Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan has revealed that new memory architectures — once thought a commodity business — are now strategically interesting and one of his pet projects, while speaking about the comeback of the American chip industry. He further noted that the memory industry is ripe for innovation, and also hinted at exploring ways to stack memory on top of a CPU.
After years of being a commodity, memory became a strategic asset in recent quarters and will likely remain one for a while, so suddenly, leading makers of 3D NAND and DRAM became highly profitable companies, something the Intel CEO is keenly aware of: "I used to be, 'do not invest in memory because it is a kind of commodity business,' but now it has become different," Tan said. […] "There is a lot of new technology coming out. So, we are kind of looking at one of my pet projects, some of the new memory architecture. I think you just saw the news: I hired my good friend, Seok-Hee Lee, who used to run SK Hynix. So, you kind of know something that I am thinking about. We are not ready to unfold it."
Tan did not reveal anything about the pet project and did not even specify whether the project is one of his personally favored strategic initiatives at Intel, or an initiative in one of the companies that he has invested in. He did mention that stacking memory on top of a CPU could make a lot of sense, though did not elaborate. Tan's remarks also follow the revelation of an Intel XBM patent that does away with the silicon interposer of HBM.
" I think CPU and memory, I think there are a lot of ways we can really do stacking together," Tan said. "And also try to find some new architecture for memory. I think in some way the memory, a lot of innovation are not there. So, there is some really good area."
Not everyone in the industry remembers, but Intel started as a memory company in 1968 and was quite a successful memory maker until the eighties, when Japanese companies took the lead, and Intel had to exit the market completely after suffering severe losses. Since then, the company has attempted either to return to the memory market with NAND and Optane, or at least to capitalize on a new type of memory with RDRAM. In all three cases, the company abandoned its memory initiatives without incurring significant losses.
Given the current profitability of 3D NAND and DRAM makers, producing memory is certainly a good business again and will remain profitable for some time. However, to re-enter it, companies like Intel would need capital to build at least one fab, R&D to develop competitive process technologies, and time. While licensing a technology — assuming that a company has capital — is an option, we strongly doubt that at this point Intel may be inclined to invest capital in memory and not in its core products and foundry businesses. Furthermore, it is unclear how investors react to such investments given the fact that the company struggles to become a strong competitor in the foundry market and has exited 3D NAND and 3DXPoint/Optane businesses after failing to achieve strategic targets.
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Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.
Reply You can't sell CPUs/GPUs without ram, also even as a foundry it would be so much easier getting customers if you can provide the ram for their needs as well especially at a time were finding ram is extremely difficult, and sandwiching compute with ram into a single thing will make logistics for customers a lot easier as well. we strongly doubt that at this point Intel may be inclined to invest capital in memory and not in its core products and foundry businesses.
Not saying they will or will not, just saying that your arguments are invalid.
Reply Added benefit to circumvent all compatibility issues. It was interesting to see that Intel provided A380 GPU board makers with vram. Maybe some insight there, maybe not.TerryLaze said:You can't sell CPUs/GPUs without ram, also even as a foundry it would be so much easier getting customers if you can provide the ram for their needs as well especially at a time were finding ram is extremely difficult, and sandwiching compute with ram into a single thing will make logistics for customers a lot easier as well.
Not saying they will or will not, just saying that your arguments are invalid.
Reply They never had in house production of 3D XPoint in the first place. It would have required spinning up an entire fab for production by 2020-2021. That's why even though Gelsinger is the one who officially put it on ice it was already dead.edzieba said:Bet they wished they'd kept the Chalcogenide line running now! They'd be selling every Optane device they could pump out.
They can't just add DRAM into their logic manufacturing process. There's a reason why literally nobody does this: it won't work.TerryLaze said:You can't sell CPUs/GPUs without ram, also even as a foundry it would be so much easier getting customers if you can provide the ram for their needs as well especially at a time were finding ram is extremely difficult, and sandwiching compute with ram into a single thing will make logistics for customers a lot easier as well.
Licensing DRAM technology for in house fabrication would take a long time because they'd need to equip a fab and develop a manufacturing process for it. Thus this isn't really a viable alternative either.
Even the ZAM technology Intel co-developed isn't intended to be manufactured in house.
What all this most likely means is that whatever developments are made relate to how the memory itself is designed and packaged and then how it interfaces with logic designs.
Intel needs to just make a desktop CPU with 16-32GB of HBM (that they make in their own fabs) on a separate chiplet. This will allow them to sell a CPU that includes enough RAM for people to have a working system, then users can add some DDR5 when the price fixing stops.Reply
As many other device makers are seeing, when their business is heavily dependent on DRAM and NAND makers not price fixing, their business can be ruined at a whim, since people are not going to be in a rush to get a new CPU, Motherboard, and RAM to replace their aging DDR4 based system while there is rampant price fixing in the DRAM and NAND market.
Intel already has experience in this area, and just needs to bring it to desktop PCs by not price gouging so much. https://i.imgur.com/88sQc07.jpeg
