Intel’s packaging doesn’t seem to be that far behind TSMC’s, just with different strengths and weaknesses, at least on the foundry side. On the design side they were slow to actually implement chiplet based design in the actual chips, compared to AMD who embraced it full force early on, and Apple who rely almost exclusively on System-in-a-Package designs (including their “ultra” line of M-series chips that are two massive Max chips stitched together) where memory and storage are all in one package.

So what IS their strategy now?

I think they need to bet the company on regaining their previous lead in actual cutting edge fabrication of semiconductors.

TSMC basically prints money, but the next stage is a new paradigm where TSMC doesn’t necessarily have a built-in advantage. Samsung and Intel are gunning for that top spot with their own technologies in actually manufacturing and packaging chips, hoping to leapfrog TSMC as the industry tries to scale up mass production of chips using backside power and gate all around FETs (GAAFETs).

If Intel 18A doesn’t succeed, the company is done.

Foxconn had two groups of engineers leave and create Intel and AMD when they were dissatisfied with how management was running the company.

You’re thinking of Fairchild, not Foxconn.

William Shockley led the team that invented the transistor while at Bell Labs, and then went on to move back to his home state of California to found his own company developing silicon transistors, ultimately resulting in the geographical area becoming known as Silicon Valley. Although a brilliant scientist and engineer, he was an abrasive manager, so 8 of his key researchers left the company to form Fairchild Semiconductor, a division of a camera and imaging company with close ties to military contracting.

The researchers at Fairchild developed the silicon integrated circuit (Texas Instruments developed the first integrated circuit with germanium, but it turns out that semiconductor material wasn’t good for scaling and hit a dead end early on), and grew the company into a powerhouse. Infighting between engineers and management (especially east coast based management dictating what the west coast lab was doing) and Fairchild’s policy of not sharing equity with employees, led Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce (who had been 2 of the 8 who left Shockley for Fairchild) to go and found Intel, poaching a talented young engineer named Andy Grove.

Intel originally focused on memory, but Grove recognized that the future value would be in processors, so they bet the company on that transition to logic chips, just in time for the computer memory market to get commoditized and for Japanese competition to crush the profit margins in that sector. By the 90’s, Intel became known as the dominant company in CPUs. Intel survived more than one generation on top because they knew when to pivot.

They had untouchable market dominance from the mid 80’s through the mid 2010’s, so probably closer to 30 years.

AMD and Apple caught up on consumer PC processors, as the consumer PC market as a whole kinda started to fall behind tablets and phones as the preferred method of computing. Even in the data center, the importance of the CPU has lost ground to GPU and AI chips in the past 5 years, too. We’ll see how Intel protects its current position in the data center.

I’m personally excited about the actual engineering challenges that come next and think that all 3 big foundries have roughly equal probability of coming out on top in the next stage, as the transistors become more complex three dimensional structures, and as the companies try to deliver power from the back side of the wafer rather than the crowded front side.

Samsung and Intel have always struggled with manufacturing finFETs with the yields/performance of TSMC. Intel’s struggles to move on from 14nm led to some fun memes, but also reflected the fact that they hit a plateau they couldn’t get around. Samsung and Intel have been eager to get off of the finFET paradigm and tried to jump early to Gate All Around FETs (GAAFETs, which Samsung calls MBCFET and Intel calls RibbonFET), while TSMC sticks around on finFET for another generation.

Samsung switched to GAAFET for its 3nm node, which began production in 2022, but the reports are that it took a while to get yields up to an acceptable level. Intel introduced GAAFET in its 20A node, but basically abandoned it before commercial production and put all of its resources into 18A, which they last reported should be ready for mass production in the first half of 2025 and will be ready for external customers to start taping out their own designs.

Meanwhile, TSMC’s 3nm node is still all finFET. Basically the end of the line for this technology that catapulted TSMC way ahead of its peers. Its 2nm node will be the first TSMC node to use GAAFET, and they have quietly abandoned plans to introduce backside power in the generation after that, for their N2P. Their 1.6 nm node is going to have backside power, though. They’ll be the last to marker with these two technologies, but maybe they’re going to release a more polished process that still produces better results.

So you have the three competitors, with Samsung being the first to market, Intel likely being second, and TSMC being third, but with no guarantees that they’ll all solve the next generation challenges in the same amount of lead time. It’s a new season, and although past success does show some advantages and disadvantages that may still be there, none of it is a guarantee that the leader right now will remain a leader into the next few generations.

This limitation comes up sometimes when people try to build out a zero-trust cable where they can get a charge but not necessarily transfer data to or from an untrusted device on the other side.

Well, the last two monitors I bought didn’t come with any signal cables at all, probably because the manufacturers don’t need to presume whether the consumer prefers HDMI or DP, or whether the other side is full size, mini-DP/mini-HDMI, or USB-C alt mode. Just right there, that’s 5 possibilities, each about as common as the others.

You can even get PD capable USB-C cables that don’t transmit data at all.

I don’t think this is right. The PD standard requires the negotiation of which side is the source and which is the sink, and the voltage/amperage, over those data links. So it has to at least support the bare minimum data transmission in order for PD to work.

Apple doesn’t manufacture docks. It’s entirely third party manufacturers (and some people freely use Dell-branded docks with their Apple laptops).

Adapting from usb- a to b is not adapting anything other than the physical connector.

Neither is the DisplayPort cables I’m talking about, where one end is just USB-C, but the signal actually transmitted through the USB-C connector and the cable itself is the HBR/UHBR transmission mode of any other DisplayPort cable (whatever the combination of the two ends physical connectors, between full DisplayPort, mini DisplayPort, or USB-C). It’s not “adapted” because the data signals aren’t converted in any way.

So it’s as much an “adapter” as a DP cable that is a mini one one side and a full size on the other.

Precisely, you need to use an adapter

No, it’s not an adapter. It’s literally just a cable with two different ends.

Unless you consider an ordinary USB-A to USB-B (or mini B or micro B) to be an “adapter,” too.

Dual 4k120 would already saturate the bandwith.

What would you use to drive dual 4k/120 displays over a single cable, if not Thunderbolt over USB-C? And what 2017 laptops were capable of doing that?

Even if we’re talking about two different cables over two different ports, that’s still a pretty unusual use case that not a lot of laptops would’ve been capable of in 2017.

Well, Bell Labs isn’t the magical place that it used to be, and that was originally an R&D shop basically enabled by the economics of the AT&T monopoly.

Mini DVI: long dead. Replaced with HDMI. The MacBook pro’s have HDMI

HDMI has always been inferior to DisplayPort, for computer displays. I’d personally consider DP to be the natural successor to DVI.

I have one of the more recent models. When I sit down at my desk, I just plug it into a Thunderbolt dock anyway, through a single port. All those extra ports just sit unused, despite having a USB-A keyboard and mouse, Ethernet jack, and 4k monitor at that desk. Plus the dongle provides power to the laptop.

I do use the SD reader from time to time, though. I used to have an external reader that was a bit unwieldy on the laptop, but it was also a requirement from when I was shooting pictures on a CompactFlash, which has never had a built in reader on any laptop.

Can you break this down?

The 2017 model pictured in this post supported Thunderbolt 3, which was a 40 gbps connection. Supported display modes included up to 4k@120, 2x4k@60, or 5k@60, which was better than the then-standard HDMI 2.0.

What combination of resolution, frame rate, and color depth are you envisioning that having a dock handle a gigabit Ethernet connection, analog audio would require scaling down the display resolution through the same port?

By 2021, the MacBook Pros were supporting TB4, and the spec sheets on third party docking stations were supporting 8k resolutions, even if Macs themselves only supported 6k, or up to 4x4k.

Even if we talk about DisplayPort Alt Mode, a VESA standard developed in 2014, and supported in the 2017 models pictured in this post, that’s just a standard DP connection, which in 2017 supported HDR 5k@60. But didn’t support a whole separate dock with networking and USB ports.

The Apples of this generation pictured all support DisplayPort alt mode, and Thunderbolt 3, through those USB-C ports. That means that you could use passive USB-C to DP cables that didn’t need active translation in the cable/adapter itself.

Even some of Intel’s Arrow Lake/Lunar Lake chips are being fabbed at TSMC.

Hawai
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The hyphen can provide indicators on how to parse the letters on either side. “Pen-Island” would be pronounced differently from “Penisland.”