Intel has either squandered the tech and we will see drastic improvements soon or possibly they’ll fall closer toward the dustbin of history. I suspect the later since they’ve been stuck at various points of specifications for a decade plus. Or they do something novel for once. I wouldn’t count them out of a breakthrough into new architectures/fab processes entirely.
It's astonishing to me how far Intel has fallen in so short a time. I feel like it was only a couple years ago that Intel was understood universally to be the "heavyweight champion of the world" so to speak.
They completely missed the boat on mobile and AMD has leapfrogged them very recently on desktop. On top of that there were the Spectre vulnerabilities which shook confidence even further. This announcement is another huge blow given the extent to which the entire consumer electronics industry tends to follow Apple. I would be interested to hear an insider's perspective on such a rapid decline.
Not an insider, but as far as I know, it's mostly their fab that failed.
They're still on 14+++nm when AMD is on 7nm, with 5nm coming soon.
You can have the best architecture in the world (no idea if they have) and the best engineers, it's hard to compete when you're so far behind in transistor size.
Intel’s CEO, Brian Krzanich, was forced to resign in the middle of a major chip and manufacturing transition. [1]
That had to be a heavy blow because the politics in this company are ugly.
I feel like sometimes people look past the most obvious signs of why a company is struggling.
For example, Apple’s move to the mothership had a major impact on the company. It was one of the company’s biggest “product” releases. No one mentions this as a reason for anything.
They tried to jump too far with intel 10nm. The process node names no longer represent actual transistor size, they just indicate a new generation. With intel 10nm they took a risk and tried to shirk the die more then would normally happen in generation jump. If it worked it would put them a whole generation ahead of TSMC and secure process leadership. But physics bit them in the ass. It turned out that shirking that small was much harder then they thought, and the cells they were using were not robust enough to handle it.
Instead of putting them way ahead it cost them years of recovery and let AMD sneak up from behind.
I agree with you, but keep in mind that those numbers represent the generation of the process node, rather than specific physical characteristics. Intel 10nm is roughly comparable to TSMC's 7nm.
The problem (in my non-insider view) is that Intel's 10nm just hasn't delivered. It was delayed substantially, and faced several problems even after rollout.
Well they have spent the last 4 years trying to fix wave after wave of side-channel vulnerabilities. A handful of those affected ARM and AMD as well, but a very large number of them were Intel-only, and were a direct side effect of Intel cutting corners on safety to get advances in their performance numbers.
My comment was meant to be more general than Intel. I’m even including AMD here. x86 has no presence in mobile (that ship has sailed) and again I’m seeing quite a lot of innovation on ARM side wrt server-class processors. Not sure how traditional PCs will play out but Macs are going to split off from x86 within years.
I totally agree, I think it would be a good thing if x86 were to be replaced by something newer. Intel could even adapt and continue to play a leading role, that is another question.
