Industry Expert Blogs

Intel had its investor day recently. I'm not going to talk about Intel as an investment. However, as the largest semiconductor company, with 98% market share in datacenter processors and a leader in process technology, there is plenty to take a look at. Anything in "quotes" means that it is a verbatim quote from either the presenter or the presentation during the morning.

Client Computing and Datacenter

Historically, Intel has used the chips for its highest-volume PC products to drive its process technology. These days, that means what Intel calls all-in-one devices. These basically compress all the functionality of a desktop PC into a very compact form factor. There were two reasons for doing this. The first is that these were the highest-volume products. It is one of the truisms of semiconductor manufacturing that if you want to get a high yield, then you have to run a lot of wafers. The second reason is that the chips were not excessively large (with regard to area). Very large chips yield poorly for defect density reasons, so running very large chips on an immature process is expensive.

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