Pushkar Ranade

Dwarkesh Podcast · What will computer chips look like in 2045?

• Why Will Intel Buy More Chipmaking Tools?

  Pushkar Ranade says Intel will invest more in chipmaking tools, and would have bought more a year ago if today's AI demand had been clear then.

  The limit is not the fabs Intel already runs. It is the tools upstream in the supply chain. Dwarkesh Patel points to NVIDIA locking in memory and other parts with commitments reportedly in the hundreds of billions of dollars, and asks whether Intel should make the same kind of commitment so advanced manufacturing is not left short later. Ranade calls that a valid question. Had Intel known what it knows now, it would have invested more about a year ago. Knowing that now, it will invest more. Otherwise the tools end up elsewhere, including Taiwan, and

  ▶ at 1:07:43 Share Transcript

• How Does Intel Plan to Catch Up to TSMC?

  Pushkar Ranade says Intel's catch-up with TSMC is a scale problem, not a missing generation of transistor technology.

  TSMC is a much larger leading-edge wafer manufacturer than Intel, and larger than Samsung. Foundry economics are mostly fixed cost. About 80 percent of a fab's cost is fixed, so every extra percent of utilization and yield adds far more output than the percentage itself. A move from 60 percent yield to 65 or 70 percent is not a linear gain. That is why only three foundries remain at the advanced node, down from about 20 around 40 years ago. Many companies simply stopped manufacturing.

  On the technology, Ranade says Intel is already there, maybe a few percent off on performa

  ▶ at 53:14 Share Transcript

• Why Can't Chip Fabs 10x Wafer Output for AI?

  Pushkar Ranade, Intel's CTO, says the world's chip tools can about double leading-edge wafer output, not multiply it by ten, even if AI labs want far more chips.

  ASML produces fewer than 100 extreme ultraviolet machines a year and does not plan to build significantly more than 100 a year by the end of the decade. That supply is split across Intel, TSMC, and memory makers such as SK Hynix. EUV is the bigger bottleneck, and it is not the only one. Once a flow such as Intel 18A is locked, the fab needs that specific tool from that supplier. Going from 18A to 14A, about 80 percent of the tool set can be reused, and the denser node still needs some new tools. Even with unlimited capital, extra w

  ▶ at 48:10 Share Transcript