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GlobalFoundries to Acquire MIPS

(mips.com)
224 points mshockwave | 1 comments | 08 Jul 25 16:57 UTC | HN request time: 0.198s | source
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somanyphotons ◴[08 Jul 25 17:38 UTC] No.44502235[source]▶
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

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kragen ◴[08 Jul 25 17:51 UTC] No.44502358[source]▶
GF's fabs aren't that old. They were neck-and-neck with TSMC until 02018, when they could do 12nm: https://web.archive.org/web/20190107061855/https://www.v3.co...
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kasabali ◴[08 Jul 25 18:13 UTC] No.44502554[source]▶
Imagine canning your 7nm process last minute only few years before the chip shortage.

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.

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bee_rider ◴[08 Jul 25 18:36 UTC] No.44502753[source]▶
I think it would require some work to call it a “moronic decision.” My suspicion is that even if they could see the future and predict that shortage, 7nm by 2020/2021 was not on the table for them.

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.

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xenadu02 ◴[08 Jul 25 23:03 UTC] No.44504803[source]▶
It does mean GF is on the path to long slow decline. The decision was not "we will wait 5-10 years" but "we will not develop any new processes".

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.

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1. kragen ◴[09 Jul 25 00:03 UTC] No.44505124[source]▶
Yeah, that was my reading at the time. But lots of companies have gone that direction, closing down major lines of business because they couldn't make money at them anymore. I mean, you probably remember this, but IBM used to make computers. Intel started out making RAM. HP used to make working products.