I understand the part where Intel is trying to get external customers interested in the output of their fab by exhibiting an implementation of an ARM processor.
In the past I understand that they did some custom implementation of Xeon cores for hyperscalers, but the meat and potatoes was the chip they designed.
Do we take this to mean that the current leadership assess the value proposition -of Intel- to be in the /making/ of the chips, akin to TSMC, and not in the /designing/ of them, as in all past seasons at Intel?
I suppose a key factor here is how far from reference this chip is. If they mean to innovate in ARM ISA territory, that's a development to ponder. But if this is a "we can also make those things" statement, I'm hearing bears in the woods.
>Do we take this to mean that the current leadership assess the value proposition -of Intel- to be in the /making/ of the chips, akin to TSMC, and not in the /designing/ of them, as in all past seasons at Intel?
No… Gelsinger laid all of this out very clearly. He wanted the design side of the house and the manufacturing side of the house to stand on their own. He didn’t want the design side relying solely on process to maintain performance leads, and he also wanted them to have the flexibility to use any fab should manufacturing fall behind.
In order for manufacturing to survive design potentially going to competitors for certain generations, they need to also support outside business.
As I understand it, Intel's strength was in manufacturing their own design in their exclusive (and most advanced) process. So the advantage was being vertically integrated.
State of the art processes are too expensive these days. x86 CPUs alone cannot sustain them. Specially, when AMD builds their CPU also with state of the art processes.
So by becoming a foundry, Intel may be able to have state of the art fabs and use it in their own designs of x86 CPUs, GPUs, etc.
The fabs need external customers not just intel to be profitable.
The custom designs for hyperscalars don’t count as external customers, they’re just part of Intels own production set.
And since nobody but AMD or VIA can make x86, it has to be ARM or other ISAs instead.
The article title is a bit clickbait since ARM is the eventuality of having external customers. The real key point is that they have made chips that aren’t their own at all.
Assuming they’re telling the truth, they’ve successfully built one chip from that fab. That’s good, but it doesn’t mean the fab is capable of manufacturing at scale while turning a profit.
They need an external customer for the fab so they can iterate and work out the issues. It’s anyone’s guess if someone trusts intel to manufacture on their behalf instead of sticking with an established player. They’re stuck in a chicken and egg situation - can’t reach high yields without a customer, but a customer only wants to sign up if the yields and future deliveries are guaranteed.
Intels only hope might be that someone, not naming names, coerces an established company to sign up.
That's too pessimistic. In general, customers don't want to be dealing with a monopolist and foundry customers are no different. It's in everyone's interest to solve the unproven process problem, so if Intel has evidence that the process isn't bust, customers will find a product which can be used as a pipe cleaner for mutual benefit.
Apple is similarly paranoid about single-sourcing -- off the top of my head I'm not sure whether their top-end M-class chips are currently fabbed by both TSMC and Samsung, or just TSMC>
Because if there was only a single source (for example if the other one was out-competed), they'd have to pay 30% of their revenue for the privilege of being in the FabStore.
They always are the first ones to use the most advanced node by TSMC, the designs probably are only compatible with that particular process. Have not heard of apple using samsung for SoCs.
The foundries they're putting together for future manufacturing are just hoping customers will comes. Intel needs partnerships because the brand isn't the same since the core founders and builders are long gone.
I think that's the industry's viewpoint as well. Intel's fabs' biggest customer was Intel. They're not doing well, so they're not fabbing as much especially at the leading edge. It'll death spiral.
This is common in industry. You often do give a discount and guarantees to the first users of a system to compensate for the risk the customer is taking.
This is part of how DigitalOcean got going, Kingston gave a huge discount on a traditional HDD order if the order was switched to SSD instead because they wanted to kickstart scaled manufacturing. First time an SSD was put in and the IOPS was measured, the product direction was clear, at the time we thought it might be a CDN tho, but eventually landed on a "cloud hosting provider".
If we assume that intel gets successful with 18A with their x86 processors, would they even have the money to finance the node after that? And the node after that which gets exponentially more expensive?
In the past x86 raked in enough money to burn a lot of it on new fab tech but non-x86 has grown immensely and floods TSMC with money. The problem for intel is that their fab tech was fitted to their processor architecture and vice versa. It made sense in the past but in the future it might not. For the processor business it may be better to use TSMC for production. For the fab it may be necessary to manufacture for many customers and take a premium for being based in a country in need. So, a split-up may be inevitable and this fabbing a competitive ARM chip surely helps in attracting more customers. Customers who may pay a premium for political and security reasons.
Apple, Nvidia and US govt can provide the required funds if they have confidence in its ability to deliver. These companies will benefit from breaking current monopoly of TSMC.
I wouldn't count on either to save Intel as it still is (i.e with the fab business still attached to the CPU/GPU business). While it's true that having Intel fabs as a second source would be nice for them to alleviate the dependency on TSMC, they are also competing with Intel on the CPU/GPU side.
My guess is, they're gonna let Intel rot a little further while doing their best to pressure for Intel to split off their fab biz (as AMD had done back then), and then invest just in the fab.
Samsung is already in a much better position for this. They have external customers and experience facilitating them. Unlike Intel's track record which doesn't inspire confidence at all.
Intel has something Samsung doesn't. It's a US company operating mostly on US soil so the US government has a vested interest to keep this strategic asset going for as long as possible.
Tech hardware is a cutthroat business, tech companies are gonna order at Intel if it has something that others don't on a business point of view: more performing, cheaper, faster delivery.
The US government can wish and encourage all they want, as long as Samsung, TSMC and any other produces better chips for less, the money will flow there.
Probably Intel’s fumble when Apple asked them for better performance per watt for the laptop CPUs and whether they wanted the iPhone CPU business back in 2006.
Probably the Intel CPUs in Macbooks before Apple made the push for the M1 - circa the Intel quad core era where their laptop chips had major heat issues... ~2012 IIRC?
If they didn’t have one already they would have presumably acquired one when they bought Altera - they had SoC FPGAs that have ARM cores hooked up to an FPGA fabric.
They have since spun off Altera but I imagine they’d still have a license.
Why is Intel manufacturing an Arm SoC as a reference platform? Probably because it's trying to attract external customers, and there's a whole lot more companies building Arm SoCs than there are firms pitching x86-64 processors.
They're not trying to build the next best thing. They're trying to attract customers.
I don't think Intel plans to make a product, but to prove they can build a working chip that's not one of their own design. Being ARM has fewer developmental risks than a RISC-V design and make validation easier.
Very unlikely to happen but Intel could release an Arm chip with native x86 translation. Arm and AMD IP would be needed but this would be the best chip for Windows
I don't understand what the difference is between "an ARM chip with native x86 translation" and a dual-ISA x86 and ARM chip.
And I don't understand why you'd want a dual-ISA x86 and ARM rather than just an x86 chip. You wouldn't get whatever CPU front-end simplicity advantages there are from ARM, since your front-end would get significantly more complex and consume significantly more transistors than with a normal x86 chip. And I don't think there's a market of people who want ARM for compatibility reason; any Windows software which supports ARM also supports x86.
What they could do is to release an ARM chip with a slightly extended ISA to add the select features which are difficult to emulate in software, such as loads and stores with the memory ordering guarantees x86 provides but ARM doesn't. Apple does this AFAIK, and it's one part of why Rosetta 2 is so good. But any ARM CPU maker could do this.
I wonder if ARM instructions could be translated to Intel’s uOps. Then everything except that translation could be shared. And, since programs consist entirely of one type of instruction for the most part, we could imagine that the chip should be able to stick to just doing one type of translation for the duration of a program run, rather than having to figure it out for each instruction.
I’m not saying I want this, but it might be surprisingly not totally impractical.
Denver does it because it was supposed to be an x86 CPU, but they couldn't get an agreement with Intel for patent licensing, so they pivoted into being the first available aarch64 CPU since decode was happening entirely in software.
> I don't understand what the difference is between "an ARM chip with native x86 translation" and a dual-ISA x86 and ARM chip.
Look at Apple's Rosetta 2 for an example. M-series Apple Silicon has special undocumented modes that mirror x86 architectural quirks that don't usually exist in ARM, in order to support AOT-translated machine code. The chip doesn't support x86 instructions, but it has the amenities to support x86 code. That could be what "native x86 translation" meant?
That's what I suggested in my comment's last paragraph. I don't think that counts as "an ARM chip with native x86 translation", but really the only person who can say whether that's what dlojudice meant is dlojudice.
I understand the part where Intel is trying to get external customers interested in the output of their fab by exhibiting an implementation of an ARM processor.
In the past I understand that they did some custom implementation of Xeon cores for hyperscalers, but the meat and potatoes was the chip they designed.
Do we take this to mean that the current leadership assess the value proposition -of Intel- to be in the /making/ of the chips, akin to TSMC, and not in the /designing/ of them, as in all past seasons at Intel?
I suppose a key factor here is how far from reference this chip is. If they mean to innovate in ARM ISA territory, that's a development to ponder. But if this is a "we can also make those things" statement, I'm hearing bears in the woods.
>Do we take this to mean that the current leadership assess the value proposition -of Intel- to be in the /making/ of the chips, akin to TSMC, and not in the /designing/ of them, as in all past seasons at Intel?
No… Gelsinger laid all of this out very clearly. He wanted the design side of the house and the manufacturing side of the house to stand on their own. He didn’t want the design side relying solely on process to maintain performance leads, and he also wanted them to have the flexibility to use any fab should manufacturing fall behind.
In order for manufacturing to survive design potentially going to competitors for certain generations, they need to also support outside business.
https://www.intc.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1451/...
As I understand it, Intel's strength was in manufacturing their own design in their exclusive (and most advanced) process. So the advantage was being vertically integrated. State of the art processes are too expensive these days. x86 CPUs alone cannot sustain them. Specially, when AMD builds their CPU also with state of the art processes. So by becoming a foundry, Intel may be able to have state of the art fabs and use it in their own designs of x86 CPUs, GPUs, etc.
The fabs need external customers not just intel to be profitable.
The custom designs for hyperscalars don’t count as external customers, they’re just part of Intels own production set.
And since nobody but AMD or VIA can make x86, it has to be ARM or other ISAs instead.
The article title is a bit clickbait since ARM is the eventuality of having external customers. The real key point is that they have made chips that aren’t their own at all.
> I'm hearing bears in the woods
No, why?
The world desperately needs a TSMC competitor.
Assuming they’re telling the truth, they’ve successfully built one chip from that fab. That’s good, but it doesn’t mean the fab is capable of manufacturing at scale while turning a profit.
They need an external customer for the fab so they can iterate and work out the issues. It’s anyone’s guess if someone trusts intel to manufacture on their behalf instead of sticking with an established player. They’re stuck in a chicken and egg situation - can’t reach high yields without a customer, but a customer only wants to sign up if the yields and future deliveries are guaranteed.
Intels only hope might be that someone, not naming names, coerces an established company to sign up.
Isn't the traditional solution to offer a really big rebate to the first customer?
Like 75% off for the first run of chips?
That's too pessimistic. In general, customers don't want to be dealing with a monopolist and foundry customers are no different. It's in everyone's interest to solve the unproven process problem, so if Intel has evidence that the process isn't bust, customers will find a product which can be used as a pipe cleaner for mutual benefit.
Specially companies like Nvidia for which the gross profit margin is so high their risk of losing TSMC is higher than risk of losing money.
Apple is similarly paranoid about single-sourcing -- off the top of my head I'm not sure whether their top-end M-class chips are currently fabbed by both TSMC and Samsung, or just TSMC>
Because if there was only a single source (for example if the other one was out-competed), they'd have to pay 30% of their revenue for the privilege of being in the FabStore.
They always are the first ones to use the most advanced node by TSMC, the designs probably are only compatible with that particular process. Have not heard of apple using samsung for SoCs.
Apple used Samsung through the A7. Moved to TSMC for the A8.
The foundries they're putting together for future manufacturing are just hoping customers will comes. Intel needs partnerships because the brand isn't the same since the core founders and builders are long gone.
I don't get it. Intel has a very huge customer for their 18A node, one that could bring billions in orders: itself.
If they themselves don't produce their chip there, why would anybody else do?
I think that's the industry's viewpoint as well. Intel's fabs' biggest customer was Intel. They're not doing well, so they're not fabbing as much especially at the leading edge. It'll death spiral.
This is common in industry. You often do give a discount and guarantees to the first users of a system to compensate for the risk the customer is taking.
This is part of how DigitalOcean got going, Kingston gave a huge discount on a traditional HDD order if the order was switched to SSD instead because they wanted to kickstart scaled manufacturing. First time an SSD was put in and the IOPS was measured, the product direction was clear, at the time we thought it might be a CDN tho, but eventually landed on a "cloud hosting provider".
> They need an external customer for the fab so they can iterate and work out the issues.
I guess you mean Intel to iterate using its own money to get the customer's chip right, no?
that customer could've been apple. since they used to have a close relationship, till intel shit the bed.
If we assume that intel gets successful with 18A with their x86 processors, would they even have the money to finance the node after that? And the node after that which gets exponentially more expensive?
In the past x86 raked in enough money to burn a lot of it on new fab tech but non-x86 has grown immensely and floods TSMC with money. The problem for intel is that their fab tech was fitted to their processor architecture and vice versa. It made sense in the past but in the future it might not. For the processor business it may be better to use TSMC for production. For the fab it may be necessary to manufacture for many customers and take a premium for being based in a country in need. So, a split-up may be inevitable and this fabbing a competitive ARM chip surely helps in attracting more customers. Customers who may pay a premium for political and security reasons.
Apple, Nvidia and US govt can provide the required funds if they have confidence in its ability to deliver. These companies will benefit from breaking current monopoly of TSMC.
I wouldn't count on either to save Intel as it still is (i.e with the fab business still attached to the CPU/GPU business). While it's true that having Intel fabs as a second source would be nice for them to alleviate the dependency on TSMC, they are also competing with Intel on the CPU/GPU side.
My guess is, they're gonna let Intel rot a little further while doing their best to pressure for Intel to split off their fab biz (as AMD had done back then), and then invest just in the fab.
Samsung is already in a much better position for this. They have external customers and experience facilitating them. Unlike Intel's track record which doesn't inspire confidence at all.
Intel has something Samsung doesn't. It's a US company operating mostly on US soil so the US government has a vested interest to keep this strategic asset going for as long as possible.
Tech hardware is a cutthroat business, tech companies are gonna order at Intel if it has something that others don't on a business point of view: more performing, cheaper, faster delivery.
The US government can wish and encourage all they want, as long as Samsung, TSMC and any other produces better chips for less, the money will flow there.
Yep, that's exactly what they did with TSMC. Foundries don't just build massive production lines and hope someone will use them, even TSMC.
> Apple, Nvidia and US govt can provide the required funds if they have confidence in its ability to deliver.
Given Apple's history with Intel's ability to deliver, I'm guessing the confidence there isn't high.
Are you referring to 5G radio modems or another chip?
Probably Intel’s fumble when Apple asked them for better performance per watt for the laptop CPUs and whether they wanted the iPhone CPU business back in 2006.
A more recent motivation might be Apple's switch to in-house ARM for MacOS for similar reasons.
Probably the Intel CPUs in Macbooks before Apple made the push for the M1 - circa the Intel quad core era where their laptop chips had major heat issues... ~2012 IIRC?
Amazon and Google probably as well?
> Intel is effectively saying "Hey, we can make Arm chips!"
Makes sense since they were once popular in the NUC space and Apple has shown high-end ARM has a market.
Random question: where did the ARM core design come from?
Intel's first exposure was the purchase of DEC StrongARM in the 90s, although that particular product line was sold to Marvel.
Nit: Marvel makes comics. Marvell Technologies (two l's) makes chips with ARM CPUs in them, mostly for datacenter gear.
originally the MOS Technology 6502 :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture_family#Histor...
it's an interesting article
a bit of a stretch
Probably directly from Arm? https://www.intc.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1614/...
Intel are believed to hold an Arm architectural license [1] as far as I know, they have made Arm-based things in the past.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture_family#Archit...
If they didn’t have one already they would have presumably acquired one when they bought Altera - they had SoC FPGAs that have ARM cores hooked up to an FPGA fabric.
They have since spun off Altera but I imagine they’d still have a license.
why only apple and Nvidia are left buying from foundries. is the market for cpu/gpu that bad? zero innovation and other players even in niche markets?
Have you heard of AMD? You know... the company with about 25% of CPU market share (at least in PCs) these days?
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/amds-desktop...
They have 17% overall according to this chart which includes Apple.
https://www.accio.com/business/best-selling-cpus
Read up on this young startup, as I think they are going places!
Intel pays for TSMC to produce their chips as well
It should be RISC-V... who is in charge at Intel??
Is this related to the rumors of softbank (ARM) money injection in Intel?
From the article:
Why is Intel manufacturing an Arm SoC as a reference platform? Probably because it's trying to attract external customers, and there's a whole lot more companies building Arm SoCs than there are firms pitching x86-64 processors.
They're not trying to build the next best thing. They're trying to attract customers.
I don't think Intel plans to make a product, but to prove they can build a working chip that's not one of their own design. Being ARM has fewer developmental risks than a RISC-V design and make validation easier.
Intel demonstrated a RISC-V chip called Horse Creek two years ago.
>It should be RISC-V... who is in charge at Intel??
Why should it be that? What are your arguments?
Very unlikely to happen but Intel could release an Arm chip with native x86 translation. Arm and AMD IP would be needed but this would be the best chip for Windows
I don't understand what the difference is between "an ARM chip with native x86 translation" and a dual-ISA x86 and ARM chip.
And I don't understand why you'd want a dual-ISA x86 and ARM rather than just an x86 chip. You wouldn't get whatever CPU front-end simplicity advantages there are from ARM, since your front-end would get significantly more complex and consume significantly more transistors than with a normal x86 chip. And I don't think there's a market of people who want ARM for compatibility reason; any Windows software which supports ARM also supports x86.
What they could do is to release an ARM chip with a slightly extended ISA to add the select features which are difficult to emulate in software, such as loads and stores with the memory ordering guarantees x86 provides but ARM doesn't. Apple does this AFAIK, and it's one part of why Rosetta 2 is so good. But any ARM CPU maker could do this.
I wonder if ARM instructions could be translated to Intel’s uOps. Then everything except that translation could be shared. And, since programs consist entirely of one type of instruction for the most part, we could imagine that the chip should be able to stick to just doing one type of translation for the duration of a program run, rather than having to figure it out for each instruction.
I’m not saying I want this, but it might be surprisingly not totally impractical.
Fujitsu and Nvidia also implement (at least) TSO.
https://threedots.ovh/blog/2021/02/cpus-with-sequential-cons...
Denver does it because it was supposed to be an x86 CPU, but they couldn't get an agreement with Intel for patent licensing, so they pivoted into being the first available aarch64 CPU since decode was happening entirely in software.
> I don't understand what the difference is between "an ARM chip with native x86 translation" and a dual-ISA x86 and ARM chip.
Look at Apple's Rosetta 2 for an example. M-series Apple Silicon has special undocumented modes that mirror x86 architectural quirks that don't usually exist in ARM, in order to support AOT-translated machine code. The chip doesn't support x86 instructions, but it has the amenities to support x86 code. That could be what "native x86 translation" meant?
That's what I suggested in my comment's last paragraph. I don't think that counts as "an ARM chip with native x86 translation", but really the only person who can say whether that's what dlojudice meant is dlojudice.
And why wouldn’t Intel be capable of doing the same?
I never said that?