Monday, October 26th 2020
Raja Koduri to Present at Samsung Foundry Forum amid Intel's Outsourcing Efforts
Intel's chief architect and senior vice president of discrete graphics division, Mr. Raja Koduri, is said to be scheduled to present at Samsung Electronics Event day. With a presentation titled "1000X More Compute for AI by 2025", the event is called Samsung Foundry SAFE Forum. It is a global virtual conference designed to be available to everyone. So you might be wondering what is Mr. Koduri doing there. Unless you have been living under a rock, you know about Intel's struggles with node manufacturing. Specifically, the 10 nm node delays that show the company's efforts to deliver a node on time. The same is happening with the 7 nm node that also experienced significant delays.
Intel has a contract to develop an exascale supercomputer at Argonne National Laboratory, called Aurora. That supercomputer is using Intel's CPUs and the company's upcoming Xe GPUs. Since the company has problems with manufacturing and has to deliver the products (it is bound by several contracts) to its contractors and customers, it decided to look at external manufacturers for its products, specifically Xe graphics. Being that Mr. Koduri tweeted an image of him visiting Samsung Giheung Fab in Korea, and now presenting at the Samsung Foundry event, it is possible that Intel will tap Samsung's semiconductor manufacturing process for its Xe GPU efforts and that Samsung will be the contractor in charge.
Source:
Samsung
Intel has a contract to develop an exascale supercomputer at Argonne National Laboratory, called Aurora. That supercomputer is using Intel's CPUs and the company's upcoming Xe GPUs. Since the company has problems with manufacturing and has to deliver the products (it is bound by several contracts) to its contractors and customers, it decided to look at external manufacturers for its products, specifically Xe graphics. Being that Mr. Koduri tweeted an image of him visiting Samsung Giheung Fab in Korea, and now presenting at the Samsung Foundry event, it is possible that Intel will tap Samsung's semiconductor manufacturing process for its Xe GPU efforts and that Samsung will be the contractor in charge.
13 Comments on Raja Koduri to Present at Samsung Foundry Forum amid Intel's Outsourcing Efforts
The other point is if they do signup with TSMC they're not only admitting defeat but also enabling a competitor & we all know Intel's not in the business of doing that, they'll rather cut their nose to spite the face :laugh:
I do commend them for keeping up this facade for what must be a horrendous outlook for the future.
Part of me hopes Intel's stupid pride actually gets them back up and running with a competitive fab again, solely because we need competition and if TSMC is the only game in town then that's bad for everyone except TSMC shareholders.
Intel deserve to fall though. Pride, arrogance, anti-competitive practices, lobbying - their whole strategy for the last 20+ years has been one of the most ethically-dubious exploitations of market position there is. They continue to break international laws because the penalties for doing so are completely outclassed by the profits that anti-competitive practices allow them to rake in.
My ideal scenario is that Intel burns through its vast stockpile of money, fires all of the fatcat execs that made Intel the monster it is, and forces them to focus as a smaller, stripped-down core business that competes on its product quality alone and not through market exploitation. Intel has good engineers but the guys at the helm need to be replaced.
For Intel's sake they need to take their thumb out of there butt.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raja_Koduri