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Intel’s ambitious plan to regain leadership in chip manufacturing

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Intel has spent it in recent years he went from one wrong step to another and had to outsource the manufacture of the latest chips to one of his biggest rivals.

Now, in order to regain its former glory, the company is betting that it can make difficult manufacturing rounds. But he also hopes that a brand campaign will convince people that in the end he is not behind the competition.

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger at a ceremony on Monday set the roadmap for chip generations. It includes new technologies designed to help the company compete TSMC, A Taiwanese chip manufacturer that currently makes high-performance, high-performance computers french fries, as well Samsung South Korean. The roadmap includes a timeline that will allow executives and outsiders to measure Intel’s progress.

Intel said in an early sign of success Qualcomm and Amazon agreed to be a customer for its new foundry business, as Intel will manufacture chips for other companies; Intel said it will start making chips for these companies in 2024. Gelsinger announced plans for a foundry business in March, he soon rejoined the company that was the CTO. However, to the embarrassing extent of the company being left behind, Intel also plans to outsource the manufacture of its most advanced chips to TSMC.

According to Gelsinger, Intel will adopt a new naming scheme for future chip generations. Today, chip makers refer to new chip-making processes or “nodes” using the nanometer scale, Intel uses what is now known as the 10-nanometer process, and TSMC uses what it calls the 5-nanometer process.

The nanometer scale once referred to the actual size of a transistor gate and the constant shrinkage ensured better performance. (One nanometer is one billionth of a meter; human hair is between 50,000 and 100,000 nanometers thick.) One of Intel’s founders, Gordon Moore, expressed in the famous In 1965, the progress of chipping can be measured by the ability of the transistor to reduce the chip approximately every two years.

But the nanometer scale no longer mentions the actual distance of a chip, and Intel and others say the current chips are similar to those made in TSMC’s 7-nanometer process. It plans to adopt a naming scheme that will reflect this, with a new version of the 10-nanometer this year, called the Intel 7, which the company says will provide a 10 to 15 percent better performance per watt. The generations to come in 2023 and 2024 will be called Intel 4 and Intel 3. ”

“There’s always where marketing ends and where engineering begins, but that’s based on engineering reality,” Gelsinger told WIRED ahead of Monday’s announcement.

Stacy Rasgon, an analyst at Bernstein Research, said the technical path presented by Gelsinger is promising but will increase the pressure to run the company. “That’s great, but the risk will be to get your neck out and get it wrong again,” he says.

Intel made some mistakes under its previous leadership. The company was slow to adapt to the change in mobile computing as it saw a loss of market share Kiss, makes plans for energy-efficiency chips used by companies, including Apple, which uses weapons-based chips for some iPhones, iPads and Macs.

Intel also caught it by surprise Artificial intelligence. Nvidia, a “fabless” chip company, capitalized on this trend with chips specializing in AI computing. Nvidia He overtook Intel according to market capitalization in July 2020.

In terms of manufacturing, Intel was slower than TSMC in adopting the latest method for recording features in silicon, known as extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV). On Monday, the company said it would increase the use of EUV, and acquired the first next-generation machine from ASML, a Dutch company that is the only manufacturer of EUV machines. The initiative will be costly, as each EUV machine costs about $ 120 million.

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