Blog Post

After many years of floundering, product misses and mis-placed bets the one time leader in the semi-conductor chips industry has set it's sights on reclaiming it's long lost crown. Whether that is possible or not is yet to be seen. The last decade or so has seen everything go wrong for the company. At least for now intel seems to be on the right track. Intel recently replaced CEO Bob Swan with former Intel veteran chip maker Pat Gelsinger designer who helped to develop some of the company’s earlier critical chip innovations. Unfortuately those days are over. The company since that time has become complacent, even rejecting a deal to make chips for apple mobile devices. That needless to say was a monumental mistake.

Intel now needs to rethink how and for whom it would make processors. The company is also emphasizing its strength as one of the few full-stack integrated device manufacturers left in the world that designs, manufactures, and sells semiconductor products. Intel has recently introduced IDM 2.0 which consists of three major aspects: 1. beefing up Intel’s in-house manufacturing. 2. expanding use of third-party foundries starting in 2023, and finally it's Intel Foundry Service — a new standalone business unit that would see Intel build chips for other fabless chipmakers like Qualcomm & Apple, something it has never really done before.

The new Intel feels like a company that's on track with a mission. The company was also finally able to debut its Alder Lake chips (for both laptops and desktops) after years of delays, with its new hybrid architecture. Intel has set an extremely ambitious roadmap to try and retake silicon supremacy by 2025 with a return to the rapid cadence of technological advances that the company used to be known for. It announced plans for billions of dollars of investments to expand its semiconductor production: $20 billion in its existing facilities in Arizona, another $20 billion to build an entirely new site in Ohio, and €17 billion for another new fab in Germany.

2020 was really tough for Intel but 2021 has shown them to be saying and doing the right things. 2022 is also Gelsinger’s second year as CEO and he seems to be on track. The company has launch a new product category where it could start to take on long-time rivals like AMD. The company is set to finally start production on its long-delayed 7nm node that was the cause of so much drama over the years The chip will come branded as “Intel 4” to better position its products against competitors. Dispite all of it's progress Intel's upcoming Arc GPUs will be built by it biggest rival TSMC on its more advanced 6nm node. Hopefully we’ll hear more on that front in the coming months.

Intel Foundry Service is still ramping up business, and Intel has announced some big news on that front well. It has agreed to start producing chips for in the future on its upcoming next-generation 20A process as well as offer a packaging solutions for Amazon’s AWS. All in all, it really does seem like Intel has managed to stop its downward spiral and could be well on the road to recovery. Its products are starting to come out on time, and its roadmap looks encouraging, with a rapid cadence of product releases the likes of which Intel hasn’t managed in over a decade.

But there’s still a lot of work to be done. Intel’s competition from AMD and Apple has never been stronger plus as of today, Intel does not make the most advanced semiconductors in the world, that title now currently belongs to TSMC and Samsung. TSMC being the king of the hill. It's competitors use more advanced manufacturing techniques like extreme ultraviolet lithography which Intel has only just started to adopt and build chips with more transistors than Intel’s most advanced products. Intel’s renewed ambition to catch up is a good sign, and its impressive roadmap reflects that. Nevertheless it's still playing catch up to major players like TSMC, whose plans for a $100 billion investment to expand production over the next three years far outstrips even Intel’s own ambitions.

There's also the ongoing chip shortage to contend with. Demand for chips still far out weighs supply, and Intel’s big plans to ramp up production and build all these new fabs will take time. The Arizona plant expansions won’t be up and running until 2024, the Ohio plant in late 2025, and the Germany fab in 2027. Which means that it’ll be years before we’ll be able to see if those billion-dollar bets really paid off. At least for now it finally feels like things are moving in the right direction again for Intel. We wish them the best!