On 2021-03-24 15:09, grarpamp wrote:

None are #OpenFabs...

https://news.slashdot.org/story/21/03/23/2127254/intel-to-spend-20-billion-t...

During today's "Intel Unleashed: Engineering the Future" webcast, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger gave an update on the company's future plans and developments, one of which includes a $20 billion investment to build two new chip fabs in Arizona.

The new factories are expected to "become a major provider of foundry capacity in the U.S. and Europe" to serve the global demand for semiconductor manufacturing. "To deliver this vision, Intel is establishing a new standalone business unit, Intel Foundry Services (IFS), led by semiconductor industry veteran Dr. Randhir Thakur. IFS will be differentiated from other foundry offerings with a combination of leading-edge process technology and packaging, committed capacity in the U.S. and Europe, and a world-class IP portfolio for customers, including x86 cores as well as ARM and RISC-V ecosystem IPs." "Gelsinger said the foundry business will compete in a market potentially worth $100 billion by 2025," reports CNBC. "A slide displayed by Intel suggested that companies including Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Qualcomm could be customers for the business."

The company is also partnering with IBM to improve chip logic and packaging technologies, which will "enhance the competitiveness of the U.S. semiconductor industry and support key U.S. government initiatives."

Intel has been trying, and failing, to build modern chip foundries for some time. At present, if you want large, fast, chip with high transistor density, Taiwan Semiconductor and Samsung's foundries are the only game in town. I attribute this to political correctness. If you have one dud member on the team, who has to be included because gay, black, female, or such, the whole team fails. One dud team in a group of teams, the whole project fails. For a long time we had women etc on the team, but just did not actually include them. They drew pay, but were no allowed near anything they could break. They wound up in the art harem. But then there was political pressure to halt this quiet practice, and Silicon Valley went down the tubes. Female team members are a particular problem, because ever attempt to discuss the technology being developed turns into a shit test. Black team members will actually talk about the technology, female team members are pretending to talk about the technology, but are actually talking about who is alpha.