alt Hacker NewsIntel has failed pretty badly IMO. Fabbing at TSMC might actually have been a good idea, except that every other component of arrow like is problematic. Huge tile to tile latencies, special chiplets that are not reusable in any other design, removal of hyperthreading, etc etc. Intel’s last gen CPU is in general faster than the new gen due to all the various issues.
And that’s just the current product! The last two gens are unreliable, quickly killing themselves with too high voltage and causing endless BSODs.
The culture and methods of ex-Intel people at the management level is telling as well, from my experiences at my last job at least.
(My opinions are my own, not my current employers & a lot of ex-Intel people are awesome!)
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We'll see, I mostly object to the "vultures circling" narrative that HN seems to be attached to. Intel's current position is not unprecedented, and people have been speculating Intel would have a rough catchup since the "14nm+++" memes were vogue. But they still have their fabs (and wisely spun it out to it's own business) and their chip designs, while pretty faulty, successfully brought x86 to the big.LITTLE core arrangement. They've beat AMD to the punch on a number of key technologies, and while I still think AMD has the better mobile hardware it still feels like the desktop stuff is a toss-up. Server stuff... glances at Gaudi and Xeon, then at Nvidia ...let's not talk about server stuff.
A lot of hopes and promises are riding on 18A being the savior for both Intel Foundry Services and the Intel chips wholesale. If we get official confirmation that it's been cancelled so Intel can focus on something else then it will signal the end of Intel as we know it.
Fabbing at TSMC is an embarrassing but great decision. The design side of Intel is the revenue/profit generating side. They can't let the failures of their foundries hold back their design side and leave them hopelessly behind AMD and ARM. Once they've regained their shares of the server market or at least stabilized it, they can start shifting some of their fabbing to Intel Foundry Services, who are going to really suck at the beginning. But no one else is going to take that chance on those foundries if not Intel's design side. The foundry side will need that stream of business while they work out their processes.