from Hacker News

Intel grew revenues in Q2 2020, but key manufacturing upgrade delayed

by sleepyshift on 7/23/20, 8:48 PM with 101 comments

• by ksec on 7/23/20, 9:33 PM

  20% YoY Revenue increase, 43% YoY Growth in Datacenter Segment. 76% Growth in Non-Volatile Memory solution, another 7% YoY growth in Client Side computing.

  This is truly amazing results.

  I get stabbed over at Anandtech every time I made an argument for Intel as an AMD investor. The Internet is full of Intel bashing comments but reality is Intel has been making record revenue quarter after quarter.

  For the not so good part.

  >The company's 7nm-based CPU product timing is shifting approximately six months relative to prior expectations. The primary driver is the yield of Intel's 7nm process, which based on recent data, is now trending approximately twelve months behind the company's internal target.

  The most important bit is that last part, 12 months behind Internal target. To put this into perspective.

  Intel original 7nm, ( on the assumption it is still the same 7nm because Intel has already changed their 10nm spec) was suppose to be slightly better than TSMC 5nm+, but not as good as TSMC' 3nm. ( In terms of transistor density, by no means it is the only metric it should be judged on ). It was scheduled for 2019, pushed to 2020 then 2H 2021, and are now looking at 1H 2022, which means in terms of consumer getting their hands on it, it would be more like 2H 2022 assuming no further delay.

  Given TSMC has never missed a beat in their execution and has iPhone SoC production. It is highly likely by the end of Calendar year 2022, TSMC would have shipped more 3nm Wafer than Intel's 7nm for the whole year.

  I am waiting to see AMD's results.

• by JoshTko on 7/23/20, 10:48 PM

  Intel's 10% stock drop is all about losing investor confidence. They've been given a pass for delaying 10nm for years in part because there was no competition and assurances that it was a one-off thing and they have learned their lesson. This delay threatens that narrative and instead suggest that Intel hasn't learned from their 10nm debacle.

• by perardi on 7/23/20, 11:29 PM

  Is there any reputable reporting, or even just wild gossip, about why Intel is behind?

  The cynical answer is “they were focused on profit margins and didn’t invest in process”, but is it possible they bet hard on some technology that didn’t pan out? Ultraviolet lithography? Some exotic indium gallium arsenide magic that didn’t work in mass production?

• by jjoonathan on 7/23/20, 9:27 PM

  Have any insider accounts of the 10nm debacle emerged, or is it still too soon?

• by ogre_codes on 7/23/20, 10:12 PM

  Apple's timing here is spot on. If Intel was firing on all cylinders, it would be a lot harder for them to pull off a processor change.

• by AaronFriel on 7/23/20, 9:38 PM

  I wonder to what extent a six month delay could influence hyperscaler decisions for compute purchasing. Every major cloud now offers AMD Epyc instances at a discount relative to Intel's 14nm(\+)* offerings. It seems unlikely Intel will be competitive until 2022. It seems unlikely any of the top three cloud providers would go all AMD for new instances but I could see the ratio shifting heavily in AMD's favor.

• by abraxas on 7/23/20, 10:26 PM

  Aren’t these node sizes mostly marketing BS that can’t be compared across manufacturers anyway? If Intel’s products can compete on performance or price or power consumption then who cares what they call it?

• by totalZero on 7/23/20, 9:25 PM

  I'm still waiting for them to move to 10nm.

• by pwarner on 7/23/20, 9:37 PM

  This has got to be interesting for folks like AWS, Google, MS. Is this the opening for AMD? Or will we see things like AWS ARM chips take off? They should both be close to entering production on 5nm chips once TSMC gets enough Apple chips knocked out. Are we going to see more specialization in the form of custom chips as process nodes are stalled out?

• by madamelic on 7/24/20, 1:24 AM

  "Yes, we missed 10nm... and 7nm... but we assure, we will be ahead with 5nm"

  History says otherwise...

• by grizzles on 7/23/20, 9:58 PM

  Intel is a company that's living on it's distribution legacy. Ask yourself - why do regular people still buy Intel PCs?

  Because they are easy to buy. A great non Intel hardware and software laptop+aio by AMD or someone else would be a mortal wound on $INTC.

• by edem on 7/24/20, 7:53 AM

  To be honest Intel is always late with manufacturing updates (and manufacturing in general).

• by coldtea on 7/23/20, 9:24 PM

  Not like they are under any pressure...

• by bhouston on 7/23/20, 9:33 PM

  At some point Intel should just dump their own process nodes and go with TSMC. This is getting ridiculous.