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Re: Intel puts 1nm process (10A) on the roadmap for 20...

Story time: I worked on Google Fiber. I believed in the project and it did a lot of good work but here, ultimately, was the problem: leadership couldn't decide if the future of Internet delivery was wired or wireless. If it was wireless then an investment of billions of dollars might be made valueless. If it was wired and the company pursued wireless, then this would also lose.

But here's the thing: if you decide to do neither then you definitely lose. But, more importantly, no executive would lose their head from making a wrong decision. It's one of these situations where doing anything, even the wrong thing, is better than doing nothing because doing nothing will definitely lose.

Intel's 10nm process seemed like a similar kind of inflection point. Back in the mid-2010s it wasn't clear what the future of lithography would be. Was it EUV? Was in X-ray lithography? Something else? Intel seemed unable to commit. I bet no executive wanted to put their ass on the line and be wrong. So Intel loses to ASML and TSMC but it's OK because all the executives kept getting paid.

I forget the exact timelines but Intel's 10nm transition was first predicted in 2014 (?) and it got delayed at least 5 years. Prior to this, Intel's process improvements were its secret weapon. It constantly stayed ahead of the competition. There were hiccups though, most notably the Pentium 4 transition in the Gigahertz race (only saved by the Pentium 3 -> Centrino -> Core architecture transition) and pushing EPIC/Itanium where they got killed by Athlon 64 and it's x86_64 architecture.

I see the same problems at Boeing: once engineering-driven people companies get taken over by finance leeches. This usually follows an actual or virtual monopoly, just as Steve Jobs described [1].

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGKsbt5wii0

cletus, 1 day ago