[서울신문] Intel’s decline in the’semiconductor empire’?… Be notified of parting by allies

The US Intel, which has built a’semiconductor empire’, is in crisis. After Apple, which makes PC products such as the MacBook, declared that it would use its own developed CPU instead of Intel products, Microsoft, the world’s second-largest cloud service company, took a’de-Intel’ move. Because.

Microsoft takes steps to’de-Intel’

Recently, Bloomberg News, an American economic media, reported that Microsoft plans to develop its own CPUs for its data centers and server computers. It is known that a plan to incorporate a self-developed CPU into the’Surface’, a tablet and notebook PC, is also under consideration. It is expected that the new CPU developed by Microsoft will be manufactured based on the blueprint of ARM, a British semiconductor design company. It is known that Microsoft has been preparing for a step toward’de-Intel’ by steadily recruiting semiconductor development engineers from Qualcomm and Nvidia for many years.

Meanwhile, Microsort and Intel have formed a strong’Wintel alliance’. Wintel refers to a computer equipped with Microsoft’s’Windows’ operating system and Intel’s CPU. Software technology is led by Microsoft, and Intel is in charge of hardware, including CPU, and has formed a close division of labor. The two companies have taken a’win-win strategy’ to grow together by introducing products optimized for each other.

Intel still stays on 14nm process

The solid alliance began to crack after the advent of smartphones. Intel’s CPU technology consumes a lot of power, so it is not suitable for smartphones that rely on small batteries. With the advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) and fifth-generation (5G) mobile communications, demand for semiconductors with low power consumption and high processing speed is increasing day by day, but it has failed to meet this. Intel’s semiconductor production technology has remained at the 14-nanometer (nm·1 billionth of a meter) process level for several years now. Intel announced in July that the release of 7-nano-based CPUs will be delayed and will be available at the end of 2022 or early 2023. Intel’s co-founder Gordon Moore’s’Moore’s Law’ (semiconductor performance doubles every 18 months) doesn’t seem to apply to Intel. Meanwhile, as ARM-based CPU performance has improved significantly, Intel has begun to be ignored by cloud companies as well as smartphones.

The foundry industry is full of work

On the other hand, semiconductor consignment manufacturing (foundry) companies such as TSMC and Samsung Electronics are all in the state of mass production up to the 5-nano process. It has already been developing 4 nano and 3 nano process technology. From the perspective of information technology (IT) companies, it is better to design semiconductors and leave them to consignment manufacturers to produce customized products. Customers, which are larger than Intel, have invested more capital and human resources in their semiconductor designs than before, which also affected the situation. Thanks to that, foundry companies that produce semiconductor chips designed by’IT dinosaurs’ into real products are booming. An industry insider commented, “Intel, which has reigned at the top for too long, has settled in comfort and cannot lead innovation”

IT Dinosaurs’ Notification to Intel “We Break Up”

The’IT Dinosaurs’ reported the breakup one after another to the aging semiconductor kingdom. ‘Amazon Web Service’ (AWS), the number one cloud company, has already developed and used a server CPU in 2018. It made a CPU dedicated to Amazon Web Services based on ARM. When the main CPU market shifted from the PC to the data center, the move of Amazon Web Services took a considerable blow to Intel. Even Apple announced in June that it would break its 14-year-old alliance with Intel. I’ve been using Intel semiconductors in my MacBook, but this year’s new product has its own CPU’M1′. Apple explained that the M1, developed optimized for the MacBook, is about 3.5 times faster than the existing CPU. As Amazon Web Services and Apple, followed by Microsoft, turned away from Intel, Intel’s position was rapidly shaken.

As the entire business was shaken, Intel recently decided to hand over most of the NAND flash business to SK Hynix, and plans to sell’Enpyrion’, the power management semiconductor business unit, to Taiwan Mediatech in the near future. There are even talks that Intel intends to entrust the CPU, which has been insisting on self-manufacturing, to a semiconductor consignment manufacturer. An industry official said, “No matter how much Intel is in the semiconductor empire, its glory cannot last forever,” he said. “It may be evaluated as a choice and concentration over the sale of Intel’s business unit, but strictly speaking, it shows the reality of Intel, which has become difficult.”

Reporter Jaehee Han [email protected]