanwhile AMD market share took a dive in both CPUs and GPUs at end of 2020 in Steam Hardware Survey.

Steam Hardware & Software Survey

store.steampowered.com

LOL That is a beating Intel stockholders want every year!

Intel lost market share in EVERY market segment. mobile, cloud, server, pc. Their margins are down per chip. And now they lost the performance crown in their last stronghold gaming. (I'm reserving judgement on rocket lake till it's in reviewers hands)

The ONLY reason for record profits is because everyone and their cousin are sucking up what pc parts they can. Even AMD has had record profits. And the only reason why AMD isn't selling more is because of capacity limitations.

I don't know about you, but I would call that a beating. When covid is done in 9 months due to the vaccine sales will return to normal.

 

[digitalgriffin]

i'm inclined to believe this report since they are staying with the 2023 release. if they all of a sudden claimed they would be out in 6 months, i'd be waving my BS flag all over the place. but figuring out the problem was eventually going to happen. seems they may know how to fix it now and if they don't rush it, they may have 7 nm ready to go by the time, everyone else is on 3 nm.

but if they can bring some ipc gain and much lower power draw, then they'll still be good to go. look at what they can still do with 14nm which other than the crazy high power draw, is still good performance.

14nm is out of legs. Rocket lake is a step backwards in terms of total performance from early reports because it only had 8 cores. They are just out transistor budget to make things faster.

 

[Makaveli]

TH "Intel reported its fourth quarter 2020 earnings today, marking a stronger-than-expected quarter and the fifth consecutive record-breaking year, largely propelled by sales of PC chips. ""Intel's earnings beat expectations as the company enjoyed record revenue for the fifth straight year. The company's client, data center, memory, and mobileye businesses all set revenue records. "Intel's PC sales were powerful, with the company noting that it sold 33% more PC chips than it did the year prior. "

Meanwhile AMD market share took a dive in both CPUs and GPUs at end of 2020 in Steam Hardware Survey.

Steam Hardware & Software Survey

store.steampowered.com

LOL That is a beating Intel stockholders want every year!

lol calm down.

The size different between these two companies is public information, I know intel makes more money than AMD as they should considering how much difference there is in market share.

Competition is good my friend be water

 

[spongiemaster]

Intel lost market share in EVERY market segment. mobile, cloud, server, pc. Their margins are down per chip. And now they lost the performance crown in their last stronghold gaming. (I'm reserving judgement on rocket lake till it's in reviewers hands)

The ONLY reason for record profits is because everyone and their cousin are sucking up what pc parts they can. Even AMD has had record profits. And the only reason why AMD isn't selling more is because of capacity limitations.

I don't know about you, but I would call that a beating. When covid is done in 9 months due to the vaccine sales will return to normal.

Let's not forget that Intel has been maxed on capacity for a few years now. That's really the only reason AMD has made any measurable market share gains because customers have been forced to look for alternatives. It doesn't matter if AMD has a superior product to offer. That alone won't get the masses to switch. Now that it appears they both are maxed on capacity, the shifts in market share are going to be due to changes in manufacturing capacity. AMD is stuck where they are with TSMC contracts, while only Intel has the ability to increase capacity which they claim to have been doing with 14nm while they try to fix the cluster---- that is their 10nm. Through the holiday season, there was pretty much no 5000 series availability in the States while 10 series Intel was readily available.

No one should be surprised that AMD lost market share in the GPU market this last quarter.

Let's hope Intel has gotten 7nm back on track. If both sides are cruising along, continually one upping each other every few months, then we all win, and there is never a bad time to upgrade.

 

[TerryLaze]

Intel lost market share in EVERY market segment. mobile, cloud, server, pc.

And yet they made 6bil more in sales.

Their margins are down per chip.

And yet they made the same net income as last year,

The ONLY reason for record profits is because everyone and their cousin are sucking up what pc parts they can. Even AMD has had record profits. And the only reason why AMD isn't selling more is because of capacity limitations.

No they don't, if that where true AMD would spin up FX again from glofo, make a huge volume of them and make money, just like nvidia does with 20xx series GPUs.
People only suck up the pc parts that are useful.

I don't know about you, but I would call that a beating. When covid is done in 9 months due to the vaccine sales will return to normal.

Covid-19 started December 2019, Intel's annual net income for 2019 and 2018 was about 20bil, annual revenue was about 70 bil.
Going back to the same amounts they are still making now... yeah that's gonna hurt them.

 

[TerryLaze]

14nm is out of legs. Rocket lake is a step backwards in terms of total performance from early reports because it only had 8 cores. They are just out transistor budget to make things faster.

It's going to be a wash, more or less, for multi which will cause 10th gen owners to not be angry about it, and it will be about 20% faster per core which will drive sales.
Also it will leave open the possibility to do another 14nm gen or refresh with 10 cores.
If transistor budget were any concern they would just drop the iGPU like everybody already wants them to, if power were the concern they would just clock them lower for all core while keeping single core boost high, just like amd does for ryzen.

 

[Geef]

Can someone please go take an electron microscope and scan the AMD chip and then the INTEL chip and see what the NM really are?

Maybe have a research group from a college do it so we know it wasn't bought and paid for by either chip maker.

---
Shortly after research...
WTF This entire time they were working with milimeter and not nanometers? No wonder their chips keep getting bigger!

 

[Olle P]

i'm inclined to believe this report since they are staying with the 2023 release... seems they may know how to fix it now and if they don't rush it, they may have 7 nm ready to go by the time, everyone else is on 3 nm.

I agree, and no mentioning on how much is expected to be produced in 2023. Might become a pretty soft December launch, like they did with the 10nm a few years ago.

Intel leaves itself in good position by locking up the fab volumes, regardless of what they make with it. AMD is dependent on TSMC production. ...

Agreed!

Intel is bringing back star players in key leadership positions and from the looks of it is going to give those keys the resources they need...

Out of necessity. The other option would be to just give up.

... AMD's magic right now is a process node advantage... Assuming that Intel gets its process nodes online the designs are already there to maintain parity or pull back into the lead.

While the process nodes do provide an advantage for AMD the real deal is the Infinity Fabric and use och chiplet design.
If Intel tried to make a (monolithic) 64-core Xenon CPU using SkyLake+++ architecture on TSMC's 7nm node it would be prohibitively low yield and most likely perform worse than AMDs comparable Zen2 Epyc.
Even with 7nm at early production stage in 2023 Intel will lag far behind node-wise. By earlier road maps Intel should have their 5nm products flying off the store shelves right now while production should be in full swing on their 3nm node to build stock for the spring release.

 

[digitalgriffin]

Let's not forget that Intel has been maxed on capacity for a few years now. That's really the only reason AMD has made any measurable market share gains because customers have been forced to look for alternatives. It doesn't matter if AMD has a superior product to offer. That alone won't get the masses to switch. Now that it appears they both are maxed on capacity, the shifts in market share are going to be due to changes in manufacturing capacity. AMD is stuck where they are with TSMC contracts, while only Intel has the ability to increase capacity which they claim to have been doing with 14nm while they try to fix the cluster---- that is their 10nm. Through the holiday season, there was pretty much no 5000 series availability in the States while 10 series Intel was readily available.

No one should be surprised that AMD lost market share in the GPU market this last quarter.

Let's hope Intel has gotten 7nm back on track. If both sides are cruising along, continually one upping each other every few months, then we all win, and there is never a bad time to upgrade.

While I mostly agree with you, Intel keeps waffling on if they will use outside competitors to mfg silicon. TSMC has already committed to making more 7nm node available. (AMD will become TSMC’s largest customer of 7nm next year – Research Snipers ) And on the free market last year before shortages hit, AMD Ryzen was the #1 seller in Europe and in the top 9 of 10 spots on Amazon here in the states.

The 10nm is a cluster. As the article points out, by the time they fix all the issues, it will be an outdated node. And when 7nm comes on line TSMC will be making 3nm parts.

Don't get me wrong. I want to see Intel compete. Competition is a good thing because it drives innovation with hopefully lower cost. Athlon 64 lead to Nehelam. Core lead to Zen. But for the foreseeable future, Intel will not make major inroads at recapturing that crown as undisputed leader in fab technology.

 

[digitalgriffin]

And yet they made 6bil more in sales.

And yet they made the same net income as last year,

No they don't, if that where true AMD would spin up FX again from glofo, make a huge volume of them and make money, just like nvidia does with 20xx series GPUs.
People only suck up the pc parts that are useful.

Covid-19 started December 2019, Intel's annual net income for 2019 and 2018 was about 20bil, annual revenue was about 70 bil.
Going back to the same amounts they are still making now... yeah that's gonna hurt them.

Don't be disingenuous. I know where you sit. That's like saying Intel should spin up P4 or Sandybridge because there is a shortage. That is quite possibly the silliest argument you have EVER made.

Intels margins were already being lowered by the time December 2019 rolled around. They were forced to bring out chips with more cores and update their stack on the same 14nm process. (i3 4/4, i5-6/12, i7-8/16, i9-10/20) The only reason that happened is because of AMD. If AMD wasn't a threat, you know Intel wouldn't have done that because more cores on the same process node leads to less chips/wafer, which drives up cost. Intel was more than perfectly happy to sell us i3 2/4 i5-4/4, i7 4/8 for years with minimal performance increases. Do you think Intel did all this (lower margins and less chips/wafer) out of the goodness of their heart? NO! They were run by bean counters who only care about the stock price. They are forced to compete because AMD is a threat and capturing market share. The only thing keeping prices from bottoming out more is there are supply constraints everywhere. If AMD doubled capacity overnight, then Intel would be in more trouble.

Investors only care about slim margins if a company is in a growth stage and reinvest (ie: Amazon) . When you have a mature company (ie: Intel) and margins start to slip AND lose market share, investors start to get nervous. And look what has happened to intel's stock price compared to AMD over the last couple of years. I'm talking about growth % and loss%.

I get really confused as to why you make arguments sometimes. Either you work for intel and make poor arguments in their defense. Are heavily invested in intel and blind to what's happening. Or actually want to promote AMD with weak arguments for Intel. Or do like playing devils advocate?

Either way, I could care less. I'm truly agnostic and just want the truth AND competition. I've been lambasting even AMD lately with their unreasonable price hikes, just because they can. I want the best value for my $ and the corp I make recommendations to when it comes to equipment procurement.

 

[digitalgriffin]

Can someone please go take an electron microscope and scan the AMD chip and then the INTEL chip and see what the NM really are?

Maybe have a research group from a college do it so we know it wasn't bought and paid for by either chip maker.

---
Shortly after research...
WTF This entire time they were working with milimeter and not nanometers? No wonder their chips keep getting bigger!

It's been done. It's a very complex measurement. Intel says it's largest feature is 10nm. TSMC/Samsung though are a bit more complex. They count smaller features as well as things like vertical density/layer density. So if a old 14nm process can pack say 100,000 transistors per sq mm, and a new process can pack 400,000 transistors per sq mm, then that's 4x's the density which would equate to a 7nm process. But the truth is it might be really a 10nm process feature wise with multiple improvements on feature density metrics (like vertical density or node sink density) Intel for example are now entirely wrapping their emitter collector pair with a much bigger base (gate) which affects density in a negative way. But it really improves power usage and reliability at higher speeds. (What is 10nm SuperFin All About? - Intel’s 11th Gen Core Tiger Lake SoC Detailed: SuperFin, Willow Cove and Xe-LP (anandtech.com) )

 

[gggplaya]

We have to also keep in mind that AMD is using a huge chunk of TSMC 7nm capacity to make Xbox and PS5 chips. Essentially taking away capacity from desktop CPU's. So yes, that's why their Q4 looks bad in 2020. The demand is there, but no supply. So many people are still trying to get their hands on Ryzen 5000 series chips.

 

[semitope]

That timeline still leaves Intel's competitors, like TSMC and Samsung, with a process node advantage in the 2023 time frame.

TSMC and Samsung aren't Intel Competitors unless intel starts making chips for other companies at scale. Their relevance is that they can make chips for Intels actual competitors like AMD and Nvidia.

 

[JayNor]

Intel has several parts already rumored to be built at tsm. Some are ramping this year and could be fairly high volume.
Mobileye eyeq5 ADAS chip
Habana Gaudi AI training chip
eASIC 5G ASICS
Xe-HPG ... the new discrete GPU with ray tracing
Xe-HPC ... the data center GPU going into Aurora

They also mentioned a Client 2.0 program, which would use stitched together chiplets, with the chiplets being potentially built externally.

So ... as they said in the CC, their plans for external foundries are increasing (beyond their current 20%).

 

[TerryLaze]

Don't be disingenuous. I know where you sit. That's like saying Intel should spin up P4 or Sandybridge because there is a shortage. That is quite possibly the silliest argument you have EVER made.

Yes it would be silly for AMD to do that, that was my whole point, a response to you saying that people would suck up anything well they wouldn't suck that up, but intel can sell 14nm and nvidia can sell 20xx series.

Intels margins were already being lowered by the time December 2019 rolled around. They were forced to bring out chips with more cores and update their stack on the same 14nm process. (i3 4/4, i5-6/12, i7-8/16, i9-10/20) The only reason that happened is because of AMD. If AMD wasn't a threat, you know Intel wouldn't have done that because more cores on the same process node leads to less chips/wafer, which drives up cost. Intel was more than perfectly happy to sell us i3 2/4 i5-4/4, i7 4/8 for years with minimal performance increases. Do you think Intel did all this (lower margins and less chips/wafer) out of the goodness of their heart? NO! They were run by bean counters who only care about the stock price. They are forced to compete because AMD is a threat and capturing market share. The only thing keeping prices from bottoming out more is there are supply constraints everywhere. If AMD doubled capacity overnight, then Intel would be in more trouble.

Yup AMD raised the acceptable price of the mainstream halo product from $300-330 to $500 which allowed intel to sell aging 14nm 6 and 8 core CPUs at that price, which is a ~50% increase for the same tech.
This in turn increased intel's revenue from 60 to 70 bil and their income from 10 to 20 bil.
Also operating margin has increased for intel since the beginning of 2017 (release of zen1) from about 20-22% to about 30%
Stock for intel went from average $30 before 2017 to avg $50, they paid dividends on their stock of $5.6 billion in 2020.
AMD never paid any dividends.

I get really confused as to why you make arguments sometimes. Either you work for intel and make poor arguments in their defense. Are heavily invested in intel and blind to what's happening. Or actually want to promote AMD with weak arguments for Intel. Or do like playing devils advocate?

I could ask the same of you since I at least use actual data while you just make everything up, people can look this stuff up you know.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/INTC/intel/revenue

 

[mdd1963]

TH "Intel reported its fourth quarter 2020 earnings today, marking a stronger-than-expected quarter and the fifth consecutive record-breaking year, largely propelled by sales of PC chips. ""Intel's earnings beat expectations as the company enjoyed record revenue for the fifth straight year. The company's client, data center, memory, and mobileye businesses all set revenue records. "Intel's PC sales were powerful, with the company noting that it sold 33% more PC chips than it did the year prior. "

Clearly, the beating AMD dealt Intel has not stopped them from selling a large quantity of CPUs profitably 'just yet'!

 

[spongiemaster]

Clearly, the beating AMD dealt Intel has not stopped them from selling a large quantity of CPUs profitably 'just yet'!

They never will either. TSMC doesn't have the capacity, nor will they to be the sole supplier or even majority supplier of x86 CPU's.