Quote:The semiconductor industry is notoriously slow when it comes to reacting to sudden increases in demand. Some analysts believe that demand for chips now exceeds supply by about 30%, and it will take three or four quarters for the supply to catch up with the demand. Essentially, this means that chip shortages will persist well into 2022.
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"We believe semi companies are shipping 10% to 30% below current demand levels and it will take at least 3-4 quarters for supply to catch up with demand and then another 1-2 quarters for inventories at customers/distribution channels to be replenished back to normal levels," said Harlan Sur, an analyst with J.P. Morgan, in a note to clients, reports MarketWatch.
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Major foundries, including Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and GlobalFoundries, have announced expansion plans for this year, and there are indications that packaging companies are going to do the same. However, it will take months for companies like ASML, Applied Materials, KLA, LAM Research, and others to build the fab tools; then, it will take some time to install the equipment. As a result, any capacity-related decision made now will not have an impact until several quarters from now, at best.

Keeping in mind that demand is already outstripping supply by around 30%, and for many products, the backorder is building up, it will take months after semiconductor companies solve their capacity problems before everyone gets the chips they need. Meanwhile, it is unclear what happens to the 'excess' capacity after the demand is met and inventory levels get back to normal.

Furthermore, it obviously remains to be seen whether fabless makers of chips continue to introduce new SKUs if they cannot meet demand for existing products.

Quote:PC sales boomed throughout 2020, sending semiconductor earnings soaring. One company without much to cheer about, at least as far as its conventional Windows business is concerned, is Microsoft. For decades, we’ve talked about the “PC industry” and the “Windows PC” industry as if they were synonymous. New data on 2020 PC shipments suggests we shouldn’t be.

As Emil Protalinski writes for GeekWire, “This is a big win for Google and a warning for both Apple and Microsoft. It also signals to app and game developers that Chrome OS can no longer be ignored.” Data points quoted in the paragraph below are by IDC.
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Analysts don’t think the Chromebook trend is going to slow down. This is part of why ARM may be emerging as a genuine threat to Intel and AMD in what has traditionally been thought of as the heart of the x86 market. The M1 has demonstrated that custom ARM silicon can beat x86 at its own game, but the x86 legacy software market is still the proverbial 800-pound gorilla in the room. Trying to best x86 on Windows means building a high-performance ARM chip and a top-notch emulator. It’s an additional barrier that helps keep the PC market and the mobile phone markets technologically separate. This specific barrier, however, is only as strong as Windows’ market share.

Chromebooks don’t carry the same expectations around legacy software support that a Windows laptop does. That allows ARM and x86 to fight on more even terms. To be clear, all of this presumes that a company such as Qualcomm, Samsung, or Nvidia will build an ARM CPU core that can compete with x86. Any such CPU is still a few years away, best-case. x86 CPUs are currently the preferred Chromebook solution for anyone who wants a higher-performing system, and that’s not likely to change in just the next year or two. But if ARM CPUs show a sustained ability to beat past x86 chips, we’re going to see more chip designers interested in entering that market. When they do, they won’t necessarily focus on Windows, where the entrenched software market makes beating x86 as hard as it could possibly be. They’ll focus on Chromebooks, where x86 enjoys a performance advantage but lacks a four-decade software library to anchor it.

Windows, of course, will remain its own titanic force — nobody expects the OS to just collapse — but it’s clear that Intel and AMD would be fighting over a shrinking pie if the two companies can’t maintain Chromebook market share. Today, of course, all of this is theoretical, but that’s how the semiconductor market works. It’s the CPUs on drawing boards today that’ll be defining the performance market 3-4 years from now. Today, AMD and Intel have no problem. Four years from now, it could be a very different story. Microsoft’s own decision to transition away from defining itself in terms of Windows and towards a cloud-centric future makes a lot of sense in the face of numbers like these. Microsoft wants to have other business segments to talk about by the time Chromebooks are truly carving into its market share.

It’s clear now that the long period of tranquility in the PC market through the 2010s, where nothing much interesting happened, was less a terminal decline and more of a pause. There’s a (relatively) new OS eating market share and a new CPU architecture. AMD has emerged as a competitor for Intel across the entire x86 space at the same time that AI and ML accelerators are redefining the CPU’s role in the larger system architecture.

Quote:Flash partners Kioxia and Western Digital revealed this week a brand new generation of 3D NAND flash memory that promises to be much faster and far denser than anything they have produced before.

BiCS6 features 162 layers and 70% more bits per wafer than the preceding BiCS5 from a few years ago. That 70% allows for a 40% reduction in NAND chip size, helping to cut manufacturing costs.
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There is also reportedly a significant uptick in I/O performance with BiCS6 operating at 1600MT/s, compared to BiCS5's 1066 MT/s. This helps keep the tech on par with competing vendors like Micron and SK Hynix, which use 1600 MT/s speeds as well.

This is just an announcement of BiCS6's capabilities, so don't yet know when it'll be produced. But if it's anything like BiCS5, it'll take another year before we see the best SSDs featuring the new technology.

Quote:Today we have one interesting research in our hands. According to Trendfocus inc. we have come to know that as much as 333 million Solid State Drives were shipped last year, in 2020. The SSDs have finally overcome HDDs in the number of shipped units, with HDDs shipping 260 million units. In terms of total capacity shipped, HDDs are still winning. The average SSD has less storage capacity compared to the average HDD, thus making the total shipped capacity of all 333 million SSDs "just" 207 Exabytes (EB), while the total shipped capacity of HDDs is a bit over one Zettabyte (ZB).

The average capacity of SSD was as much as 0.67 Terabytes (TB), while the average capacity of HDD was around 4.0 TBs. This is exactly why HDDs are still present as much - simply because they can store much more storage and offer better value as the price per Gigabyte ratio is much lower than the one of an SSD. The SSDs are experiencing Year-over-Year growth of 20.8% in unit shipments, while HDDs are declining at the rate of 18%. When it comes to the total storage capacity shipped on yearly basis, SSDs are growing at the rate of 50%, with HDDs growing at a 13% rate. You can also check out the SSD share of different vendors below.

Quote:A report has emerged that Adata has altered its XPG SX8200 Pro again by swapping in SK Hynix flash, making this the fourth known SSD configuration. According to the report, the latest revision is purportedly 23.6% percent slower in sequential read speed than the previous revision, and it also takes a 14.3% haircut in sequential write performance. As before, Adata ships this drive with the same model number as the original SSD.
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Adata’s XPG SX8200 Pro was once hailed as the best SSD in its category in terms of offering the best bang for your buck. Unfortunately, the SSD also received its fair share of bad press as Adata switched out the original components for slower parts, without publicizing the change. While swapping out different types of flash certainly isn't unheard of, Adata's tactic involved swapping the SSD controller, a first. In addition to the original SX8200 Pro, our testing identified two more revisions that delivered substantially lower performance than the original SSD.

Now it appears that Adata has quietly revamped the SX8200 Pro again. Redditor svartchimpans recently purchased an SX8200 Pro that doesn't match the specs of any previous revisions we've tested. That means there could now be a total of four different variants of the SX8200 Pro. However, given the timeframe, we don't expect to find the original SX8200 Pro anymore.
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Synthetic benchmarks don't always paint the entire picture, and we would need to thoroughly test the new revision to see how much slower it is compared to the other three variants. According to the Redditor's results, however, the SX8200 Pro with Samsung 64-layer NAND (the previous revision) delivered up to 30.8% and 16.7% higher sequential read and write speeds than the latest variant that comes with SK Hynix 96-layer NAND.

Keep in mind that the user was testing the two other drives that he bought with nearly all of the capacity used while the SK hynix-powered version was empty. A full drive is always much, much slower than an empty one. So the delta between the drives would be further apart if they were all at the same usage level.

For instance, the empty drive with SK Hynix flash delivered 2.8% higher sequential read performance than the 94% full drive with Samsung flash. However, the latter still pumped out 7.6% higher sequential writes than the empty drive with SK hynix flash.

Performance is just one side of the coin, though. It remains to be seen whether the new NAND will impact the SX8200 Pro's endurance. The SX8200 Pro is available in 256GB, 512GB, 1TB, and 2TB capacities. Adata rated the original drives with endurance ratings of 160TBW, 320TBW, 640TBW and 1,280TBW. Given that Adata hasn't modified these values in the specification sheet, we can only assume that the SK Hynix drives should be as durable as the original ones.

Quote:The Mercury Research CPU market share results are in for the fourth quarter of 2020, with the headline news being that Intel has clawed back share from AMD in the desktop PC market for the first time in three years. Intel also stopped its slide in the notebook PC segment, gaining share for as far as our records go back (2018). AMD also lost share in the overall x86 market during the quarter, but notched a solid gain for the year. Meanwhile, AMD continued to make its steady gains in the server market.

It's noteworthy that the fourth quarter of 2020 was anything but typical: The PC market continued its pandemic-fueled surge, seeing its largest growth in a decade. For example, while AMD lost share in the overall x86 market (less IoT) during the quarter, Mercury Research pegs the overall x86 market growth rate at an explosive 20.1%.

Intel obviously captured more of that growth than AMD, but it's important to remember that losing a slight bit of share in the midst of an explosive growth environment doesn't equate to declining sales - AMD grew its processor revenue by 50% last year and posted record financial results for the year.

Shortages have plagued AMD due to ongoing supply chain issues. Given the lack of AMD products on shelves, the company is obviously selling all of the silicon it can punch out, signaling strong demand. AMD expects to see 'tightness' throughout the first half of 2021 until added production capacity comes online, meaning we could see a limited supply of AMD's PC and console chips until the middle of the year.

Those shortages led to a scarcity of AMD's chips during the critical holiday shopping season in the fourth quarter, while Intel's chips were widely available and often selling at a discount. That obviously helped Intel recoup some share. During its recent earnings call, Intel also cited improving supply of lower-end processors, like those destined for Chromebooks, as a contributing factor. Intel CEO Bob Swan noted the company increased its PC CPU units by 33% during the fourth quarter.

Intel has also expanded its chip production by leaps and bounds over the last several years as it recovered from its own shortage of production capacity. The advantages of its IDM model are on clear display during the pandemic - the company's tight control of its supply chain and production facilities have allowed it to better weather disruptions.

That said, given the dynamic nature of the market, it's hard to draw firm conclusions on several of the categories below without more information. Dean McCarron of Mercury Research will provide us with detailed breakdowns for each segment in the morning, and we'll add his analysis as soon as it is available. For now, here's our analysis of the raw numbers.

Quote:Intel has announced it will discontinue all of its Optane drives in the consumer space, even the top-end enthusiast-oriented products. This isn’t entirely surprising given how the storage market has performed these past few years, but we’re hoping it’s a tactical retreat, not a complete pullback.

According to new Product Discontinuation Notices, Intel has discontinued the M10, 800P, 900P, and 905P SSDs. That’s the entirety of the Optane desktop family, and the company does not plan to provide an immediate replacement. The discontinuation notice for the 905P family states: “Intel will not provide a new large capacity Optane Memory SSD as a transition product for the client market segment. Intel will focus on the new Optane Memory H20 with Solid State Storage for the client market segment.”
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This has undoubtedly hurt the adoption of Optane, which has remained far more expensive than NAND. This is scarcely unusual for emerging memory technology, but it hit Optane doubly hard. The performance arguments in favor of Optane are modest outside of certain server and enterprise workloads, but they exist. Had both technologies remained more competitive, Intel would have had more luck driving adoption. With NAND prices down so dramatically, there was less market for Optane as an SSD replacement or even an Optane cache drive.

Intel’s third-generation Optane — which won’t appear for a few years — is supposed to bring some genuine performance improvements, so we may have to wait a few years to see if Intel can scale 3DXPoint to the point that it leads NAND flash in all cases. If it can, we’ll probably see the technology reappear in consumer products. For now, however, Optane will be an enterprise-only option.

Quote:Today, thanks to the ServeTheHome forum member "111alan", we have the first pictures of the alleged Intel Sapphire Rapids Xeon processor. Pictured is what appears to be a dual-die design similar to Cascade Lake-SP design with 56 cores and 112 threads that uses two dies. The Sapphire Rapids is a 10 nm SuperFin design that allegedly comes even in the dual-die configuration. To host this processor, the motherboard needs an LGA4677 socket with 4677 pins present. The new LGA socket, along with the new 10 nm Sapphire Rapids Xeon processors are set for delivery in 2021 when Intel is expected to launch its new processors and their respective platforms.

The processor pictured is clearly a dual-die design, meaning that Intel used some of its Multi-Chip Package (MCM) technology that uses EMIB to interconnect the silicon using an active interposer. As a reminder, the new 10 nm Sapphire Rapids platform is supposed to bring many new features like a DDR5 memory controller paired with Intel's Data Streaming Accelerator (DSA); a brand new PCIe 5.0 standard protocol with a 32 GT/s data transfer rate, and a CXL 1.1 support for next-generation accelerators. The exact configuration of this processor is unknown, however, it is an engineering sample with a clock frequency of a modest 2.0 GHz.

Quote:Back in 2015, AMD demonstrated an intriguing concept PC it dubbed “Project Quantum.” It was an AMD high-concept PC that combined up to two Fiji GPUs with an Intel CPU to build a gaming box in a unique form factor. The upper part of the chassis held the closed-loop liquid coolers and exhausted heat out the top, while the bottom of the machine held all of the electronic components.
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Now, AMD has filed for a patent on the design, which has sparked discussion that the company may be preparing to revive it. I have no specific knowledge of AMD’s plans in this regard, but we can speak to the overall competitive situation between AMD and Intel, which is better than it’s been in nearly 15 years. The Ryzen 5000 series is expected to deliver significant performance uplifts, with 1.19x additional IPC and the potential for an unknown amount of additional clock (1.2x – 1.25x are the common figures). Assuming the company delivers, this is a sufficiently large boost to catch many an enthusiast eye. But the performance of Big Navi is still an unknown factor.

It would make sense for AMD to reserve Project Quantum for a time when it was in a much better competitive situation with respect to Intel. The question is, is this a chassis design AMD would license to other companies? The idea that AMD would build the machine itself seems unlikely, since it would essentially be competing against its own customers.

It would be interesting to see if AMD could boost the performance of CPUs it sold into Project Quantum systems, specifically, as a way of creating a premium boutique product — but how that product would be distributed is anyone’s guess. It makes sense for AMD to take out a patent on the Project Quantum concept whether it builds anything around it or not, just to prevent a competitor from sniping the idea out from underneath them.

The fact that people are buzzing about this concept is an example of how much things have changed in the past five years. In 2015, AMD had to outfit its own hardware concept with Intel CPUs in order to get the market to take it seriously. Today, it’s a given that the Ryzen 3000 and 5000 families would be at least competitive for the socket, while the performance of Big Navi is the larger question mark.

Quote:Last time, the issue was Western Digital’s decision to use Shingled Magnetic Recording in its Red NAS drives to squeeze more data onto the drive (negatively impacting some read/write/access speeds). The DataHoarder subreddit has been poking at Red drives again, bringing together an extensive consumer investigation. Western Digital has apparently taken to calling its drives “5400 RPM Class” despite rotating at 7200 RPM. The issue affects a variety of drives according to the Reddit post, including the WD80EMAZ, WD80EZAZ, and apparently others. Some of these are “shucked” drives–pulled from external enclosures–but others appear to be bare drives.

Redditor /u/Amaroko ran an experiment that seems to lay the through out conclusively. They placed a variety of different drives, one at a time, on top of an empty cardboard box with a Blue Yeti mic held above it, then recorded the sounds the drive makes during activity (Gallery). Then they ran the info through spectral analysis. The analysis showed the drive running at 120 cycles per second, which works out to 7,200 cycles per minute.
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Western Digital has since responded to requests for comment on this. Here’s the response they sent to Blocks and Files:
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It seems like Western Digital is saying is that it classifies its drives not on the drive’s actual states, but on the rough performance of the drive in comparison with industry standards. This is a 7200 RPM drive that performs like a 5400 drive as long as you’re not worried about noise or power consumption.

For most users, this kind of thing is going to be relatively inconsequential and go unnoticed. The fact that Western Digital is not just advertising the drive as one speed, but showing it in SMART data, though, is concerning. This is the second time this year the drive maker has been caught telling half-truths about its WD Red NAS drives; that’s only going to put their products under more scrutiny as educated consumers start to lose trust in the brand.

Quote:NVIDIA and SoftBank Group Corp. (SBG) today announced a definitive agreement under which NVIDIA will acquire Arm Limited from SBG and the SoftBank Vision Fund (together, "SoftBank") in a transaction valued at $40 billion. The transaction is expected to be immediately accretive to NVIDIA's non-GAAP gross margin and non-GAAP earnings per share.

Quote:That hasn’t happened, even though predictions made as recently as June favored a price increase. The reason for the market uncertainty is because demand wasn’t just dropping. It’s been shifting across the market. The need for NAND in smartphones has been much lower than typical, while the market for PCs has boomed. Both Sony and Microsoft will be buying a lot of flash memory to support the Xbox XSX/PS5 launches, and there may even be an uptick in consumer sales if customers buy secondary drives to supplement console storage on launch day. No idea how strong the sell-through market on those add-ons will be, but we should see at least some motion.

What happened, specifically, is that demand for NAND wafers fell earlier this year while demand for SSDs surged. Now, wafer demand is starting to recover, but PC demand is falling off. Consoles should soak up some of the difference, but there’s also a memory manufacturer bringing new production online. YMTC is expected to hit maximum capacity utilization in one fab, while simultaneously bringing a second plant online. Trendforce writes: “Currently, YMTC has expanded the incorporation of 64L 256GB TLC products for its module maker clients; the average quoted price is far lower than contract prices and approaching spot market levels, in turn widening the decline in contract prices and exacerbating the oversupply situation in the market.”

What this means in aggregate is that if you’re going to be in the market for an SSD through the back half of the year, you should be in pretty solid shape — though keep in mind that even when pricing changes, it doesn’t necessarily directly impact what you’ll see on store shelves. Those planning to buy a drive for an Xbox Series X/S or a PlayStation 5 may well benefit at least a bit, and I’ve heard from a source that SSD prices there have been falling rapidly. The US market may see a similar decline over the next few weeks. The decline is expected to be larger in Q4 than it is in Q3, but keep an eye on what real-world prices actually do — there may be some good deals in the not-so-distant future.

Quote:Till Kottmann, a Swiss IT consultant, posted on Twitter a link to a file sharing service today that contains what an anonymous source claims is a portion of Intel's crown jewels: A 20GB folder of confidential Intel intellectual property. The leaker dubbed the release the "Intel exconfidential Lake Platform Release ."

Update: Intel has responded to Tom's Hardware with an official statement:

"We are investigating this situation. The information appears to come from the Intel Resource and Design Center, which hosts information for use by our customers, partners and other external parties who have registered for access. We believe an individual with access downloaded and shared this data."

Quote:Now, don’t mistake me — it could be that there’s some killer data lurking in this repository, with major implications for Intel security, or IP, or what have you. I haven’t exactly scanned it. But while a Simics simulation for an unreleased platform is interesting, Simics is a commercial platform you can buy. It’s a full-system simulator used for software development. There could be security flaws lurking in some of the software, and the leaker has encouraged people to look for backdoor mentions in the dump — which is a whole lot different than a leak in which you say “Hey everybody, here’s the 8MB of documents showing where Intel hid the x86 hardware backdoor… no, not IME. The other backdoor.”

Note: The degree to which closed-source processors that run invisible code (from the OS’ perspective) should be considered “backdoors” is hotly contested between a subset of security researchers and open-source computing advocates on the one hand, and Intel and AMD on the other. The former group believes that security processors and “trusted computing” zones should either not exist or, if they do exist, should be based on open, transparent projects. AMD and Intel disagree. The remark above should be considered tongue-in-cheek, particularly if you’re the kind of person who requires a paragraph-long explanation to be mollified by anything.

In any event, it’s not clear how much of this is juicy details and how much of it is dull. Some of it covers chips that were under NDA as recently as May, but the presentations we get on a regular basis are under NDA as well, and trust me, Intel doesn’t give us the keys to the kingdom, so much as information it doesn’t want leaked until it’s ready to announce it. According to Ars Technica, the details were fond on an unsecured server hosted by Akamai.

Quote:Intel announced today in its Q2 2020 earnings release that it has now delayed the rollout of its 7nm CPUs by six months relative to its previously-planned release date, undoubtedly resulting in wide-ranging delays to the company's roadmaps. Intel's press release also says that yields for its 7nm process are now twelve months behind the company's internal targets, meaning the company isn't currently on track to produce its 7nm process in an economically viable way. The company now says its 7nm CPUs will not debut on the market until late 2022 or early 2023.
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On the earnings call, Intel CEO Bob Swan said the company had identified a "defect mode" in its 7nm process that caused yield degradation issues. As a result, Intel has invested in "contingency plans," which Swan later defined as including using third-party foundries. The company will also use external third-party foundries for its forthcoming 7nm Ponte Vecchio GPUs, the company's first graphics chips. Ponte Vecchio comes as a chiplet-based design, and Swan clarified that production for some of the chiplets (tiles) will be outsourced to third parties. Swan noted the GPUs will come in late 2021 or early 2022, portending a delay beyond the original schedule for a 2021 launch in the exascale Aurora supercomputer.
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For perspective, rival foundry TSMC plans to be on the 3nm node in the same time frame as Intel's new schedule for 7nm. Intel clearly isn't pleased with its execution on the 7nm node, as an embattled Swan remarked that "And we feel pretty good about where we are, though we’re not happy. I’m not pleased with our 7nm process performance" at the end of the call after a bruising question and answer session with analysts. Swan also said "we have root-caused the [7nm] issue and believe there are no fundamental roadblocks," and that the company would provide further updates at an upcoming Architecture Day.

Swan said the company had a built-in buffer in its roadmap to account for process node delays. That accomodation comes as a result of hard-learned lessons from the company's incessant 10nm delays. Intel says it will use its advanced packaging technologies, which allow it to mix and match components produced from external sources with its own chips, to help reconcile the six month delay to its 7nm processors with the year-long delay to its internal 7nm yield projections. In the past, Intel stated that it would also enable newer architectures to be portable to older nodes, so it's plausible that Intel could resort to back-porting some architectures as part of its contingency plan.

The 7nm delay reflects yet another setback as Intel still struggles to overcome the multi-year yield issues it has encountered with its 10nm process. Those delays have allowed its competitors, like AMD, to wrest the process node leadership position from Intel for the first time in the company's history. That's triggered a price war in the market as Intel fights a true x86 competitor with a better node, not to mention Amazon's new Graviton 2 ARM chips based on TSMC's 7nm node. Apple also recently announced that it is transitioning from Intel's chips to its own ARM-based 7nm silicon. The 7nm delay also exacerbates the recent news that rock star chip architect Jim Keller, who was a key part of a team effort to revitalize the company's roadmaps, has left the company.
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Today Intel said that it plans to increase its shipments of 10nm chips by 20% over its prior projections, so it appears the company's 10nm plans have shifted out of necessity. Intel's new plan centers on gaining another 'full node' of performance from its current 10nm node, meaning 10nm may have longer legs than the company expected when it announced last year that it would accelerate 7nm production. Intel pulled off a similar feat with its 14nm processors through a series of "+" revisions that added incremental performance improvements, so it does have a track record of successful inter-node improvements that could help it remain competitive until it can correct the issues with its 7nm process.

Intel has also traditionally used third-party fabs, currently to the tune of ~20% of its production, for low-margin, non-CPU products built on trailing-edge nodes. Intel's new plans to more aggressively leverage external fabs could result in it using other fabs for its core logic, like CPUs and GPUs, which the company hasn't done in the past. As Swan noted, that will present challenges in maintaining attractive ASPs for Intel's products, especially given the scale of its production needs. Ultimately, Intel could also face significantly reduced margins if it outsources significant portions of its fabrication of high-margin products, like CPUs, to third parties. Relying upon an outside vendor for leading-edge node production also incurs more risk in terms of supply assurance as Intel could be forced to compete with deep-pocketed rival semiconductor companies, like Apple, Nvidia and AMD, among others, for production capacity.

Quote:This time, Intel’s entire approach to the topic was different. Instead of reassuring investors that the products built at third-party foundries would be low-cost hardware, Intel openly acknowledged that it would use whatever technology stack was required to deliver performance leadership, be that fully internal manufacturing, fully external, or a combination of the two. CEO Bob Swan emphasized that this plan is part of Intel’s commitment to flexibility and argued that its willingness to develop what he called contingency plans is a sign that the company is determined to deliver maximum value to both investors and customers.

I don’t disagree. At this point, given the challenges Intel has faced with its own manufacturing, the company would be foolish and potentially negligent if it failed to explore every option. That doesn’t change the fact that six years ago, Intel declared its process node leadership would continue on 14nm and into the future, while in 2020, the company CEO spoke of protecting the company’s roadmaps and products from its own process node problems. “We have learned from the challenges in our 10-nanometer transition,” Bob Swan said, “And have a milestone-driven approach to ensure our product competitiveness is not impacted by our process technology roadmap.”
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I think what Intel did today was put a very smooth face on a radical corporate realignment. If I might be permitted a bit of poetic license and a Deus Ex: Human Revolution quote: “It’s not the end of the world, but you can see it from here.”

Based on Swan’s own remarks and timelines, Chipzilla has 24-36 months to demonstrate why it should still own its own fabs. By late 2022 / early 2023, TSMC should be shipping 3nm. Even if we assume that Intel’s 7nm is good enough to compare directly to TSMC’s 5nm, that still puts the Taiwanese company a full node ahead.

Is this the end of Intel? Not by half. Intel’s financials are great, the company is tremendously profitable, its data center business continues to grow, and its cash flow is healthy. AMD was in far more trouble after Bulldozer bombed in 2011 than Intel is now, even facing further delays and the question of whether it will remain an IDM over the long term. The company’s process engineers may be struggling, but its CPU design teams are still excellent.

But having a great CPU design team is a necessary but insufficient component of holding the leadership position in CPUs that Intel has long commanded. The company is capable of mounting aggressive comebacks, but if Intel wants investors to see its foundry facilities as a necessary part of the business rather than a drag on its profits, it’s time to pull out all the stops and fix its factories. No, Bob Swan didn’t say that explicitly, today.

He didn’t have to.

Quote:Jim Keller on Lex Fridman's AI Podcast shed some light on his thoughts on the microprocessor design fundamentals as he sees them. In a hour-and-a-half-long interview, he approaches Moore's Law and its much lauded - and ubiquitously repeated - death, as well as the need for both iterative and zero-point microprocessor design requirements.

Mr. Keller approaches the usual microprocessor design loop, where a company develops a new design from scratch and then looks at the most fundamental way of adding performance. Usually, he says, easy 10% performance increments can be found by simply looking at a design and increasing execution units - increase a buffer here, increase a cache over there, put in another add processor on this part of the pipeline. However, he also speaks of how this process in itself is limiting, inasmuch as doing this often will eventually guide processor designs towards a bottleneck and the diminishing returns problem, where any more additions made to the design don't seem to increase performance - mostly just adding complexity, area and power requirements, and generally convoluting a given design.
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Mr. Keller approaches the usual microprocessor design loop, where a company develops a new design from scratch and then looks at the most fundamental way of adding performance. Usually, he says, easy 10% performance increments can be found by simply looking at a design and increasing execution units - increase a buffer here, increase a cache over there, put in another add processor on this part of the pipeline. However, he also speaks of how this process in itself is limiting, inasmuch as doing this often will eventually guide processor designs towards a bottleneck and the diminishing returns problem, where any more additions made to the design don't seem to increase performance - mostly just adding complexity, area and power requirements, and generally convoluting a given design.
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Of course, then comes Intel, which Keller himself describes as having a microprocessor development mindset that's closer to a 10-year sustained designed rather than the 3-5 year development schedule for a new architecture he favors. Interestingly, in the podcast, Jim Keller approaches this microarchitecture mindset on Intel from a short-term and long-term disaster perspective. According to him, repeating and refining a recipe (like Intel did many years with their Core architecture [author's side-note]) is the most efficient way to go about it: incrementally improving a design, saving money and taking a low-risk approach to processor development, albeit threatened by the diminishing returns equation we mentioned earlier.

The problem, according to Mr. Keller, is that managing quarter to quarter means that there is fear in hitting a short-term disaster with a rewrite from scratch; companies thus look to "milk" every ounce of profit from a previous design by incrementally improving it. However, this primes companies to hit a long-term disaster, much like we see today with Intel (it's not a disaster for a multi-billion dollar company like Intel, but you get the point): its architecture, which didn't go through a from-scratch design phase for years, was superseded by AMD's new Zen design and its iterations.
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Closing up this article, which doesn't aim to be a summation of the AI Podcast, but aims to highlight some interesting tidbits present there, are Mr. Keller's thoughts on team management for a technological project. According to him, he sees the existence of abstraction layers in microprocessor design teams. Where a team of 10 humans works well together, and a team of up to 100 people may be able to function properly under a single supervision, any more than that and teams have to be divided, with organizational boundaries having to be set - and here too appears the diminishing returns equation. Jim Keller says some very interesting things regarding this, as in, that humans in general aren't getting smarter - so there is a fundamental limit to how much "processing power" you can have in a team working on a set project, considering team and size and communication capacity caps that derive from the fact that we are, well, humans.
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TL;DR: Jim Keller is clearly an extremely accomplished microprocessor designer, but also a project leader, and has very clear ideas regarding the industry and his field of work. You should read the entire article and then move onto the podcast.