Intel: Our balance sheet is a smoking ruin, but we think our new chips work Intel has told the world its vaunted 18A manufacturing process works – at least in early tests … that it's announced with few details. Chipzilla on Tuesday announced what it described as "major milestones" for its foundry, which it now treats as a separate biz that supplies chipmaking services to both Intel and third-party …
They may not have them yet.
It's perfectly normal for the first samples of chips to have bugs that need to be fixed before you can proceed further. These chips are insanely complex.
"It boots an OS" is a step before "it runs reliably", and that's needed before you can run all the benchmarks. And after that, you look at optimizing things so the chip runs as fast as possible. Only then do you have performance numbers that will match the final chip.
Fsck Wall Street. Telling investors what yields are before you even ramp up to near production levels is simply feeding their intensely greedy, selfish FOMO in hopes of jumping onto a bandwagon before its even finished.
Let them rot. When you have things sorted *then* make production announcements, before then tell them to suck an egg and wait until you get things right. You make an early announcement for yields, fails during roll-out...and the fscking greedy bastards sue you anyway.
Wall Street are not your friends. They are blood-sucking selfish bastards that deserve to rot on a pike as soon as possible.
They are blood-sucking selfish bastards that deserve to rot on a pike as soon as possible.
I'm sure Intel are open to your ideas on alternative capital structures that don't involve public equity markets?
There's sooooo much that's wrong with the way Wall Street works, on the other hand I'm not seeing many better options.
While you are right to be sceptical, but it's too early to know what those numbers are like versus actual yield and performance figures once a production design is being produced.
I.e. this could be a repeat of 10nm announcements where "yield was good*" where the asterisk indicated "for components clocked below 1GHz" which later turned out to be "yield is truly awful for anything above 2GHz and approaching zero yield at the frequencies we are targeting" because power leaks were so bad.
Or it could be that yields are around the mid-30s but are expected to double once the process matures and they get minor process issues resolved which would be broadly inline with expectations for an x86 processor but low for mobile ARM chips with lower clock speeds and generally smaller dies.
I am certain that Intel will eventually turn things around. The real damage over the last few years is to their reputation. Companies that once would have never considered AMD are now openly saying they dumping their Intel servers for AMD ones. The way Intel has handled the damaged 13/14 chips has alienated all but the most blind fanboys. AMD is coming out this a winner only because they have been delivering the last several years.
The real damage to Intel over the last 10 years has been their failure to deliver new processes which has made investors jittery about investing even more money in the next generation of fabs
Maybe that's what you are classifying as reputation but this is likely the last attempt at staying a leading edge semiconductor company unless the US government choose to assist with the next future fab refresh which I think is likely for another generation unless TSMC commit to US operations.
While you may scoff at that, spending $20bn on a pair of fabs that might not break even makes people risk adverse and there isba long history of semiconductor manufacturers not being able to finance the next round of upgrades and becoming a niche manufacturer or going out of business.
Shareholders can easily also have shares in AMD, thus playing the two big (only?) horses.
Not to mention that, said shareholders are that cash flush, they should have shares in TSMC as well, giving them revenue across the board.
Convenient timing for this announcement considering how most of the news stories regarding Intel of late have been negative. It sounds like PR spin as I think 18A production is going to end up slipping passed 2025 but who cares at that point if it makes the share price go up and the shareholders happy now.
If the chip manages to boot Windows 11 then much of it would need to be functional, if however it was just booting MSDOS then huge chunks could still be inoperative.
The fact that this bit of PR guff did not mention booting Windows 11 makes me think that it just booted MSDOS (something an 8086 could manage).
Considering the fiasco of 10nm, sky lake 14nm+++++ and now pretty serious flaws in apparently the entire 13th and 14th gen series of CPUs... I'll wait.
Not that Intel is on my mind to buy but genuine competition is good, fake competition in the way they announce new things no one can verify is worthless.
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