[Rinzler89]

>The fabs will be used even if it’s boring shit.

This is what a lot of people who have no idea about the semi industry miss because they get all their education from news headlines. Which is what I assume leads to Intel's massive stock drop. People voting on FUD, kind of like the opposite of the hype that pushed Nvidia to the moon, but when you asked investors who bought Nvidia, what Nvidia actually makes, most are clueless and only bought out of hype and FOMO.

Everyone assumes the world only needs 3nm chips because that's what TSMCs latest cutting edge node is and that's what they learned powers their iPhone, but the reality is the world runs on nodes much larger than that. To put this into perspective, the new TSMC fab being built in Germany will tape out 28/22nm nodes and then upgrade to 16/12 nm nodes mostly for robotics, industrial, IoT and especially automotive. Just let that sink in. Even Global Foundries is stuck at 12nm.

Intel's 4 process is cutting edge by comparison and plenty of international players who can't afford TSMC or Samsung would gladly pick up that node capacity for the right price.

[rbanffy]

> To put this into perspective, the new TSMC fab being built in Germany will tape out 28/22nm nodes

Add to that those older processes are more mature, having been refined for decades, get higher yields, and are far cheaper as well.

[mamonster]

Yh, 28+16 is basically pretty much all you need for industrial semis. The other key part I think is basically going to be military, I've watched an interview with one of the big wigs at Baikal and he claimed that the Russian miltech industry would be fully self-sustaining if there was domestic 28nm capacity.

[keyringlight]

I remember one comment from during covid when the supply chain was messed up (possibly from Intel) saying productivity could be improved a lot for non-leading edge chips by getting designs off relative ancient processes to relatively recent, which would let the industry modernize old fabrication plants. It requires work for that new design though, and moving away from thoroughly tried and tested

[minkles]

That was quite naive. The problem is there is little motivation to do that. The designs can't just be scaled down, they need to be recompiled from scratch with the target process' standard cells and verification. That work is expensive as fuck. Then there's packaging and managing the supply chain and data around it. Why bother when demand causes prices to go up? Just pocket the money and wait. If you spend that on more capacity and reengineering you just burn the money.

[Rinzler89]

How could it come from Intel when Intel wasn't a fab for hire back then? It was most likely TSMC who said that not Intel.

[ulfw]

Uhuh.

I guess intel lays off another 15% of people because of ... 'FUD' and 'people who have no idea about the semi industry'

Yea.

[minkles]

It's just lay off season. Wait until all the other companies go "oh hey us too" in a few weeks.

Also look at the market tank. What's the usual reaction to that? Trim costs to improve shareholder appearance.

[Rinzler89]

I never said what you're claiming. Please read comments carefully, assume good faith in the comments you read, and don't put words in my mouth.

Like I said, Intel's layoffs are a reaction to their stock tanking, and their stock tanking is due to investor behavior which is sometimes rational, but a lot of the times not.

[BeetleB]

The stock tanked after the layoff announcement.

They need the layoffs because all their competition have fewer employees. Intel is simply bloated.

[davidt84]

Right. They decided to lay off 15% of their workforce because investors act irrationally.

[Rinzler89]

I never said that. Why assume bad faith?

[davidt84]

I am assuming nothing other than what you said

How else am I supposed to interpret that paragraph?

[Rinzler89]

Is reading comprehension gone that low because of the school system?