Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger spoke at Hot Chips 2022 on Monday on the lofty topic, “Semiconductors Run the World,” the same day Intel’s stock price dropped to its lowest level in five years.
Intel was victim of a widespread semiconductor sell-off affecting other chipmakers over investor fears of rising interest rates. Nonetheless, the bad news on Wall Street and in the broader economy clouded the message Gelsinger hoped to convey of being an innovator with chip design.
Intel fell 4.3% at market close to $33.84 and has lost 36% of its value since the start of the year. A bad Intel earnings report in July was considered by some analysts to be a disaster.
RELATED: Intel’s bad Q2 drowns out its CHIPS Act celebration
Intel at Hot Chips focused on various chip innovations, including upcoming Meteor Lake processors, a next-gen Core processor for PCs in 2023, and Ponte Vecchio processors, being deployed for Aurora, the world’s fastest supercomputer.
Intel’s newest approach links chiplets into a single larger processor to make them run faster.. “The board is becoming a chip now,” Gelsinger said. With 2.5D and 3D processing, he said, “we’ve reached the sweet spot of die size with the low end of processing applied to packaging…We’ve created logic transistors in 3D.”
EUV, advanced packaging with chiplets and other innovations will allow Intel to reach 1 trillion transistors per processor by the end of the decade, Gelsinger said. By comparison the Pentium of 1993 had two processors on a single chip with 3.3 million transistors.
AMD uses the chiplet approach for its Ryzen 7 5800X3D and Apple puts two of its M1 Max chips into the M1 Ultra, its most powerful Mac processor.
A chief advantage Intel claims is how Meteor Lake is expected to be cheaper than the Ryzen processor at $400 and the M1 Ultra at $2,000 for an M1 Max Mac Studio. Meteor Lake is built with Foveros, where four chiplets are set atop a silicon substrate that provides communication links.
Packaging is as important as the process technology itself, Intel believes. Intel supports an open chiplet ecosystem through Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express backed by a consortium of multiple chipmakers. Meteor Lake shares the chiplet approach with Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake, all part of Intel’s next general 3D client platform. Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake are expected in 2024.
Ponte Vecchio is a data center GPU-based compute accelerator for high performance computing and AI training.
Intel also shared FPGA based hardware acceleration for radio frequency applications, part of its DARPA CHIPS program in collaboration with Texas Instruments. The company showcased integration of digital and analog chiplets from various process nodes, foundries and developers at what it called a fraction of the development time and cost.
Jack Gold, an analyst at J. Gold Associates, said Intel has made big investments in new package technology that seems to be well ahead of the industry. “If they can make it all work, with the smaller and older tech chiplets, it could give Intel a major cost and time to market advantage,” he added.
Intel’s approach means older process nodes can be used “so you don’t have to wait three to four years to build out new fabs for the smaller nodes and you get a higher return on your fab investment as you don’t need to retire the old fab as soon,” Gold added.
Gold said that advanced packaging technology “can potentially produce lower costs and higher volumes of SoCs.”
CHIPS Act achievements
Gelsinger used his Hot Chips appearance to praise passage of the CHIPS Act which he called the "biggest industrial legislative achievement since World War II."
A key component of the CHIPS Act is creation of a National Semiconductor Technology Center which along with the National Science Foundation will promote chip research, he said.