Intel canceled their 20A after bad results, and shifted focus to 18A.

It’s even to the point that their own Arrow Lake chips are going to be fabbed by TSMC.

Realistically, there are probably half of office workstations, maybe more, where the business users who use them can do everything they need through a browser.

In that sense most stuff already works on Linux, including basic productivity software, email and calendaring, real time communications through Slack or Teams or whatever.

More specialized jobs might need more specialized software, but for many workers they don’t need that.

Because we’re going to stop supporting Windows 98!

At least there was a technical reason there, that Microsoft was merging the two separate codebases for consumer Windows and enterprise Windows, and building on the better NT codebase than the 95->98->ME codebase.

And XP was actually way better for the main thing that we were going to be using computers for going forward: networked with the actual internet.

Windows 11? Can’t see any paradigm shift in how the operating system itself is supposed to work, at least not on anything that actually makes a difference in a favorable way.

Did Intel ever get its foundry business off the ground? I remember some announcements in the last year or two, and then some rumors of yields not being good enough for the customers to move forward, and now some rumors of Intel thinking of spinning off the business. This partnership might be a watered down version of those plans.

I don’t think it would be difficult to get the IMV up to compliance with US regulations. If they’re selling it in Mexico, it’ll be required to have airbags. The hood looks long enough to have engineered in proper crumpling in a crash. Things like backup cameras might require a little bit of retooling, but that’s not actually super expensive compared to the other expenses of officially bringing it in: the 25% import tax, a parts and service network, etc.

So it’s a business decision not to even try to get it into the U.S., informed by those regulations.

In contrast, something like a kei truck wouldn’t be easy to get street legal as a new car in the US: no crumple zone and higher center of gravity are more fundamental safety issues that can’t easily be engineered around.

At the same time, expecting privacy in a room where a bunch of strangers hang out is already unreasonable. If everyone already in the channel can log the chats, for example by idling in the channel, then adding E2E on top of that is probably a false sense of security.

Userland

How much does a banana cost, $30,000?

YouTube serves probably dozens of formats/bitrates, and has spent years tweaking how it ingests, transcodes, and serves videos. Adding in-stream ads might have been a bigger engineering task in that environment. Depending on the percentage of users/viewers avoiding ads, it might not have been worth the return.

I imagine the first image file would’ve come well after the first text transmission, and would’ve required the development of a binary file transfer protocol. Maybe they’re talking about XMODEM and the BBS era, before those BBSes were eventually networked onto the internet.

You can’t say that, though, because it implies Chinese engineers and information technology scientists are trailblazers rather than plagarists and IP thieves.

I mean, I said what I said and I meant it. The Chinese are trailblazing a path nobody has tried before: DUV only for sub-10nm processes. It’s not ideal, and the reason why nobody did it before is because they already had EUV by the time they got there.

But I wouldn’t sleep on the ability of anyone to be able to solve problems using the tools at their disposal.

Especially since there’s nothing stopping the mainland Chinese companies from hiring Taiwanese engineers.

Not a ton of people believed that Taiwan could surpass Japan, either, but that happened in the 90’s. Not a ton of people believe that Japan can get back in the game, but Rapidus is making a play for 2nm.

Nothing is forever, and things are always changing. I’m somewhat optimistic that western sanctions will keep China from competing on the world stage at semiconductor fabrication, but I don’t think it’s a guarantee or in any way inevitable.

Meanwhile, you’ve got companies in Taiwan, Korea, China, and Japan breaking into the 3nm and 2nm scales.

The mainland Chinese SMIC is doing everything they can without access to ASML’s EUV machines, and have gotten further than anyone else has on DUV. It remains to be seen just how far they can get without plateauing on the limits of that tech. Most doubted that they could get past 10nm, but some of their recent chips appear to be comparable to 7nm, and there are rumors that they have a low yield 5nm process that isn’t economically feasible but can be a strong political statement.

TSMC is delaying the transition to Gate All Around, announcing that they won’t be trying it on the 3nm processes, and waiting until 2nm to roll that out. They’re the undisputed leader today, so they’re milking their current finFET advantage for as long as it will sustain them.

Samsung has already switched to Gate All Around for their 3nm process, so they might get the jump on everyone else (even if they struggled with the previous paradigm of finFET). But they’re not lining up external customers, as their yields still can’t compete with TSMC’s. It’s entirely possible though that as the industry moves from finFETs to GAAFETs, Samsung could take a lead.

Intel basically couldn’t get finFETs to work, and are already trying to skip ahead to GAAFETs (which they call RibbonFET). Plus Intel (like the others) is trying to introduce backside power delivery, which, if it can be commercialized and mass produced, would achieve huge gains in power efficiency. Intel did introduce both technologies in its 20A process (supposedly 2nm class), but then canceled it due to low yield. So they’re basically betting the company on their 18A process, and hoping they can get that to market before TSMC and Samsung hit their stride on 2nm.

But they won’t go bankrupt because the US gov./army need Intel to stay relevant against China, and Intel is basically the only American company that both designs and fabs their own processors and that is still relevant.

That’s never stopped anyone from going bankrupt and wiping out shareholders. If the tech is that critical, the US government might engineer a bailout of the company, but will make the shares worthless in the process.

They did it with GM and Chrysler in 2009, they did it with Iridium in 2000.

In the same way that a normal person can have a net worth less than the value of the house they own: debt and illiquidity.

HIDEO

Intel was consistently playing catch up to tsmc

Yes, this has been true since about 2017, because 10nm was about 3 years late, losing its previous 3-year lead.

The future is uncertain, but the past is already set.

what is your source for this?

Familiarity with the industry, and knowledge that finFET was exactly what caused Intel to stall, Global Foundries to just give up and quit trying to keep up, and where Samsung fell behind TSMC. TSMC’s dominance today all goes through its success at mass producing finFET and being able to iterate on that while everyone else was struggling to get those fundamentals figured out.

Intel launched its chips using its 22nm process in 2012, its 14nm process in 2014, and its 10nm process in 2019. At each ITRS “nm” node, Intel’s performance and density was somewhere better than TSMC’s at the equivalent node, but somewhere worse than the next. Intel’s 5-year lag between 14nm and 10nm is when TSMC passed them up, launching 10nm, and even 7nm before Intel got its 10nm node going. And even though Intel’s 14nm was better than TSMC’s 14nm, and arguably comparable to TSMC’s 10nm, it was left behind by TSMC’s 7nm.

You can find articles from around 2018 or so trying to compare Intel’s increasingly implausible claims that Intel’s 14nm was comparable to TSMC’s 10nm or 7nm processes, reflecting that Intel was stuck on 14nm for way too long, trying to figure out how to continue improving while grappling with finFET related technical challenges.

You can also read reviews of AMD versus Intel chips around the mid-2010s to see that Intel had better fab techniques then, and that AMD had to try to pioneer innovating packaging techniques, like chiplets, to make up for that gap.

If you’re just looking at superficial developments at the mass production stage, you’re going to miss out on the things that are in 20+ year pipelines between lab demonstrations, prototypes, low yield test production, etc.

Whoever figures out GAA and backside power is going to have an opportunity to lead for the next 3-4 generations. TSMC hasn’t figured it out yet, and there’s no real reason to assume that their finFET dominance would translate to the next step.

Another example here is the Matrix protocol, specifically designed from the ground up to be open and distributed. In reality, the only option for full-featured stable server software is the one maintained by the project itself, and there aren’t a lot of third party clients available.

Openness itself is a good goal, but the complexity itself can pose a barrier openness.

Intel has only been behind for the last 7 years or so, because they were several years delayed in rolling out their 10nm node. Before 14nm, Intel was always about about 3 years ahead of TSMC. Intel got leapfrogged at that stage because it struggled to implement the finFET technology that is necessary for progressing beyond 14nm.

The forward progress of semiconductor manufacturing tech isn’t an inevitable march towards improvement. Each generation presents new challenges, and some of them are quite significant.

In the near future, the challenge is in certain three dimensional gate structures more complicated than finFET (known as Gate All Around FETs) and in backside power delivery. TSMC has decided to delay introducing those techniques because of the complexity and challenges while they squeeze out a few more generations, but it remains to be seen whether they’ll hit a wall where Samsung and/or Intel leapfrog them again. Or maybe Samsung or Intel hit a wall and fall even further behind. Either way, we’re not yet at a stage where we know what things look like beyond 2nm, so there’s still active competition for that future market.

Edit: this is a pretty good description of the engineering challenges facing the semiconductor industry next:

https://www.semianalysis.com/p/clash-of-the-foundries