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by mamonster 688 days ago
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.
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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
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.
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.