GlobalFoundries to Acquire MIPS

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

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...

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.

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.

Oh no, it is a moronic decision and everyone thought so even then. It was a competitive process, they said volume production was due in late 2018 and they canned it at the very last minute citing it financially not feasible. You can read details at this news article (https://www.anandtech.com/show/13277/globalfoundries-stops-a...) or thousands of forum discussions regarding the news. No need to even look that far, just skimp the discussions on the forum topic below the news article I linked and it was plain as a day to anyone what would happen.

> 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.

> It was a competitive process

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.

No I don't, but then, how bad it could be? As bad as Samsung's 8nm? Or Intel's 10nm? Even they delivered something in the end. What did GF deliver? A whole fucking nothing. Samsung had Nvidia and Qualcomm as their customers even with its, ehm, not so good 8nm process. It was a sure bet GF was going to have some customers as long as they delivered something (and I don't even count AMD's wafer supply agreement).

It could be arbitrarily bad. 1% yields, 0.01% yields, 0.00001% yields. Having to write each wafer with an electron beam because they couldn't get EUV to work at 7nm.

It could be, but on the other hand it could be freaking fantastic, too. The only way we'd know if they've fucking did it, which is my point.

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...)

I think the proof of the pudding is in the eating: it's been seven years since the cancellation of 7LP. They have launched nothing even near the leading edge since 12LP+.

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.