On Monday Intel Crop said its factories will start building Qualcomm Inc chips and laid out a roadmap to expand its new foundry business to catch rivals such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co and Samsung Electronics Co Ltd by 2025.
Intel for decades held the lead in technology for manufacturing the smallest, fastest computing chips. It has lost that lead to TSMC and Samsung, whose manufacturing services have helped Intel’s rivals Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Nvidia produce chips that outperform Intel’s. AMD and Nvidia design chips which then are made by the rival chip manufacturers, called foundries.
“We’re laying out a whole lot of details to The Street to hold us accountable,” Intel Chief Executive Pat Gelsinger told Reuters in an interview, referring to investors.
It will change its naming scheme for chipmaking technology, using names like “Intel 7” that align with how TSMC and Samsung market competing technologies- Intel said.
In the chip world where smaller is better, Intel previously used names that alluded to the size of features in “nanometers”. But over time the names used by chipmakers became arbitrary marking terms, said Dan Hutcheson, chief executive of VLSIresearch, an independent semiconductor forecasting firm. This, he said, gave the mistaken impression that Intel was less competitive.
The company’s first major customers will be Qualcomm and Amazon. Qualcomm, which dominates chips for mobile phones, will use what Intel is calling its 20A chipmaking process, which will use new transistor technology to help reduce how much power the chip consumes.
Amazon, which is increasingly making its own data centre chips for its Amazon Web Services, is not yet using Intel’s chipmaking technology but will use Intel’s packaging technology, the process of assembling chips and “chiplets” or “tiles”, often stacking them up in so-called 3D formation. Intel excels in this packaging technology, analysts say.
“There have been many, many hours of deep and technical engagement with these first two customers, and many others,” Gelsinger said. He also said during an event announcing the news that the Qualcomm deal involved a “major mobile platform” and engaging in a “deep a strategic manner.” Qualcomm has a long track record of using multiple foundry partners, sometimes even for the same chip.
But Intel is being more cautious than in the past. The years of delays resulted in part from the “hubris” of tackling multiple technical problems in a single generation of technology- said David Kanter, an analyst with Real World Technologies.
“Intel is absolutely going to catch up, and be ahead in some dimensions, with TSMC over the next few years,” Kanter, the analyst, said. “Intel really does have people who spend all their time looking at how to deploy new materials and technology to juice their performance.”
