Text/Ball Review/Zi Yang Correction/Zhi Qiu
In the old Internet era, Intel had unlimited scenery and had a very high voice in the field of semiconductors. However, with the development of the times, a large number of powerful giants have emerged in the semiconductor field, and Intel's advantages have gradually been weakened.
First it was overtaken by TSMC, and then abandoned by Apple
As we all know, Intel is one of the few chip manufacturers that grasps chip design and chip production, but due to its many decision-making mistakes in the past decade, it has failed to keep up with the pace of evolution of the chip era, and finally in terms of advanced technology, it has been overtaken by TSMC, such as Intel's CPU is still using 14nm, TSMC has reached the 4nm process node.
At the same time, in the field of Intel's extremely advantageous computer processors, it has once again been abandoned by Apple. Entering 2021, Apple officially announced the abandonment of Intel's X86 architecture, turned to the ARM architecture, and launched the M1 chip applied to computers, with the excellent performance of the chip, it has been recognized by many users.
Although Intel is trying to save Apple, Apple has made up its mind to use its own M1 chip design.
Reinventing the past
From the above point of view, first by the latecomer TSMC to overtake, and then by Apple ruthlessly abandoned, for Intel, the blow is really not small.
As a former chip giant, it is naturally not willing to be surpassed by latecomers, so in February this year, Intel formulated an IDM 2.0 plan to return to its former glory in the field of chip manufacturing.
According to the author's understanding, Intel's plan includes spending huge sums of money to build chip manufacturing plants, opening up the chip foundry business to the outside world, and accelerating Intel's chip manufacturing process.
According to Intel's plan, it will surpass TSMC in 2025 and become the world's largest chip manufacturing giant.
However, in the author's opinion, Intel wants to achieve TSMC's transcendence in the field of chip manufacturing, which is obviously a bit delusional. Leaving aside the gap in technology, there is a huge gap between Intel and TSMC in terms of customer base alone.
According to the data released by DIGIMIES, TSMC's top ten customers are the world's top chip companies, such as Apple, MediaTek, AMD, Qualcomm, Broadcom and Nvidia, etc., and even Intel itself is in the list of customers of TSMC.
Not only that, but Intel CEOs have also visited TSMC to get more 3nm production capacity.
However, Intel's return to the first echelon of the chip foundry field should not be a problem. First of all, Intel itself has strong technical accumulation in the field of chip manufacturing, so it is relatively easy to revive the foundry business.
Secondly, Intel is also building factories, in addition to establishing factories in the United States, it also plans to establish a new chip packaging and packaging and testing plant in Malaysia, with the aim of expanding Intel's semiconductor production capacity in Malaysia in the future.
It is worth mentioning that the Intel-led X86 will also face a huge threat. At present, there are three camps in the global CPU architecture, the first is the Intel-led X86; followed by the AMR architecture; and finally the open source neutral RISC-V architecture.
According to the relevant market research agency analyst Dean. Data released by McAllen shows that the market share of computers with ARM architecture processors has increased to 8%, affecting the PC market dominated by X86 architecture processors.
Not only that, although the RISC-V architecture cannot be compared with X86 and ARM, there are not many companies that develop chips based on the RISC-V architecture, such as Alibaba, Huawei, etc. have layouts on the RISC-V architecture.
Write to the end
From the above point of view, Intel's future challenges are not many, whether it is chip manufacturing or X86, Intel wants to restore the glory of the past, there will be great difficulty.
It is not difficult to see that the competition in the global semiconductor field will become more and more fierce in the future, and whether Intel can laugh to the end depends on its future layout.