Monday, January 23rd 2023
Intel Slams the Brakes on Hillsboro R&D Center as Part of Cost Savings
Alongside its facilities in Hillsboro, Oregon, Intel was meant to build a state of the art, $700 million R&D centre, but it appears that the company has decided to slam the brakes on that project, as part of its cost saving measures. The "mega lab" as it has also been referred to, will most likely not get built at all, despite the comparably small cost in relation to building a semiconductor fab, but $700 million saved is still going to make Intel look good in front of its shareholders. In total, Intel is said to be looking at cutting US$3 billion in spending for 2023 and cancelling the construction of the R&D facility contributes almost a quarter of that sum.
The "mega lab" was supposed to cover 18,580 square metres of floor space, largely dedicated towards data centre R&D projects. According to Intel, those projects will still go ahead, just at other facilities, according to a statement sent to Oregon Live. Intel is apparently also scrapping plans for a much smaller, US$200 million R&D facility in Israel, while potentially also pushing back its plans for new fabs in Europe. The latter might come down to what kind of subsidies Intel can get from the German government and the EU.
Sources:
Oregon Live, via Tom's Hardware
The "mega lab" was supposed to cover 18,580 square metres of floor space, largely dedicated towards data centre R&D projects. According to Intel, those projects will still go ahead, just at other facilities, according to a statement sent to Oregon Live. Intel is apparently also scrapping plans for a much smaller, US$200 million R&D facility in Israel, while potentially also pushing back its plans for new fabs in Europe. The latter might come down to what kind of subsidies Intel can get from the German government and the EU.
52 Comments on Intel Slams the Brakes on Hillsboro R&D Center as Part of Cost Savings
And in a few years when they fall way behind in new tech development, what will they do then ?
I know exactly what they will do: Go cryin to the gov't about needing even MOAR taxpayer money (the recent "Chips Act" will pail in comparison) to bail themselves out of their self-inflicted discombobulated clusterf*ck mess....
Mark my words, cause it's a comin sooner rather than later !
Too many lakes catching up with them
Nobody wants eol lakes anymore :laugh:
They also hit a home run with STARS back in the day and were slapping intel around during the pentium years and then gouged their customers with FX models and almost went bankrupt with Bulldozer... so I wouldn't read into AMD's recent success as some genius business strategy or that they're well run. Those guys were circling the drain hard for years (I have 2 friends that work there) - they're a total shitshow.
wait..................wasn't this the whole reason for the "chips act"??
Secondly, since you bring it up, Keller’s influence on AMD products disappeared years ago and barely scratched the surface of where AMD is now and is currently headed. The Keller talk is brought up to scare people. Keller never thought of or came up with the Xilinx acquisition and product integration, the combination of RDNA and Zen in a compute/AI monster (XDNA), 3D stacked cache and future stacked and MCM combos. Hell I’m not even sure how much Keller was involved with chiplets but the IO die and core chiplet combos came later after Zen/Zen+. Finally, it takes extreme engineering from both AMD and TSMC to move to ever shrinking die processes. Keller has nothing to do with any of that.
TSMC beating Intel at fabbing the cutting edge is exactly right -- if Zen 4 was on 12nm GLOFO or 8NM Samsung it would be a completely different story both in server and client computing.
And that's exactly why they won't be allowed to fail by the USgov.
American semiconductor manufacturing is a national security issue in the eyes of US government -- reliance on TSMC is not an option; despite the trillions of dollars China has thrown at their chip development they too have failed horribly to compete with TSMC. RISC V, ARM, Sifive etc. are great, but they're also just design shops relying on external fabs.
Intel's designs are not the problem, they're competing on design alone while on an inferior process node -- their ability to fabricate silicon is the issue; and that's simply not acceptable to the powers that be. The military complex won't allow that we rely solely on a contested island next to China for the future of our tech. Therefore Intel, GloFo etc. are going to continue to get massive capital injections indefinitely, and TSMC is going to continue to get funding to open plants stateside.
Intel's pivot to fabbing, while panned on wallstreet, is kind of where the value lies -- they are basically the last competitive high-end fab in the west. All of those homebrew and fabless businesses are great an all - but those designs are worthless if you cant manufacture them.
Suggestions like that are nonsense.There is so much wrong with this statement. Lack of big-picture-perspective kind of thing.
The reason Intel is cutting back is because of the world economy. This is part of the aftermath of the pandemic. Things and companies will sort themselves out, it just takes time.
www.theverge.com/2023/1/12/23552711/apple-ceo-tim-cook-pay-cut-2023