INTC renta clean room and toolset process line ! You got circuits we make thru the Lipton Gamut and sp-t you out 100,000 chiplets in two weeks. Up to you Raw jigsaw or fully glued and assembled with you booting up your modern OS of choice. Feel the chiplet heat baby.
7 replies (most recent on top)
@df I would agree it's not the fab techs that make the stuff, but it's absolutely fab engineering, both future & current, and mis-management from the CEO to the first line manager, along with their complicit liars in Finance. It's been well known for over 20 years that TMG was nowhere near as efficient as TMG, but they made all sorts of excuses to hide that fact for decades... this includes, Intel invests in leading nodes (but then why aren't they getting paid for it?), TSMC uses older equipment (if that is more profitable, then why shouldn't TMG do the same?), to TMG makes less money... a complete and utter lie by not accounting for their customer's margins. Since TMG has made 60% net profit margins as a contract mfg, which also gives the contracting company 60%-70% margins on top of that... while Intel only makes 60% margins having both pieces. This has been known for decades, but TMG kept just ignoring it. Such a waste.
Fabs have not been Intel's benifit for prob 25 years. If any one actually looked into how "efficient" TMG was... it would put Rube Goldberg to shame many times over. TMG has been severely inefficient for over 25 years in both bloat, and poor yields. They only looked good because desktop and embedded processors stayed on legacy designs on fully depreciated equipment, thus generating huge profits. The leading edge nodes did have performance improvements, but mobile was never able to fully monetize that performance (which is a whole other can of worms).
WTF would Intel do without fabs? Sit around and design desktop processors to compete with AMD? Or maybe do some radios to compete with Qualcom? Oh I know, maybe some graphics to compete with Nvidia? Oh oh- low power to compete with ARM!
Maybe? Maybe they could be like Meta, or Google, or Telsa, or Microsoft and design their own chipsets in-house! You know, Vertical integration! To support their main business.
Right?
Guess what, most all the people that could do that are gone.
GUESS WHERE THEY WENT
Acres and acres of clean room toolset storage space down in Arizona. Miles of idle prima donna toolsets and contractors su-king down the billions by day.
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/intel-foundry-secures-contract-to-build-microsofts-maia-2-next-gen-ai-processor-on-18a-18a-p-node-claims-report-could-be-first-step-in-ongoing-partnership
True. Fabs are in fact money pits holding Intel back.
It doesn't mean I am blaming Fab workers. But certainly Fab management is to be blamed.