This news confirms a number of things.
- Dadi Perlmutter backs winners not losers; he is Weebit’s Chairman
- Intel is more likely to acquire and/or do business with companies where its former No. 2 just so happens to be
- Intel is investing big in Israel atm, $5bn recently + $10bn + $1bn Israeli money + $6bn Mellanox
- The $10bn + $1bn is for a new plant aka a new Fab in Israel https://www.extremetech.com/computing/276690-report-intel-will-outsource-chipset-production-to-tsmc
- You generally don’t need a new Fab unless you are manufacturing things you haven’t manufactured before
- Weebit is moving to 28nm, which Intel has had to outsource previously
- Looks like Intel could be moving to 28nm, and this coincides with WBT moving to 28nm and all of the above
- 28nm is what ST and Samsung have been doing and Samsung knocked Intel from its top spot (in terms of sales) last year so Intel is keen to regain ground https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/31/samsung-surpasses-intel-as-worlds-biggest-chipmaker-for-the-first-time.html ... see 28nm Moore’s Law article below (must read!)
- Intel’s 3D XPoint has been described by some as a failure and reportedly was not cost-effective:
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.
Source: https://semiengineering.com/next-gen-memory-ramping-up/
Handy said that it's important to note that Intel is the only one selling anything with 3D XPoint in it. It's also important to remember that Micron and Intel's businesses are different.
"Micron's in an interesting place because they know exactly what it cost to make 3D XPoint memory and they have chosen not to introduce SSDs," said Handy. "Which, to me, says that they don't want lose money on it like Intel is." Micron would have to answer to investors if they lose money on the technology, but for Intel, losing money is fine as long as 3D XPoint helps with its Xeon sales, Handy said.
Source: https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1333486
Source: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/18/3d_xpoint_issues_and_micron_intel_split/28nm: The Last Node of Moore's Law
After the 28nm node, we can continue to make transistors smaller, but not cheaper.We have been hearing about the imminent demise of Moore's Law quite a lot recently. Most of these predictions have been targeting the 7nm node and 2020 as the end-point. But we need to recognize that, in fact, 28nm is actually the last node of Moore's Law.
Beyond this point, we can continue to make smaller transistors and pack more of them into the same size die, but we cannot continue to reduce the cost. In most cases, in fact, the same SoC will actually have a higher cost!
...
Beyond 28nm, the SRAM bit-scaling rate is about 20% per node instead of the historical 50%. And the situation is actually far worse as is illustrated by the following chart, which was presented at ISSCC 2014 in an invited paper by Dinesh Maheshwari, CTO of Memory Products Division at Cypress Semiconductors. It was also at the center of our recent blog, "Embedded SRAM Scaling is Broken and with it Moore's Law."
...
Summarizing all of these factors, it is clear that -- for most SoCs -- 28nm will be the node for "minimum component costs" for the coming years. As an industry, we are facing a paradigm shift because dimensional scaling is no longer the path for cost scaling. New paths need to be explored such as SOI and monolithic 3D integration.Beyond 28nm, the SRAM bit-scaling rate is about 20% per node instead of the historical 50%.
Source: https://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1321536Opinion only, not advice, dyor etc
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