Intel CEO Challenges and Development Perspectives

Heads of leading high-tech companies inNew Year’s Eve talk about current achievements, problems and plans for the near future. During a planned Credit Suisse conference, Intel CEO Robert Swan revealed to reporters the reasons for the decline in digging popularity, highlighted the technical difficulties with the introduction of 10-nm technologies and said that a shortage of 14-nm Intel processors reduces the company's market share in x86 CPUs.

The head of Intel believes that the main reasonThe problems of the company became incorrectly chosen general directions of development. In particular, Intel's top priority was to retain 90% of the x86 processor market. At the same time, other areas in the field of semiconductor technologies were missed, where the company had a total share of 30%.

Currently, to close the gapIntel rivals are rapidly increasing the number of programmable accelerators based on FPGA, introducing 5G and plans to enter the GPU market. The basis of the company's marketing policy is the diversification of production, the introduction of a wider range of new, uncharacteristic for Intel high-tech products.

Parsing the mistakes leading up to the current deficit14nm processors and the challenges of implementing finer manufacturing processes, Swan noted three major omissions made by the company. First of all, the growth in demand for server processors was incorrectly estimated. The marketing plans laid down a 10% increase, while in reality the need for such devices increased by 21%. To meet the unexpectedly large demand, the capacities producing mobile and desktop CPUs were reoriented. This led to their deficit.

Swan called the second most important mistakethe excessive development of partnerships with Apple, which completely broke relations with Qualcomm, switched to Intel processors. This led to Intel's shortage of capacities. Later, when Apple and Qualcomm entered into a partnership, Intel turned out to have excessive capacities for the production of mobile modems. This production had to be sold, while suffering multibillion-dollar losses.

The third reason was purely technical in nature,when Intel developers, when switching from 14-nm to 10-nm technology, tried to “increase the number of transistors 2.7 times in an“ aggressive way ”, while when switching from 22-nm to 14-nm technology, such an increase was only 2.4 times . This technical policy has delayed the implementation of the 10-nm process for 5 years.

Nevertheless, Swan promises that in the near futureIn the future, all problems will be eliminated, and by the 4th quarter of 2021, Intel will start production of 7-nm processors using EUV lithography, which will achieve a transistor density comparable to the 5-nm processors of TSMC’s main competitor. By the second half of 2024, Intel will switch to production on the 5-nm process technology, which can compete with 3-nm TSMC processors.