Suddenly another company that has (old?) fabs and a cpu design team in-house
This could be interesting to see how much they try to loss-lead to get market share in the low-end
replies(4):
This could be interesting to see how much they try to loss-lead to get market share in the low-end
Must be the most moronic decision ever.
and it's not like 20/20 hindsight either, because every hardware enthusiast knew at the time Intel was having troubles and was worried TSMC (and Samsung at the time) were going to be the only fabs producing leading edge lithographies.
Keep in mind that your iphone only has very few chips in <10nm technology. The rest is using much larger groundrules, even the memory.
These nm values are really bullshit anyway, but the tech node that was supposed to be Intel’s 7nm, which ended up being called “Intel 4” (because they branded some 10nm tech as Intel 7), only came out in like 2023. Given they Global Foundries was always behind Intel, suddenly leapfrogging them by 2-3 years would be quite a feat.
> These nm values are really bullshit anyway, but the tech node that was supposed to be Intel’s 7nm, which ended up being called “Intel 4” (because they branded some 10nm tech as Intel 7), only came out in like 2023. Given they Global Foundries was always behind Intel, suddenly leapfrogging them by 2-3 years would be quite a feat.
This is a very weak argument. Intel was ahead of everyone, now everyone is ahead of Intel. Remember TSMC's blunder processes like 20nm? How they turned around after that? Or how GloFo has had always mediocre processes but they finally hit the nail in the head with their 14/12nm? Fab business has always had companies leapfrogging each other, it turns out the worst sin is not trying. GloFo's greedy investors chose to bury the business in the ground for their short term profits.
First, nobody knew if even TSMC was going to succeed at bringing a 7nm process to market. 02018 was maybe the height of the "Moore's Law is over" belief. There was a lot of debate about whether planar semiconductor scaling had finally reached the limit of practical feasibility, although clearly it was still two orders of magnitude from the single-atom physical limit, which had been reached by Xie's lab in 02002. Like Intel, SMIC didn't reach 7nm until 02023 (with the HiSilicon processor for Huawei's Mate60 cellphone) despite having the full backing of the world's most technically productive country, and when they did, it was a shocking surprise in international relations with the US.
Second, even if GF had brought 7nm to market, there was no guarantee it would be profitable. The most profitable companies in a market are not always the most technically advanced; often the pioneers die with arrows in their backs. If you can make 7nm chips in volume, but the price for them is so high that almost everyone sticks with 12nm processes (maybe from your competitors), you can still lose money on the R&D. Moore's Law as originally stated in "Cramming" was about how the minimum price per transistor kept moving to smaller and smaller transistors, and historically that has been an immensely strong impetus to move to smaller processes, but it's clearly weakened in recent years, with many successful semiconductor products like high-end FPGAs still shipping on very old process nodes. (Leaving aside analog, which is a huge market that doesn't benefit from smaller feature size.)
Third, we don't know what the situation inside GF was, and maybe GF's CEO did. Maybe they'd just lost all their most important talent to TSMC or Samsung, so their 7nm project was doomed. Maybe their management politics were internally dysfunctional in a way that blocked progress on 7nm, even if it hadn't been canceled. There's no guarantee that GF would have been successful at mass production of 7nm chips even in a technical sense, no matter how much money they spent on it.
In the end it seems like GF lost the bet pretty badly. But that doesn't necessarily imply that it was the wrong bet. Just, probably.
Do you have any evidence, besides GF's own PR/IR department, that the process ever actually worked in volume? Because from my point of view, how they ended things looks exactly how I would spin away a multibillion-dollar investment into a failed process.
https://www.eetimes.com/samsung-globalfoundries-prep-14nm-pr...
"Samsung expects to be in production late this year with a 14 nm FinFET process it has developed. GlobalFoundries has licensed the process and will have it in production early next year."
GlobalFoundries licensed 14nm from Samsung. How do you know GlobalFoundries is capable of 7nm?
My guess is that the guys in Abu Dhabi did not want to do the investments needed to bring 7nm into production. They lost a huge opportunity because of that. At the time, it probably looked like the right financial decision to them, even though practically everyone affected downstream thought it was myopic.
Name company making chips with EUV that is not TSMC, Samsung, or Intel?
They had previously signed a contract with IBM to produce silicon at these more advanced nodes that they could not honor, and there was legal action between them.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/13277/globalfoundries-stops-a...
https://newsroom.ibm.com/2025-01-02-GlobalFoundries-and-IBM-...
Pursuing 7nm would have likely bankrupted GloFo.
In any case, at the time and still I think GF was probably correct in that they would not be able to compete at the leading edge and make money at it. Remember, AMD and IBM separated fabs out for a reason and not having the scale necessary to compete was probably a big part of that. AMD has succeeded on TSMC and IBM seems to be doing ok on Samsung. Most chips are not at the leading edge and don't need to be, and so most fabs don't need to be leading edge to serve customers. There are all kinds of applications where a more mature and better characterized process is better, whether for harsh environments, mixed signal applications, or just low volume parts where $20M of tooling cost is not worth it.
kragen thinks making most of his readers glitch for a second every time they read one of his dates is worth it on order to advertise for the Long Now. Really unfortunate choice, since he often has decent information to share.
Since it didn't happen, the only thing we know is what they said and they said it was because of "strategic shift"
> Tom Caulfield also mentioned GF needed $3 billion dollars of additional capital to get to 12,000 wpm and they could only fund half of it through cash flow, they would have to borrow the other half and the projected return wasn’t good.
> When Tom took over as CEO he went out on the road and visited GF’s customers. What he found was a lack of commitment to GF’s 7 nm process in the customer base. Many customers were never going to go to 7 nm and of the customers who were, GF wouldn’t have enough capacity to meet their demands. There was also concern in the customer base that 7 nm would take up all the R&D and capital budgets and starve the other processes they wanted to use of investment.
(https://semiwiki.com/wikis/company-wikis/globalfoundries-wik...)
If 7LP worked, given this market and its hunger for capacity, it'd be in production at at least small scale. Equipment costs are down and knowledge has disseminated, making it a lot cheaper to launch, especially as "7nm" isn't the leading edge any more.
I don't think it works.
I don't fault them for failing to predict the chip shortage and huge opportunity to acquire customers that would result. The fact remains: they will eventually fade away.
The burden of proof is on you to support your claim that they could have executed a 7nm process profitably, as opposed to them looking at the data and coming to a rational conclusion that they couldn't.
What?
The chip shortage was a shortage of cheap but inferior 28nm, 40nm, 65nm and 80nm chips that GlobalFoundries was (and still is) well positioned to profit from.
However OCTAL (leading zero) prefixing of a text mode number fails on a number of points:
* It's still a fixed register size (5 characters), which will overflow on the year 100000 AD.
* It's confusing, everyone else.
* It's not technically correct. (human behavior)
Truncating to two year digits was confusing because ambiguity. There is no ambiguity if a number encoded in decimal uses precisely the number of characters it needs. That's how normal humans normally write numbers.
Why the fuck I'd have to prove that given that GloFo themselves claimed that they pulled out of it because it'd be unprofitable? Some people in this subthread are very eager to put words into my mouth.
Duh. Of course it doesn't work, because they cancelled it in 2018!
> making it a lot cheaper to launch, especially as "7nm" isn't the leading edge any more.
Same logic cuts both ways. If they didn't think it was financially viable in 2018 when it'd be a leading edge process and their customers would be willing to pay top dollar for it, why would they think it'd be feasible now when it isn't the leading edge lithography and nobody would be paying top dollar for it?
On top of that I doubt even your claim that it'd be cheaper to do the investment now would hold given how everything got more expensive since 2018. I'm also doubtful that machines got cheaper since ASML is still the only ones building them and they've probably got their hands full with their existing customers. They'd probably laugh at GloFo if they'd come with a request like that "Sorry GloFo, we're already booked until 2030 building machines for TSMC, Intel and Samsung maybe try at 2032" :P
GloFo got off the train and there's no going back.
5G wasn't really that necessary, although I know it's critical as a broadband replacement for many people.
I would miss TikTok, of course.
The reason one would expect 7LP to be cheaper to launch now is that their competitors have got equivalent processes into production that can be learned from, or even "learned from" (ripped off). Equipment suppliers have debugged their offerings and pruned their lines to what's useful. In short, someone else has derisked it and found what works. That is a major advantage. In other industries, one company doing the derisking can launch an entire industry (see, Apple, iPhone) if moats are low. Moats are very, very, very high in the foundry space, so there are not many companies that could copy TSMC 7FF or Intel 7 even if they wanted to. GlobalFoundries could do it. But they choose not to. If they were on the cusp of a node introduction, they'd love to see their competition swoop in and solve the last problems for them. Sure, it makes them late to market, but at a vastly lower total spend to enter the market (one with tremendous moats and limited competition!). They could probably profit off that.
But they don't want to. So, either, leading-edge process nodes are uneconomical (in which case, good riddance, leave the market), or they don't actually have significant R&D effort completed and are still billions of dollars in R&D opex away from having anything viable. In which case... nothing of real value was lost.
So, yeah, it sucks that we lost a competitor. But I don't think we lost GF on the leading edge because they didn't like the color of paint on the new ion-implanter's frame. I think we lost them because they didn't have a product and they knew it. In which case there is nothing to mourn.