System news
AMD woke the sleeping dragon with Ryzen, now Mark Williams watches as Intel begins to flex its muscles.
AMD woke the sleeping dragon with Ryzen, now Mark Williams watches as Intel begins to flex its muscles
Intel has been on the back foot ever since AMD launched its firstgeneration Ryzen processor in 2017, sporting a new chiplet design strategy. Intel, it seemed, didn’t initially think it was much of a threat, but with each new Ryzen generation it watched AMD eat away at its long-held performance lead. Until finally when the Ryzen 5000 series launched and took the performance crown from Intel outright in all categories, even in its last stronghold of gaming performance. This combined with Apple’s decision to ditch Intel in favour of its own in-house designed ARM-based processors meant that Intel’s confidence had all but been defeated.
Back in January Intel appointed a new CEO, Pat Gelsinger a former long-time star employee to help steer Intel in a new direction and revive the company’s fortunes. Two months later and Gelsinger has stirred up much excitement amongst employees and launched a humorous ad campaign poking fun at Apple products using none other than Justin Long, the ‘Mac’ from the famous ‘I’m a Mac’ TV ads from the early 2000s. It’s obvious Intel is not happy that Apple cut it loose.
Gelsinger – having reinvigorated the company – recently announced its new strategy going forward.
Digging into the topics, Gelsinger spoke about its 7nm process progress, essentially saying that after fixing the blockages in the pipeline it is on track to make its debut in 2023 with Meteor Lake, a processor that appears to be Intel’s full response to Ryzen in that it’ll be a chiplet (or “tile” as Intel likes to call them) system-on-package design leveraging multiple manufacturing nodes, processes and packaging techniques like Foveros and EMIB to build.
While exciting to hear, that’s still a solid two years away, by which time TSMC is expected to be in volume production of its 3nm node. On the surface it still seems like Intel might be a tad behind the leading edge, but with 12th Gen Alder Lake processors coming later this year and finally shipping 10nm parts to the desktop, it seems like Intel is once again on the move with manufacturing.
On the topic of manufacturing, Gelsinger also announced a major shift in Intel’s posture with regards to its crown jewels – its fabrication plants. Long held as its prized possession that no one else could use, Gelsinger announced that Intel’s new IDM 2.0 (Integrated Device Manufacturing) strategy would result in Intel using more third-party foundry capacity than it does today for the manufacturing of its new compute tiles, giving it the flexibility on price, power and capacity that it needs going forward.
Gelsinger also announced that Intel would be building two new fabs in Arizona USA, solely dedicated to giving guaranteed wafer capacity for its next and biggest announcement – Intel becoming a world-class foundry business. This means Intel will open its doors to customers wanting to have chips fabricated and using Intel’s fabs to do it. Essentially, Intel will start competing more directly with the likes of TSMC, Samsung and Global Foundries to produce semiconductors for the global economy. This announcement will be music to Joe Biden’s ears, having declared he wanted to help fix the global chip shortage. Intel is committing to building more fabs in the US and EU to diversify supply away from Asia which currently holds around 80 percent of the global semiconductor supply chain.
Building more fabs around the world and opening its doors to customers will be a boon for global chip supply and help solve the shortage in which we currently find ourselves. Not to mention give some of the larger economies around the world sovereign control over semiconductor supplies.
Exciting times ahead at Intel. For now, at least, we know that 10nm is the best we’ll see for Intel’s processors until 2023 rolls around. Let the fabs wars begin!