For the newbies:
WBT's non-executive Chairman David Perlmutter was executive VP and chief product officer at Intel prior to joining Weebit.
Weebit is based in Israel. Intel has been investing in Israel for years and this is another $10B of its own money.
What for? We know that Intel's 3D Xpoint Memory solution according to some hasn't lived up to the hype and apparently doesn't do enough to displace DRAM:
In reality, though, 3D XPoint has been delayed and failed to live up to those specs. “We know much of that was over-hyped in reality,” said Mark Webb, the principal at MKW Ventures, a consulting firm. “The reality is different, but it’s still pretty amazing. 3D XPoint will have more revenue than all other new nonvolatile memories combined.”The technology is fast, but it isn’t 1,000 times faster than NAND. “It also has a much higher cost than NAND,” Webb said. “It’s not a DRAM replacement. It complements DRAM.”
Source: https://semiengineering.com/next-gen-memory-ramping-up/Intel is forcing its 3D XPoint Memory down the cost curve by manufacturing significant volumes at a loss. The company can afford to do this because it believes that 3D XPoint is required to support the company’s higher-performance CPUs. Any money that Intel loses on 3D XPoint sales will be recovered through the sale of more costly processors.
Other technologies don’t have this advantage, and must be sold at a profit to make any sense. This is a chicken-and-egg problem: To reach high volumes any emerging memory must sell at competitive prices, but costs will prohibit that until high volumes are reached.
Source: https://www.israel21c.org/chip-giant-intel-to-invest-11-billion-in-israeli-plant/
Do you blow $10 billion ($11 billion less $1 billion from the Israelis) doubling down on what some consider a disappointing product?
Or do you give your old No. 2 a call and say "Let's do a deal!" to the chagrin of Samsung and ST?
Opinion only, dyor etc
