I think a partnership with China is politically unpalatable at the moment. But stranger things have happened, and that can change on a whim if the Trump Administration decides co-opetition is better than war. Everything is a lever, and everything is a deal.

Given how brilliantly destructive splitting Intel in two is likely to be, I’m surprised selling the foundry directly to SMIC isn’t one of the promoted options. That would, at least, encourage continued innovation all around.

I think it is very plausible Intel’s 18A process and the intellectual property behind it is more valuable than what either TSMC or Samsung will achieve in the coming years

On a more serious note, Solomon’s trick of threatening to cut the baby in half may yet uncover the true loving mother of economic prosperity in the United States.

We may have no choice here. It might be Intel/TSMC US versus SMIC/TSMC Taipei.

Intel without it fabs would end up at a cost disadvantage, a margin disadvantage, and would lose its cash cow properly managed sustaining the organizations overall monopoly bloated although right sizing cost structure currently operating at marginal revenue = marginal cost = price for every next unit of production. Currently just enough money in fabrication and packaging to produce every next unit of production to cover CapEx brown and green field fab construction, outfitting and the research and development expense.

I’ve proposed in my writings that Intel sell shares in IF to between 5 and 7 large customers that would hold board seats and participate in decision making OPERATNG Intel IF on the ‘private golf club’ model for access, starts, wafer and other materials as an operating satellite of a ‘federated’ Intel. This is a similar business model to ARM holdings plc; parent and satellite(s). Government and the US Trump executive understand federated and private golf club business models and lots of people in semi fabrication and equipment play golf.

All foundries are basically clubs (small cartels) maintained by their largest customers on material inputs block negotiation / procurement directing to downstream system design production so why not Intel and some appropriate number of charter IF fab club members? If the operation grows charter members can sell some of their shares to grow membership. If foundry fails, the value of those shares becomes another question BUT I don’t think Intel IF will fail and success sustainable well operated.

I also think the Intel + GoFlo merger a viable idea.

The January 27, 2025 regular 9341 Congressional briefing recommended State of Ohio start looking for a New Albany buyer before fab shell outfit and TSMC would not be a bad buyer for auto / industrial embedded components production. I believe Intel will never produce an Intel component in Ohio on embedded slim margin. If not TSMC there are a handful of prospect fab buyers already producing components for auto and industrial embedded so why not on that core competency?

Mike Bruzzone, Camp Marketing

Quite so! This could be quite useful to help navigate the environmental regulation rodeo as explained by BASF when presenting their new 3 PetaFlop/s Quriosity — “the world’s largest supercomputer used in industrial chemical research”. Those reconfigurable FP64 NextSilicon-branded Maverick-2 chips could get them to assess the “Potential impact of crop protection products on groundwater quality” in even less than a few hours (instead of years), or through more complex environment models: https://www.basf.com/global/en/who-we-are/innovation/how-we-innovate/our-RnD/Digitalization_in_R-D/supercomputer

I reckon it’d be quite a sight to see the rancheros at Corteva (Dow/Elanco-Dupont), Bayer-Monsanto, and Syngenta, down the Arbuckle and saddle-up to join this here computational steer wrestling contest, for everyone’s improved environmental protection, with great crop production!

Also, thanks for linking to “A recent study from Oak Ridge National Laboratory” where Table 3 shows that a 10x speedup with MxP only occurs (so far at least) for dense matrix situations, while the more relevant sparse matrix computations may see just 1.5x (eg. CFDand Climate/Weather in their Table 2, and I expect contaminant transport and environmental flows, unfortunately).

Maverick-2’s mill cores that automatically identify computational hotspots and optimize the corresponding compute graphs (reducing data movement overhead among others) sounds like quite the ticket imho. I like the 4x better perf-per-watt vs GPUs and hope it gets realized in sparse computations (eg. both direct and iterative solvers). In particular, I expect the distributed HBM3E approach, with dynamic reconfiguration of compute, to help out with the HPCG and Graph500 memory access challenges (here in HPC-relevant FP64, rather than the more common FP32 of dataflow devices).

Looking forward to seeing some conference presentations or papers related to Sandia’s NNSA Vanguard Penguin Tundra testing of this quite promising ASIC ( https://www.sandia.gov/research/news/sandia-partners-with-nextsilicon-and-penguin-solutions-to-deliver-first-of-its-kind-runtime-reconfigurable-accelerator-technology/ )!

A cloud service should be created that allows potential customers to easily upload source code and evaluate the performance of Maverick-2. The runtime limit could be 60 seconds. The uploaded source code should be prevented from accessing the internet or the local file system. The uploaded source code should be able to print a maximum of 5000 characters. Potential customers would submit a job to a queue and see the results on the website when the job completes. No registration or email address should be required.

The NextSilicon website should have detailed documentation describing the microarchitecture of Maverick-2, especially the memory subsystem. The latency, bandwidth and size of each level in the memory hierarchy should be listed. Techniques for optimizing the performance of Maverick-2 should be described. When Maverick-2 becomes available for sale, there should be links on the NextSilicon website to webpages where the product can be bought.

NextSilicon should work with HPC software providers, like Q-Chem, to get their applications running on Maverick-2. The NextSilicon website should show the performance of these real-world HPC applications on Maverick-2 and alternative platforms. Maverick-2 should provide at least a 3x better price/performance ratio on real-world HPC applications than the best available NVIDIA GPUs and x86 CPUs.

Where are the benchmarks, feeds and speeds?

For example it would be interesting to see to what extent, if any, SPECfp benefits from Maverick-2 acceleration.