The challenges Intel faces to compete with TSMC, Samsung

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ANALYSIS Ever since CEO Pat Gelsinger announced Intel was opening its fabs to contract manufacturing, the question has been: for whom?

www.theregister.com/, Jun. 06, 2023 – 

Who was going to pay to have their chips made by an American giant with such a spotty reputation for execution and whose process tech has been not only falling behind TSMC and Samsung, but even Intel's own roadmaps at that?

At Computex last month, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang revived the question, reminding reporters his GPU giant was open to the idea of using Intel's assembly lines; Huang said as much this time last year.

To be clear, Intel Foundry Services (IFS) – which wants to make chips for all kinds of customers, just like TSMC, Samsung, and UMC do – has won some victories in the two years since it was introduced, just not for the kinds of process tech that grabs headlines. Last summer, MediaTek announced it would use Intel to fabricate some chips on a 22nm node.

But for a company like Nvidia, which is currently building chips on TSMC's N4 process, Intel's six-year-old tech isn't going to cut it, and it's hard to say whether Intel's 7nm – now called Intel 4 – will be good enough either.

So while Huang's comments might have sounded like a renewed ringing endorsement for IFS, they're really a pragmatic statement about the nature of the semiconductor industry. Things change, so, why wouldn't he keep his options open?

While Nvidia's current generation of chips are largely manufactured by TSMC, that hasn't always been the case - the GeForce giant has a long history of working with Samsung. The whole advantage of being a fabless chipmaker is you can have your chips built by whomever you want. Who is to say Intel won't be leading the pack a few years from now? It's simply too soon to say.

That said, Intel has a lot of work ahead of it, if it seriously expects to compete with TSMC and Samsung any time in the near future.

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