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SILICON SILIC CHIP www.siliconchip.com.au Publisher/Editor Nicholas Vinen Technical Editor John Clarke – B.E.(Elec.) Technical Staff Bao Smith – B.Sc. Tim Blythman – B.E., B.Sc. Advertising Enquiries (02) 9939 3295 adverts<at>siliconchip.com.au Regular Contributors Allan Linton-Smith Dave Thompson David Maddison – B.App.Sc. (Hons 1), PhD, Grad.Dip.Entr.Innov. Geoff Graham Associate Professor Graham Parslow Dr Hugo Holden – B.H.B, MB.ChB., FRANZCO Ian Batty – M.Ed. Phil Prosser – B.Sc., B.E.(Elec.) Cartoonist Louis Decrevel loueee.com Founding Editor (retired) Leo Simpson – B.Bus., FAICD Silicon Chip is published 12 times a year by Silicon Chip Publications Pty Ltd. ACN 626 922 870. ABN 20 880 526 923. All material is copyright ©. No part of this publication may be reproduced without the written consent of the publisher. Subscription rates (Australia only) 6 issues (6 months): $72.50 12 issues (1 year): $135 24 issues (2 years): $255 Online subscription (Worldwide) 6 issues (6 months): $52.50 12 issues (1 year): $100 24 issues (2 years): $190 For overseas rates, see our website or email silicon<at>siliconchip.com.au * recommended & maximum price only Postal address: PO Box 194, Matraville, NSW 2036. Phone: (02) 9939 3295. ISSN: 1030-2662 Printing and Distribution: 14 Hardner Rd, Mount Waverley VIC 3149 54 Park St, Sydney NSW 2000 2 Silicon Chip Editorial Viewpoint We need Intel My editorial in the September 2024 issue was titled “Intel is in trouble”, and it turned out to be uncomfortably accurate. Intel once seemed like a juggernaut, but a mix of strategic missteps and what I would call complacency has left the company struggling for relevance. Once enormously profitable, it is now fighting to survive. Intel still doesn’t have many true rivals. A decade ago, it was practically a monopoly; now AMD, Apple, NVIDIA and even Qualcomm are pressing hard. Yet Intel remains hugely important. The computer industry needs it – not just as a supplier, but to keep competition alive. Intel’s history proves it can innovate. From its groundbreaking DRAM, EPROM and flash memory in the early 1970s, to the x86 architecture in the late ’70s, and later technologies like USB, Thunderbolt, Ethernet and integrated WiFi, the company helped shape modern computing. I believe Intel will endure, possibly with government support, since it is ‘too big to fail’. But I hope it can claw its way back into competitiveness on its own. It has rebounded before, and it can again. Ironically, the seeds of today’s situation were sown in Intel’s glory days. Its main rival in the early 2000s, AMD, surged with the Athlon 64 in 2003 and the dual-core Opterons and Athlon 64 X2s in 2005. But from 2007 to 2009, a mix of design bugs and poor yields drove AMD to the brink of bankruptcy. To survive, it spun off its fabrication plants into a new business, GlobalFoundries, and became a fabless chip designer. For most of the 2010s, AMD floundered with the underwhelming Bulldozer architecture. With AMD weak, Intel grew complacent. For much of the decade, its ‘new’ CPUs were minor refreshes of the same four-core design. Worse, Intel’s long dominance in semiconductor manufacturing collapsed when it failed to make the transition from 14nm to 10nm processes in a timely manner. Intel moved to 14nm in 2014 with their Broadwell architecture. They planned to move to 10nm in 2016, but they ended up being mostly stuck on 14nm until Alder Lake in 2021. Five years is a long time to be standing still in the world of technology! This broke Intel’s streak of being at the forefront of semiconductor process nodes since the late 1980s. Meanwhile, AMD tapped the rapidly advancing process technology of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). They moved from 10nm to 7nm, then 5nm and 4nm, all while Intel stalled. TSMC is now widely considered the world leader in cutting-edge semiconductor fabrication; even Intel uses them for their latest desktop processors. While TSMC was improving its semiconductor manufacturing technology, AMD was preparing its comeback. In 2017, it launched the Zen architecture, offering up to eight cores versus Intel’s typical four. Then in 2019 came Zen 2, a bombshell: up to 16 cores by joining two 8-core ‘chiplets’ together with a separate I/O die. AMD has refined that formula ever since, now producing CPUs with an incredible 192 cores, while Intel resorted to ever-higher powers and voltages to stay competitive in the desktop space. This culminated in the chip degradation problems I covered last year. Intel has also now adopted the chiplet concept they once derided. So get well, Intel; we need you to keep the industry competitive and innovative. If this saga proves anything, it’s that in semiconductors, complacency is fatal. AMD learned that lesson the hard way in the 2010s. Intel is learning it now – the question is whether it can turn that lesson into innovation before it’s too late. Note: a couple of days after writing this, the US Government bought a 10% stake in Intel. by Nicholas Vinen Australia's electronics magazine siliconchip.com.au