[aurareturn]

It's true. It's hard to see how Intel can catch up to Apple and AMD in the client and server space respectively.

However, I still own a substantial amount of Intel stocks because it will be one of the most valuable company in the world if China uses military action against Taiwan. If not, then I still believe Intel will be successful with their IFS strategy because the world is about to enter an era where compute will never be enough and designers want a second supplier next to TSMC.

[may_mccheese]

AMD's secret sauce is a smart cache using like a 1 or 2 layer NN or something. We see NVIDIA's major insight long ago, to but generic compute cores on their chip (so as to no longer need to predict how many shader units, how many geometry units, etc, just have a pool of generic units)

So it follows that intel is doing something similar i.e. NN type units which may be used for ML, where the cache is not so important, or in your typical non-ML settings such as gaming or web browsing, these NN units will reduce cache misses at an incredible rate and thus (effectively) up memory i/o rates by 400-500%

[Aromasin]

I'm also backing that investment thesis. I don't have hopes for Intel being anything but a budget alternative in terms of their client and datacentre products, but the foundry business is only going to grow as more players join the gold rush that is compute power, and they're going to be the ones selling the picks.

[Detrytus]

Well, give it 1-2 more years and they will leapfrog TSMC with their manufacturing process. 18A is allegedly still on track, and Intel is also getting into foundry business, I can totally imagine NVIDIA switching to Intel for their next-gen GPUs for example. That, combined with worries about China attacking Taiwan makes me bullish on Intel stock.

[aurareturn]

I doubt they leap frog TSMC. 18A will come out around the same time as N2. I have more confidence that TSMc’s N2 will perform better and be in far higher volume and yield rate.

20A is sort of Intel’s first foray. 18A is really their serious node.

If you think Intel has a chance to leap TSMC, it will come at the 14A node but you have to bet that TSMC is wrong to stay with low NA.

[formerly_proven]

Their process strategies lined up at final gen DUV and 1st gen EUV, but are divergent for the future: TSMC isn’t using high NA EUV for the time being and instead focuses on multi-patterning. Intel is instead trying to push high NA EUV into production first. We will see which works out; they can of course also both achieve success in different ways.

[aurareturn]

Given the recent history, it’s safer to bet that TSMC knows what they’re doing more. It feels like Intel is risking a lot to try to win back the crown. Hence, I believe in TSMC’s more.

[Detrytus]

Given the recent history TSMC is kind of repeating Intel's mistake here: they do not want to pay for new generation of the ASML litography machines (which are like $300M a piece), so they will leverage the last-gen ones and try multi-patterning instead. Didn't work for Intel last time, will end badly for TSMC this time.

[imtringued]

We already live in an era of compute saturation for machine learning. The NPUs that AMD and Intel ship have more compute than the memory bus can handle.

[aurareturn]

Explain more? Are you saying we have enough compute but not enough memory?

[pinkgolem]

Not enough memory bandwidth