Comment by scarface_74
17 hours ago
So tell me your plan that would create a competitor for Intel from scratch that could be making decent chips in 5 years? 10 years?
17 hours ago
So tell me your plan that would create a competitor for Intel from scratch that could be making decent chips in 5 years? 10 years?
Given the circumstances and the relatively low dollars involved, it would be interesting to see the experiment: $10B darpa program to establish a scalable fab ecosystem in 5 years via consortium.
This was how the internet was created, darpa stitched together dozens of performers to get the key ingredients (eg bbn gateways, academic subnets, experimental applications, protocol research.
They even led the last ditch marketing Hail Mary after years of no-one caring about the program besides the zillions of engineers from all around building it by organizing a press day in a hotel ballroom for a demo day.
As a taxpayer I’d strongly support 5B/.1% of the fed budget for a few years just to learn what happens in the attempt.
$5B wouldn’t be nearly enough to create a leading edge fab. Estimated cost for TSMC is $20B.
China has been trying and failing to build a competitive fab for years, has the rare earth minerals in its back yard, etc and can’t do it.
The second issue is, who exactly is going to use these fabs once they are built. One issue that Intel has is that its “customer service” sucks. TSMC will bend over backwards as a partner. No one wants to work with Intel.
Can you imagine Apple or Nvidia wanting to work with a government owned chip fab?
Is it too much "magic" for the moneyed geniuses down at Apple? Or is technology not quite their wheelhouse anymore?
Do you apply the same standard to Nvidia, AMD, Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Tesla who are all trillion dollar market cap companies (besides AMD) who design their own chips and they are manufactured by TSMC - or for Tesla moving to Samsung