Intel: Our upcoming AI chip will be cheaper, run cooler than Nvidia, AMD options

Crescent Island is an air-cooled chip that uses LPDDR5 memory.

See full article...

 

[sbradford26]

When you go with an AMD chip you’re paying margin to the chip designers (AMD) and margin to the fabricator (TSMC). With an Intel in-house chip you’re paying margin to Intel that incorporates both margin for the design and margin for the fabrication.

But the only way the Intel chip could be cheaper is if it’s making less margin than AMD plus TSMC. So either they’re planning on making less margin on their design services or less margin on their fabrication services or both. Taking less margin is not something you have to do when you’re making a desirable product!

Saying that margin would have to be reduced to be cheaper assumes that the costs are exactly the same. There are many aspects of a design that could be tweaked to allow for higher yields which would lower the costs. And since they are designing this chip to use cheaper memory and be air cooled tends to point to designing something that is more focused on manufacturability.

 

[sbradford26]

??? More focused on manufacturability than AMD, NVIDIA and TSMC who notoriously don’t give a shit about manufacturability? Because that doesn’t sound right to me. Literally everyone in the industry cares about manufacturability. The idea that Intel has some sort of silver bullet on that front is nonsense.

You are missing though that not every company has the same goals or constraints in what they are designing. Memory interfaces are notoriously tricky to design and a very susceptible to flaws. So it is very likely that the design choice to utilize HBM memory makes those chips significantly harder to get higher yields on.

Also sure Intel isn't at its peak but that doesn't mean that they don't have vast institutional knowledge in the semiconductor space.