Intel has been a lurch from one mistake to another for the past several years and even had to outsource manufacturing of its latest chips, as one of its largest competitors.The company now hopes to regain its glory by executing a series of difficult manufacturing shifts. It also hopes that a rebranding campaign can convince people it's not so far behind its competition.At Monday's event, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger presented a roadmap for several generations of chips. The roadmap includes new technologies that will help Intel compete with TSMC in Taiwan, which makes high-performance computer chips. It also includes a timeline to allow outsiders and executives to measure Intel's progress.Intel announced that Qualcomm and Amazon have agreed to become customers of its new foundry business. Intel stated it will start making chips for these companies in 2024. In March, Gelsinger announced plans to start the foundry business. This was just a few months after he returned to the company as CTO. In a shocking sign of how far behind the company is, Intel plans to outsource manufacturing of its most advanced chips and components to TSMC.Gelsinger stated that Intel will use a new naming system for the next generation of chips. Currently, chipmakers refers to new processes or nodes for making chips. TSMC uses a 5-nanometer process, while Intel uses a 10-nanometer method.Once, the nanometer scale was used to describe the size of a transistor gate. However, continued shrinkage guarantees better performance. A nanometer is one-billionth a meter. A human hair is between 50,000 and 100,000 nanometers thick. Gordon Moore, one of Intel's founders, stated that chipmaking progress could be measured in the ability to shrink a chip by roughly twice as many transistors every two years.The nanometer scale does not refer to the actual distances of a chip. Intel and others claim that their current chips perform as well as those made by TSMC's 7-nanometer process. The company plans to use a naming scheme that reflects that, with an updated version of the 10 nanometer chip due in this year called Intel 7, which it claims will deliver 10 to 15% better performance per watt. The next generation, which will arrive in 2023, 2024, and be known as Intel 4, and Intel 3, respectively, will be the Intel 4 and Intel 3.Gelsinger explained to WIRED that the question of marketing ends and engineering starts is always a concern. However, this is deeply rooted in engineering reality.It's all great, but they risk it again.Bernstein Research analyst Stacy Rasgon says that Gelsinger's technical roadmap is promising, but will increase the pressure on the company to implement it. He says that while this is great, the danger is that they will continue to push for their agenda and make it worse.Under its former leadership, Intel committed a number of mistakes. It was slow to adjust to mobile computing and lost market share to Arm. Arm makes blueprints for energy efficient chips that are used by companies like Apple. Apple uses Arm-based chips in its iPhone, iPad, and other Macs.The rise of artificial intelligence caught Intel off guard. Nvidia, a chip company that is not fabless, capitalized on the trend by producing chips specifically for AI computations. Nvidia surpassed Intel in market capitalization by July 2020.Intel took longer than TSMC to adopt the new method of etching features into silicon. This is known as extreme UV lithography (EUV). Monday's announcement by the company stated that it would increase its use of EUV and had obtained the first next-generation EUV machine made by ASML, a Dutch company. Each EUV machine is approximately $120 million, so the initiative will be expensive.
