Intel Ireland Fab 34 Achieves a Significant Development Milestone, Including the Capability to Drive Intel 4 Node
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schmidtbag
Really great to see modern nodes coming to a place that is geologically and politically stable.
D1stRU3T0R
was that a /s ?
schmidtbag
No, Ireland is a great country and I'm genuinely glad to see Intel invest in them. Israel, Taiwan, and South Korea seems to be where the bulk of modern processors are manufactured, where all 3 are at risk of being attacked (all 3 aren't even universally recognized as sovereign nations), and Taiwan also being at risk of tsunamis or floods. Considering the global chip shortage, we can't afford to lose any of these places. Nothing bad is going to happen to Ireland in the foreseeable future.
cucaulay malkin
they're fine till 4nm I think
alanm
Was just reading about this in another article. They ordered a next gen EUV machine from ASML for $340 million a piece. Samsungs EUVs cost about a $150 mil per unit when they bought them a few years back. These appear to be the most expensive "tools" on the planet.
JamesSneed
You should watch some videos on how they work. Its absolutely insane. Just to create the EUV light they fire tin droplets at 100Mph and hit those in mid flight with a pulsed laser. This laser has a low power beam that hits the tin to flatten it out and a higher power beam that destroys the tin giving off the EUV light. The laser is about the size of a semi truck. This light then hits giant reflectors. This is all just to get the light source it gets insanely more complicated from here.
Venix
What would be ideal is to have fabs on europe usa and tsmc and Samsung ... And all of em be very close on their silicon. As things are right now if china decide tomorrow to do Hong Kong number 2 .... Then most likely only apple will be able to fab there since they are on very good terms with china. And from what it seems glofo is out of the race indefinitely, pitty their 14nm was not that bad tsmc's 16nm where slightly better (same lithography really as both of those are really renamed 20nm finfet) , but still glofo was competitive enough .
geogan
I wish AMD would also open a Fab in Ireland
Venix
They got rid of glofo a while back .... I do not think they will want back in the business logic says at least š
alanm
They dont have that sort of money. When they commit to a fab, its production is only good for a few years after which they need to re-invest in new facilities and/or retool their existing plants for new processes. Its an extremely capital intensive ongoing affair. Its why they got out of the business.
What I would like to see is Apple doing it instead of hogging up everyone elses share at TSMC and elsewhere. They can easily afford it, just that their management are risk averse, spineless douche-bags that lack the courage to do it.
Venix
They where courageous enough to remove the headphone jack so they can sell you overpriced dongles and airpods !
And yes they called the removal of the headphone jack courage...
Denial
Hot take but I think removing the headphone jack was a good move.. courageous? Probably not but nevertheless a good move. The state of wireless earbuds from 3rd party companies was trash prior to this decision and 90% of people were walking around with $3 earbuds listening to music like its 1930s mono. Most of them were forced to upgrade afterwards. Audiophiles just bought DAC dongles instead that was better than the built in variants anyway.
Did it make Apple money? Absolutely. But I think it also forcibly raised the 'floor' for the lower bound of audio quality.
H83
CanĀ“t agree with this. Apple only did this to "force" clients to buy their wireless earbuds to make even more money.
If people were buying crap earbuds, that was their problem, not AppleĀ“s problem. Even worse, some guys had great wired earbuds that became useless with this move...
Denial
It doesn't have to be intentional to have an effect. Either way I'd argue against your "people buying crap earbuds is not their problem" building a good ecosystem around your devices definitely has knock-on advantages down the road. It's a big reason why people get stuck with certain brands.
Venix
I will never ever be ok with options being taken away.
Aura89
Ireland has natural disasters as well
https://www.gsi.ie/en-ie/geoscience-topics/natural-hazards/Pages/default.aspx
How frequent they are compared to what you are comparing to is probably difficult to say, as its very specific to location.
schmidtbag
Are you just arguing for the sake of arguing? Intel could build the factory in an Irish swamp and it would still be at less risk of natural disasters affecting production than Taiwan. Nowhere in the world doesn't face natural disasters, but for many places, the risks are either:
A. Effortlessly avoidable (like don't build the factory in a swamp)
B. Are of apocalyptic proportions where a factory going down is the least of concern (like a meteor)
C. In the case of Ireland, whatever disasters they face are insignificant compared to most other parts of the world (like hurricanes, floods, fires, heat waves, and earthquakes)
Quantity of disasters is irrelevant. What matters is their destructive force. I don't think Ireland has ever had a natural disaster that would threaten Intel's facility longer than a day for as long as people lived there.
The deadliest natural disasters they faced (like the "Year Without a Summer", the potato famine, or a few plagues) would be survivable nowadays thanks to the help of other countries, particularly the EU. Besides those, the most deadly disasters they faced were all were caused artificially, typically by negligence or just simply an accident (except maybe one). There are not many of these.
BLEH!
Which nm equivalent is Intel 4?
Aura89
Just stating the facts. Sorry that you have problems with factual information. Wasnt even an argument.
Everywhere you could build a fab, a natural disaster could happen, or man-made disaster. If every time it happens we say it was built in the wrong place, then no place is right.
Texas had the big freeze, its not normal, yet any fabs built there if running at the time would have had issues with it, it'd have been more conspiracy theories of "well guess prices are going to artificially go up again" blah blah blah.
So say this fab we are talking about has a natural disaster, is it also now a problem of where it was built?
Guess there is nowhere that is a good option.
Earthquakes, blizzards freezes, volcanoes, floods tsunamis, hurricanes, tornados, fires, power outtages, etc. You can not get away from them, they happen, this is facts, no reason to have a problem with it.
More then likely the biggest thing ireland could have an issue with is hurricanes, they have had them before, just like texas' big freeze, it may be abnormal to get a "big" one that would impact them, but they could, and then what? More conspiracies from nutjobs?
Just seems to useless to worry about.
Thats...not true lol
https://www.irishcentral.com/roots/history/five-worst-irish-storms-history
"Up to 300 people died, tens of thousands were left homeless, and winds reached well over 115 miles per hour in a category three hurricane. Twenty-five percent of the houses in Dublin were destroyed and 42 ships were sunk."
Sure you could say this was over 100 years ago, but if anything the natural disasters are getting stronger and more frequent.
And there are more listings in that list.
So again my point is: natural disasters happen anywhere, so theres no reason to make it sound like ireland is safe when all that does it open it up to being going all conspiracy theory when something happens.
schmidtbag
You pointed out that Ireland faces natural disasters as if those disasters are significant enough to refute my point; they're not. Otherwise, why make the statement?
That's like moving from East St. Louis to Copenhagen because it's one of the safest cities, and then you come around saying "yeah but there's still crime" while completely missing the fact that not only are there fewer crimes but they're less severe.
Your argument is basically "there's a non-0 chance that a major disaster could happen to Ireland so therefore its safety doesn't matter" which is such a fruitless perspective.
Would it make sense for Intel to build a facility at base of an active volcano? Surely, it doesn't matter, because disasters happen everywhere, right?
Actually, those fabs likely wouldn't have had issues, because they tend to have backup power sources. Texas' grid was known to be a liability before that freeze. When you spend tens of billions of dollars on a facility, you're not going to cheap out and ruin your wafers - you're going to do your research on your location and take precautionary measures. As far as I've heard, natural disasters have never harmed any of Intel's facilities to any significant degree.
You say that as though every fab has faced crippling natural disasters. Ireland is statistically a very safe place.
Do you know where Ireland is? Because if you knew about its geography, you'd realize that most of the things you mentioned cannot be threats in our lifetime.
Ireland has never faced a deadly earthquake and it has no reason to either, due to its location within the Eurasian plate and the direction it is moving in.
Being a relatively small island, the ocean regulates the temperature to prevent drastic weather conditions like blizzards or freezes. Of course they can still happen, but not to a point that would totally catch them off-guard. Ireland is pretty far north, yet it barely gets any snow.
The nearest active volcano is probably in Iceland, which is 1300km away. As stated before, the EU could always help out if that were to ever erupt.
While Ireland does [rarely] face tsunamis, the facility is built in Leixlip, which is practically immune to them.
As stated before, the facility would have backup power.
Fires don't tend to spread very far in European countries these days; it's not a threat to Intel, anyway.
That just leaves hurricanes, of which Ireland's are much less severe than in places like southeast Asia or western Atlantic.
Right... that's my point - it is so useless to worry about disasters in Ireland because they're typically going to be so insignificant.
There were over 300 people who died in Ireland from a single plane crash. So yes actually, natural disasters there are less deadly.
I wouldn't have discounted that being only 100 years ago, because in the scheme of climate, it's not that long. You're right that storms are getting stronger, but so are structures.
Only people who obsess over a tragedy they had no involvement in make conspiracies. None of this changes the fact that Ireland is a safe place to build a factory.
