The problems plaguing Intel are fundamental problems that money cannot easily solve, if at all.

Intel needs expertise that only a few hundred people on Earth have, and most of them are in Taiwan, already working for someone else.

You don't just buy an EUV and start printing, you buy an EUV and give it to a wizard to use as a wand. Intel needs wizards.

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ac29 44 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

What you say is a bit dismissive of where Intel currently is. They are maybe a year behind TSMC and have been "printing" EUV in high volume since 2023 and shipping it in high volume since 2024.

Their latest node 18A is already in production and should be a lot closer to TSMC's latest and greatest, with the first products shipping early next year.

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rangestransform 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You need an army of wizards who are willing to do, for the most part, lab-tech work for lab-tech salary while having a graduate degree in relevant field

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derefr 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

How much money are those wizards making that Nvidia can't easily afford to both 1. pay them to come fix Intel's problems for a while, and also 2. pay TSMC to rescind their non-competes to enable them to do that?

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ricardonunez 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

How one become a wizard like that?

	▲	Workaccount2 an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Get a PhD in some kind of esoteric field like chemical kinetics and then spend a decade learning about oxide surface conditioning under someone who spent their life working on it. None of this stuff is published (externally) and there are no discussion forums or stack overflows to help you either. You need to get through academia, prove yourself, and then you can start working on a chance to get access to the trade secrets that make it possible. After all that you will be placed as a researcher on a handful of steps in the multi-thousand step process of making SOTA wafers. And probably not make crazy money, but at this point, you're not in it for the money anyway.
	▲	fooker 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Realistically, identify the next technology that will need such wizards and get into a PhD program to research that technology.
	▲	2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[deleted]