[Software] Intel resurrects: new power alliance with software enabled for tick tock

[WilkerCSBD]

Many have complained about how Intel has slowly faded away in the shadow of TSMC and AMD. Many from within the company affirmed that a change was needed, its shareholders shouted in the sky with certain strategies and now, from the hand of Pat Gelsinger, the first changes arrive at Intel, some very important. The new strategy for the future of the company will be called IDM 2.0 and will mark the path to the success that the company once had.

It was and a new conference led by the CEO of the company Pat Gelsinger where Intel has launched a series of new measures that are largely a turnaround on everything the company had done in all its years of history. Under a very striking headline, Gelsinger has put white on black and has clarified at a stroke all the doubts that have been flying over the company for a long time, and according to what we have seen, Intel's turn is more than remarkable.

Intel Unleashed: Shaping the Future with IDM 2.0
Intel IDM 2.0 2

There have been five key issues which the company has dealt with and where they will turn their entire strategy called IDM 2.0, a very appropriate name for its meaning, by the way. The key points to address are these:

Investment in Fabs
Intel Foundry Services
Chiplets at 7 nm for Meteor Lake and Tic Tac
Collaboration with IBM
Production outsourcing
As we can see, Gelsinger has not left a puppet with head and has addressed all the problems and rumors about his company head-on. What movements are they going to make exactly?

The Fabs stay and will expand
Intel IDM 2.0

There will be no selling or decentralization at Intel in true AMD + GlobalFoundries style, not at all. Intel's strategy is quite the opposite: to strengthen from top to bottom the capacity that it has to be the largest IDM in the world and thus control the entire production process from top to bottom, in a more exhaustive way and enhance its designs at scale so that the control is greater than it is currently.

This is a clear advantage, because it is to further enhance the cliché of "I cook it, I eat it", but at a level of further refinement of the technique, so that not even Samsung can face them in this process.

For this, Intel has announced within its IDM 2.0 plan an investment of no less than 20 billion dollars in two new Fabs in Arizona that will be ready to produce at full capacity in 2024. Obviously, these new Fabs will produce the cutting-edge nodes of the company and, although it has not been announced as such, it will enter as an important part of the global and geopolitical strategy of CHIPS FOR AMERICA that Trump began and Biden will finish.

Obviously, these two new Fabs will introduce EUV scanners manufactured by ASML, as it is the only company in the world capable of reaching this technology and bringing it to market. The demand for scanners is very high, but Intel ensures that within the indicated timeframe there will be enough to begin manufacturing without problems.

Among the high-performance manufacturing nodes will be the 7nm, which we will talk about later.

Intel Foundry Services or IFS, an old concept for a new project
Fab-42-Intel

Intel has modernized overnight and the proof of this is that for the first time in its history it is going to enable its services to other clients, just as TSMC and Samsung do, or GlobalFoundries and SMIC.

The program will be called IFS and will be a separate company from Intel with exclusive access to current and future offerings from the company. The program reaches such an extent that Intel will work with its clients to build SoCs under x86 ARM and RISC-V, in addition to the IPs of the company itself, of course, where the question is precisely how it will license its designs to those interested clients. in accessing their technology.

And, although Intel has already worked with external partners and manufactured chips, the approach is totally new. The partnership with Cadence and Synopsys will see the company end once and for all the problems of using the company's software for each design, making it tremendously difficult for companies to adapt to its use.

Now, Intel enables and empowers Industry Standard Tools (EDA) so designs should be much easier to perform and thus will save your customers time and achieve more benefits as the demand for design and creation of Semiconductors are at record highs amidst a shortage of them. And we insist, this is another geopolitical movement within CHIPS FOR AMERICA and IDM 2.0 is only a central pillar, since everything would remain on American soil.

Tic Tac is back, the 7 nm solve their problems and Meteor Lake will arrive with chiplets and Foveros

The Gelsinger specification is going to bring back the company's famous Tic Tac, so we are likely to see a new Road Map shortly. This is driven by the company's announcement stating that its 7nm manufacturing node is now operating on schedule, with a solid foundation for growth.

To such an extent that it will come to give life to Ponte Vecchio, its high-performance GPU accelerator for the Aurora supercomputer and which was announced at the time under 10 nm SuperFin, so this time jump is all news.

Likewise, this is a very specific sector, so Intel has also confirmed that Meteor Lake will include these 7 nm with Foveros technology and with chiplets under its belt. A product that will be launched in 2023 in volume and that finishes its design and IP in the second quarter of this year. However, nothing has been commented on the chipset that it would include, so we will not be able to know if any other architecture will finally be advanced.

Intel and IBM will collaborate again to empower semiconductors
It may be the announcement with the least weight, but it is surely one of the most important, since IBM is working with Intel again and vice versa, so that the development of the new nodes and their logic for semiconductors will have an effort and basis joint.

The areas to work on are very simple: increasing the performance and efficiency of semiconductors, all within the government framework and the CHIPS FOR AMERICA project once again.

However, it is not really clear where the two companies will come together. It is sti[CENSORED]ted that a team from Oregon and another from New York will collaborate remotely and then join forces at a later date. IBM, for its part, could gain access to Intel's cutting-edge technologies for its POWER and z's, such as Foveros, EMIB and more, which would be a quantum leap in its CPUs.

Outsourcing of production and TSMC thanks to IDM 2.0
Pat gelsinger chip

Although this section has a lot to do with IFS as such, the announcement goes a little further and is more specific in itself. Here Intel has talked about outsourcing families of computing products to get the best processor or graphics card at any given time in the industry.

That is, Intel is not only preparing to offer as IDM a series of x86 IPs through IFS, but it does not close in band and if it finds a node with higher performance in the industry, it will contract production of it to put its designs on top, ergo enters to compete with AMD and NVIDIA of direct form without stopping the internal machine room until they catch up and surpass the competition.

This allows that while Intel offers its services to clients vertically through IFS, such as x86 cores, GPUs, displays, AI, services or interconnect technologies or any IP that it has and the client is interested, at the same time, it continues to develop your technologies, your manufacturing nodes and you get the best of your competition if you are outmatched at any given time, not closing in on your designs.

Pat Gelsinger noted that it will leverage its relationships with TSMC, GlobalFoundries, Samsung and UMC to enable a new manufacturing facility for its product designs with the manufacturing nodes of these partners. From connectivity to graphics and chiplets, a whole set of technologies that will be ready to take advantage of their rivals, since they are willing to sell their wafers to Intel.

The ad has a key section where users are focusing and that has gone unnoticed and is cited as follows:

Gelsinger said he expects Intel's commitment to third-party foundries to grow to include manufacturing a range of modular tiles in advanced process technologies, including core products from Intel's computing offerings for the data center and customer segments. from 2023 '

The key here seems to be the phrase "Core products in IT offerings." This could mean that Intel is going to continue with the design of Core CPUs under x86 for wafers that come from other manufacturers and foundries, or that Intel is going to outsource is the production of a supposed IO Core based on chiplets such as AMD makes Ryzen, where the cores are made by TSMC and the IO is made by GlobalFoundries.

With IDM 2.0, ISAs for manufacturing come into play. As pointed out in various rumors, the named phrase would refer to outsourcing for x86 cores. What does this imply? Well, the other companies will logically have access to the design plans of Intel x86 CPUs, something unheard of until now.

Ultimately, Intel has a core strategy: IDM 2.0, which is a pivotal and central base, where the company can rotate it on the board and point to the destination that best suits it in order to stay on the cusp of innovation and performance.