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by yvdriess
553 days ago
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In defense of the chip designers: Design pipelines are deep and Intel at the time famously had very node-specific designs without industry-standard PDKs. The moment engineers were told to switch a design to 14nm, it basically reset the 5 year design-to-product pipeline. Management failed because they did not hedge the risk by starting a parallel 14nm design effort at first sign of 10nm troubles. They likely were engaged in magical thinking or some variation of the "Are YOU going to tell him?" Silicon Valley scene. It does not help that information like that is considered actionable insider trading information. I bet a lot of people working on 10nm designs first heard the news about the delays from the quarterly investor calls. |
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Right. It was well-known publicly that Intel was running their business in a way that maximized the damage any fab troubles would have on their product roadmap. It was obvious a decade ago that Intel needed more flexibility to bring their CPU designs to other fab processes. It took them too long to start working on Rocket Lake, and too long to deliver it. But they have at least made some progress on the problem, since they've been selling x86 CPU cores made at TSMC for the past year.
(On a related note: Buying Altera and forcing them to port their entire roadmap over to a broken 10nm process was made even more stupid by the fact that Intel didn't have a usable PDK that outsiders and acquisitions could work with.)