Hey, welcome. Welcome to Direct Connect 2024, and I am just thrilled, excited to have all of you here with us today. Last week marked my three-year anniversary as the CEO of Intel. And when I came back to the job, I said, "We have three goals. We're gonna rebuild this iconic company, the company that Grove, Moore, and Noyce built. Second, we're gonna restore the critical role it has and plays in the technology industry writ large. And third, we're gonna rebuild Western manufacturing at scale, resilient, sustainable, trusted supply chains." And I think of today as a day three years in the making as we open the doors on delivering on that mission.
When I came back to Intel in 2021, we presented this event just a couple of months after my return, called Intel Unleashed, and we shared a perspective on the tremendous opportunities ahead, the plans that we had in motion for this fundamental rebuilding of Intel, setting a course for a new era of technology and innovation. We announced plans at that point to become a world-class foundry, and we said we're gonna be a major provider of U.S.- and European-based capacity. And when we rolled that strategy out, some were like, "Yeah!" Others were like, "Yeah, right." And others were just, "No way are they gonna be able to pull this off," right? They had fallen behind. They stumbled. Could they possibly get back to leadership? And our employees, as we spoke to them, they said, "Yeah, we can do this.
We're gonna reestablish that leadership position." And our pessimists were challenging. "Nah!" Some of them I called perma-bears, right? They were so far in hibernation, they ain't ever coming out. But here we are today, three years later, and today, this vision of Unleashed becomes real. Today, the best of foundry, the silicon ecosystem, what could be today is what is. And with that, I'm thrilled today to announce, simply put, Intel Foundry. This is a renaming, a reorganization, a new organizational model for Intel that includes our three major elements: technology development, right, leading, bending physics; you know, our global manufacturing and supply chain; and our Intel Foundry Services and ecosystem operation, all three together, Intel Foundry, a rebuilding of Intel.
And for that, as I said, we're not fixing one company, we're establishing two vibrant new organizations: Intel Foundry to serve internal and external customers at scale, to manage supply chains, to assure capacity corridors, and Intel Products, our client, data center, and networking products, two distinct and separate organizations. And as I think about that, you know, they're dependent. You know, the wafers, the factories, you know, that leadership technology thrust, I need the product group and the foundry group working intimately together. Who's gonna drive the wafers to run those fabs? Intel Products. But they're also independent because you, the foundry ecosystem, need to have an independent, your designs, your fab, your intellectual property, your capacity corridor, corridors. In a word, independent. In a word, dependent, or simply put, interdependent. Intel Products, Intel Foundry, all under the Intel banner. That begins today.
And when we think about this, this era of AI, you know, as I... You know, making it more accessible at scale and delivering AI end to end, and as we say, from the data center to the cloud, to the networking, to the edge, and to the client, this AI continuum. And as I came back to Intel, I was sort of, you know, thinking about computing, and, you know, I'm, you know, young, vibrant yet, but it's been over 40 years since I've been in the computing industry. And with that, you know, I sort of... When I showed up, it was like, sort of, "This is boring. You know, let's add a few more cores on the chip. You know, let's make PCIe a little bit faster. You know, let's increment the DDR. Boring." And then AI happened. End of boring.
This is transforming everything about, computing, the explosion in systems and thermal envelopes and interconnect, capabilities. Everything that we do is coming to bear in this AI period. And as I think about Intel, we're engaging in 100% of the AI TAM, clearly through our products, from the edge and the PC and clients and in the data centers. But through our foundry, I wanna manufacture every AI chip in the industry, those internal, right, you know, that are being done by the cloud service providers, those merchant providers, you know, the technology providers. We're engaging in 100% of the AI TAM. And with that, we need a new model of what the foundry requirements are for that industry, and that's simply put, what we call the systems foundry for the AI era, where semis are essential, this lowest layer, this world-class foundry.
And as you'll hear from us, today, Moore's Law, alive and well. Until the periodic table is exhausted, we're not done with Moore's Law. You get that? Yeah! Let's say- Come on, get excited.... We bend physics, we create molecules, we do amazing things, and Moore's Law is alive and well. And we're doing it through new transistors with RibbonFET, new power delivery with PowerVia, new advanced lithography with EUV and High-NA. But it's even better than that, because now we're doing it not just in X and Y, right, a monolithic silicon, we're doing it in Z as well with advanced packaging, X, Y, and Z, and new systems of networking and glass and optics and in-package capabilities and thermals. But we have to do it a different way. We have to enable globally resilient, sustainable, and trusted supply chains.
At the end of our conference today, I'm joined by Sam Altman. He's made a little news of late, you might have heard, right, for it. You know, I'm a pretty aggressive guy. Man, am I conservative! He's gonna challenge the capacity needs of the industry, and Keyvan's gonna spend some time talking today about our capacity strategy. You know, this next generation of world-class silicon process packaging is all at your disposal. You know, this idea of this coming together in advanced packaging, it's not because we said, "Hey, you know, let's put them all into a package." Physics is driving us that way. You know, where thermal envelopes, interconnect, speed of light is driving us to put these together.
You know, a rack is becoming a system, a system is becoming a system on a chip or a package, and the system of chips needs new capabilities, new tests, advanced and packaging capabilities, and that's what a systems foundry does. And Stu is gonna describe today how we're making all of this real and available to you, every aspect of Intel to enable your innovation, bringing all of this together, right? And the people, the systems, the processes, you know, that we're standing up with Intel Foundry to ensure your supply chains, the confidentiality of your information, to do it with your EDA and IP partners. And throughout the day, you're gonna see this vision come to life.
And a year ago, you know, as we began this next phase of our journey, we says, "Hmm, you know, we need people who are advising us on that journey." It was a true pleasure of mine to go to some of the Intel board members, but also some of the leaders of the, uh, industry, to help us set this up, to assure, right, the establishment of the Intel Foundry, to assure that we've established the business processes, to change the DNA of Intel, to become maniacally customer-focused as we look forward, to assure that we have efficient operations. My advisory board is here with us today, and I'd like them to stand up and acknowledge that these are the people that are helping guide us. So over here.
Joe Kaeser, former CEO of Siemens, Chi-Foon Chan, former Synopsys Co-CEO, my many decades-long friend, Lip-Bu Tan, you know, brother and friend. And over here, let's get a light over here to Tsu-Jae King , one of the, you know, most honored members of the semiconductor research and academic community. So these are the people that are helping advise us and guide us on the journey to set up and become what I've called the world's number two system foundry. So thank you for joining us on this great journey. And as we describe this vision to become the number two foundry of the world, we realize there's only a few companies that can do this, right?
You know, that have the capital capacity, that have the R&D, the longevity to go do this, and we announced this vision in the middle of COVID. Boy, did we realize how much we needed resilience at that time, at that period of time. And now, as we're in an economic downturn, ah, welcome to semiconductors, right? You know, this is a tough, you know, business. And then the AI explosion and the cyclicality of the industry, and we've seen the geo-instability and active wars in Israel and Ukraine and, you know, the tensions in Taiwan Straits. You know, this is anything but a resilient supply chain today. And even as we seek to be peacemakers, right, to seek global prosperity, we know that the best way to do that is through resilient, sustainable supply chains.
And for that, we said, "Yes, get to be a large, meaningful, the second-largest foundry, but become the world's most sustainable foundry, the world's most resilient foundry," because that's exactly what the world requires. And this exponential explosion of AI demands a new way of delivering silicon with the lowest possible environmental footprint. And as part of Intel's Climate Transition Action Plan, we're approaching 99% global renewable energy, 100% renewable in the US for over a decade, you know, driving conservation in our energy, the water management processes, responsible use of chemicals, reducing, abating, and replacing greenhouse gas chemicals. You know, as I like to say, Gordon was an environmentalist before it was cool. He built it deep into the DNA of Intel. We don't do this because it's driven by some expectation in the industry.
We do it because it's the right thing for humanity and for the planet. You know, one time, my daughter-in-law was giving me a bad time, and, you know, "Hey, you're sort of proud of all the great advancements that you drove, huh?" And, and then she said, "But did you have to bankrupt my planet?"... to do so. And I think all of us are left with that same question: Are we gonna be responsibly turning over our planet to the next generation? And in the face of things like this explosion of AI capabilities, it isn't just doing good things, it's doing the right things for tomorrow as well. So sustainable foundry, but also resilience. And we're seeing global politics has been dominated for the last 50 years by where the oil reserves are. COVID was a big wake-up call, you know, for us all.
You know, an auto factory building a $50,000 car being stopped for a $1 semiconductor. How did that happen? Semis, advanced computing, is to the world's geopolitics what oil has been for the last 50 years. And silicon, fortunately, isn't restricted to where it's found. It's the second most abundant element on Earth. I call it God's gift to humanity, this 4-by-4 crystalline structure that we can bend, and shape, and shove different elements into. It's just magic that these tiny chips are enabling the modern economic cycle that we are in today. But stunningly, you know, in 1990, 80% of the semiconductors were built in U.S. and Europe. Today, 80% in a small, concentrated area in Asia. You know, we've seen this long, steady decline, right, in terms of our supply chains for the world.
Nothing should be reliant on a single port, a single country, a single place in the world. We need resilient access to supply chains and capacity in the right regions at the right time. And thus, you know, the choice, the opportunity to drive systemic change in where and how we drive the most important aspect of our future, where the technology supply chains are. And as I've liked to say, you know, the moonshot is 80-20, 20 to 50/50 in a decade, rebalancing the supply chains of the world. It was a proud day when I got to stand on the White House lawn when we signed into law the CHIPS Act. You know, a moment to rebuild the supply chains of the world.
And with that, it was a thrill to do so with the president, but the tireless championing that we saw through Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, and it's my pleasure to have her join us now here at Intel Direct Connect. Secretary Raimondo?
Hi, Pat, how are you?
Thank you, Gina. Thank you, Secretary. It is such a pleasure, and you and I agree how important the CHIPS Act has been, you know, and I'd love for the audience to hear directly from you, your perspective and your passion for this piece of industrial policy.
Hello, everybody. Pat, I love the energy. I loved listening to your presentation, and it's exciting. You know, we've never quite done anything like this before, or at least not for a long time. If you want to find a precedent of when the United States government has acted this strategically in terms of industrial strategy, I think you'd have to go back 60 years to the space race. I think that's the closest parallel, a time when the federal government came together with the private sector and academia at every level to spur innovation and ensure America's technological leadership in the face of fierce competition. Of course, then it was Russia, now it's other countries. That's what this is about.
I mean, you just said a couple of minutes ago, after COVID, the vulnerabilities in our semiconductor supply chain were on full display for the world. You know, full display for the world. The fact that we are so overly dependent to a couple of countries in Asia to access semiconductor chips that we need for life-saving medical equipment, cars, every piece of technology, showed us, we gotta get to work. We need to get back to work, making more chips in America. And so this is a moment-
Yeah
... you know, our generation, this is our moment.
Yeah.
But it's making more chips in America, you know, bringing back the silicon to Silicon Valley, if you will. But it isn't just that. It's then getting a massive flywheel going in the United States of America, from research and development all the way through to advanced packaging and everything in between. And I hope, in the process, we will create hundreds of thousands of high-paying jobs for America. But also, if we do our job right, Pat, and I guess I'm talking to myself here, but I have to do it in partnership with you and the folks in your audience, 10 years from now, engineering degrees all over this country will be taught in a different way, will be tailored for the chip industry. It'll be exciting.
The top graduates of our schools will say: "I wanna go work in a chip factory, in a chip design operation in the United States." And so I'm psyched about it, and you've been a fantastic partner.
So say a little bit more about building those chips in the U.S., why so important, and a little bit about the AI surge and how you see that affecting the CHIPS Act and affecting the AI future.
So, look, I wanna be clear: we, we can't and do not want to make everything in America. You know, we don't wanna make every chip in America. That isn't a reasonable goal. But we do need to diversify our semiconductor supply chain, have much more manufacturing in the United States, particularly of leading-edge chips, which will be essential for AI, as you well know. And we need to just have more resiliency and more diversification. So the goal isn't to be self-sufficient, you know, to produce and package everything we consume in this country, but we do need a self-propelling engine of innovation and production, and that fell out of balance.
You know, we maintained our leadership in the design, and in the software, et cetera, but we sacrificed our manufacturing capacity, and with that, our capacity to conduct the advanced research and development that we need to maintain our global leadership. Now, people ask me all the time, you know: How do we compete with China? We run faster in America. You know, we out-innovate the world. We manufacture in the United States. We expand and modernize our manufacturing capacity, and that's what this is all about. With respect to AI, you know, I think that's unbelievable. Like, first of all, as an American and as a U.S. Secretary of Commerce, it kinda gives me the chills to realize how the United States of America leads in AI, because of our great entrepreneurs.
You know, in the whole stack, up and down the stack, that's a source of competitive advantage, and we need to continue to invest in that. But for you, frankly, it's a source of great upside and opportunity in customers. You mentioned Sam Altman. When I talk to him or other customers in the industry, the volume of chips that they project they need is mind-boggling. Even if you take their projections and cut them in half, it's still mind-boggling. So, you know, it's exciting. It's exciting what AI can do to advance technology and medical care and such.
Of course, we have to keep a lid on the risks, which I'm hard at work on, but I think it's really a perfect convergence for you at the time you have IFS that, you know, the demand for 2 nm and 3 nm and 18A is just gonna explode.
Well, thank you. And, you know, maybe say, you know, the CHIPS Act, are we, are we done? Do we... You know, do we have the, all the R&D underway? Do we need a CHIPS 2.0, Secretary?
You know, I'm out of breath running as fast as I can to implement CHIPS 1.0. But it's amazing. We were at GlobalFoundries yesterday, $1.5 billion investment. That's the third of our investments, and I think, you know, there'll be a steady drumbeat of those announcements to come in the coming weeks and months. We announced a week ago that we've launched Natcast, which is a purpose-built nonprofit. It'll be a public-private partnership. We announced Deirdre Hanford, who many of you know. She was at Synopsys for a long time. She's going to run this, and that's gonna be our hub for research and development and workforce training. We'll be putting billions of dollars into that.
All of that being said, I suspect there will have to be, whether you call it CHIPS 2.0 or something else, continued investment if we want to lead the world. You know, look, we, we fell pretty far. We took our eye off the ball. We used to manufacture 40% of the world's chips in this country. You know, we used to manufacture, you know the numbers better than I, but I don't know, what? 12%-15% of leading-edge chips, and now we're down to almost none in this country. So if we wanna really compete globally, yeah, we're gonna have to continue to invest.
Yeah. Thank you. Maybe, you know, just as we finish up here, obviously, we haven't announced our CHIPS grant yet, yet very soon, right? We're making that happen. But maybe just a final message for this audience, you know, and here, the Intel Foundry Day, what's your message to them?
Get excited, get ready, get ready to lead the world. America is a great country, because we are competitive, we out-innovate, we out-compete, and what CHIPS is about is much bigger vision than just, you know, incentivizing 10 new fabs all around the country. If that's all we do, then shame on us. What this is about is getting the flywheel going, developing a deep and sustainable ecosystem again in this country. Intel is this country's champion chip company. It's an American champion company of a very huge role to play in this revitalization, and I just, I'm excited. I'm ready to go. We did a big announcement yesterday. There's more to come, and I believe we will be very, very successful.
Well, thank you so much for joining us today.
Happy to be here.
Thank you, Gina, my friend, my partner in this great, incredible journey. Thank you again. You know, we've described this as, you know, this critical underlayment. I just ask you, what aspect of your life is not becoming more digital? Well, everything is! Your healthcare, your financial, your social. And with that, we simply call it Siliconomy. Silicon and the economy becoming fused together in an inextricable way. Today, you know, 15% of every economic endeavor, you know, it's expected to be 25%, and that's before we account for the implications of AI driving that more rapidly. And as stewards of Moore's Law, we see this relentless pursuit of more efficient, more capable, more scalable computing, and for that, we've been on this journey. And when we announced our, you know, Intel Unleashed, we also announced that we're gonna get five nodes in four years.
We're gonna do something unheard of in the industry to return Intel to process technology leadership. And while we're not finished today, we see the end is soon in front of us on that journey. And Intel 7, you know, shipping and ramping in volume. Intel 4, with our Core Ultra launch, shipping and ramping in volume. Intel 3 is production certified and will be with our server products, launching in the first half of the year, going into volume production. So with this, we've gone on an incredible, you know, journey, but then it continues into what we call the Angstrom Era. And, for this, you know, Intel 20A and Intel 18A, the adoption of RibbonFET, a new transistor structure, of PowerVia power delivery technology, the embrace of EUV. You know, and for this, you know, the first major new transistor rearchitecting since 2012.
I'll tell you, I've been studying SEM diagrams, you know, for over 40 years. This is a Mona Lisa. No, no, no. I think it's a Michelangelo, right? Sculpted in silicon, right? You know, for these truly are works of art, and I am thrilled for the progress our TD teams are playing to bring us back to technology, you know, leadership. You know, with that, the finish is 18A. With that, we've already sent into fab our first 18A products, and this is a test chip for Clearwater Forest. In Clearwater Forest, Intel 18A top die, but then we're putting it on Intel 3 base die, a construction that you saw in the, you know, cartoon there that's being broken out, that takes advantage of EMIB.
It also takes advantage of Foveros Direct, the first copper-on-copper without solder ball bonding, that will allow us to go to below 10-micron pitches between the interface of top and bottom die, the first-ever time. You know, you're gonna hear Choon talk today about our assembly and test technology, singulated die testing, advanced packaging capabilities, but the testing to go with it as well. You know, and how we're working with our partners in EDA ecosystem that are represented here, Synopsys, Cadence, Ansys, Siemens, to enable these capabilities, delivering these advancements in, technology, but also not just in our products, but for the first time ever, making them available to the entire industry. So I am thrilled. This is what we call a family photo mode. So kids, come to papa. Here we go, five nodes in four years.
I do want to announce, describe, you know, and give a moment to our latest, newest 18A customer, my decades-long friend, Satya Nadella, speaking for Microsoft as the newest 18A customer. Let's hear from Satya now.
Thank you so much, Pat. It's great to join you at your launch event. It's clear that we are in the midst of a very exciting platform shift that will fundamentally transform productivity for every individual, organization, and the entire industry. To achieve this vision, we will need a reliable supply of the most advanced, high-performance and high-quality semiconductors, and all of us at Microsoft are committed to supporting Intel's efforts to build a strong supply chain right here in the United States. That's why we are so excited to work with Intel Foundry Services and why we have chosen a chip design that we plan to produce on Intel's 18A process. We look forward to sharing more details in the future, and I can't wait to see all that we will be delivering together for our customers in the years ahead. Thank you so very much.
Thank you, Satya. And you know, now that you know we see the light at the end of the tunnel and finishing five nodes in four years, are we finished now that we've gotten back to leadership? No! Having gone on this grueling trek to five nodes in four years, Moore's Law, alive and well, and you're gonna hear more about that today. So can I tell you more about what comes after 18A? Yes. And today, we're announcing that we're extending these nodes. We're adding major and minor nodes to it, a combination of older and leading-edge nodes to ensure our customers have access to the process technology they need. Today, we are announcing Intel 14A for the first time. You can think about this like 1.4 nm technology, but Intel 14A venturing deeply into the Angstrom Era.
14A, first processing. ... but we're also announcing that we're extending our nodes, as you see on here, adding P-nodes, enhancements to those existing, you know, adding performance capabilities, adding T-nodes, through silicon via. New, feature enhancements with E-nodes on the roadmap, filling out that roadmap of capability. You know, today we're announcing for the first time Intel 16E, enhancements to our Intel 16, technology as well. So we're filling out that full set of nodes in the roadmap that we have to go beyond it. You know, and, for that, we're, you know, continuing to see, you know, a broader set of portfolio of interest from the industry. And, we're thrilled to have Jason Wang here, the UMC President. We just announced the partner. Where are you, Jason? You're supposed to be right there. So, right.
So, but Jason Wang from UMC, joining us as well, a partnership to add a 12 nm node. You know, building out a real foundry roadmap and working with our customers to continuously evolve our offerings on Intel's leading and mature node technologies. But as we've seen, as we've gone through this period of time, this AI era explosion, wafers are cool. Packaging, something that we sort of kept in the corner of Intel in private, has gotten to be really cool. So Intel Foundry offers us a broad set now of advanced assembly and test technologies, and we're under volume ramp. You know, we're seeing more and more customers taking advantage of the capacity and the technology that we offer to optimize power to innovate in X, Y, and Z, as well.
Being able to take these, technologies of EMIB and Foveros and Foveros Direct, bringing higher density pitch and working on next generation. Intel, 25 years ago, drove the standardization of organic packages. Now we're driving the next generation of glass-based packages, and with that, the ability to directly interface with optics and waveguides directly into the package construct for the most advanced system capabilities as well. Choon Lee , this afternoon, will give, you know, a full roadmap of these, capabilities now available to the industry. We've seen extraordinary interest from customers and the momentum that they have. You know, and Intel Foundry has, you know, added a number of additional AI, customers to our portfolio of packaging offerings as well.
AI era needs advanced wafers, but it even needs more systems and packaging capabilities, an area that Intel is the clear leader in, and this now includes, as customers, some of the largest AI leaders in the world. And I'm happy to share that we now have expected lifetime deal value of over $15 billion of customer in our foundry customer business into the future. Including the Microsoft announcement today, the advanced packaging customers that we described on leading-edge nodes as well as mature nodes, we're continuing to see great response from our customers for Intel Foundry. You know, as I conclude my time on stage, today is a day three years in the making, and I couldn't be prouder of the team at Intel that has rallied behind this rebuilding of this iconic company.
You're gonna hear from a number of those leaders today, bringing together the world's first system foundry capabilities for the AI era. With that, it's my pleasure to introduce to the stage a friend for decades now and the zealous leader of our foundry services, none other than Stuart Pann. Please welcome Stuart to the stage.
Good morning. Thank you all for coming this morning. What I'd like to do is break down that top sentence, a systems foundry for the AI era. First off, I wanna show you why we believe we are a foundry. We have the table stakes. We have the ability to deliver what you need when you need it. I wanna establish what is a systems foundry? A lot of questions we've talked press, like systems of foundry, foundry of systems, what does it mean? And then I'm gonna talk about why the AI era is driving significant upside demand for all of us, and there's an incredible tailwind for us. But first, I wanna offer up a personal perspective on Intel, the company. The thing that the IBM PC and I have in common is we both came to Intel in 1981.
So a long time, 43 years. And so I have a sense of history about this place. And one of the things I'd like to talk about first is the people, because it's the people that make this company. Our people can sense and feel this momentum. You can hear it in their voices, you can see it in their actions. You even get the occasional high five in the factory. They know that you don't need to be in Taiwan to build the world's most advanced semiconductors. They've realized this 5 nodes in 4 years, this audacious goal that Pat laid out. You can see the check marks across all the boxes here. So it's an honor to represent the 52,000 scientists, engineers, factory people, logistics people, order management, all this organization. We're ready to earn the right to be your foundry supplier. Nobody's gonna give us that.
We want to earn it. So that's one perspective. I want to offer up a second perspective, and this comes from Chris Miller, the author of the book, Chip War. This is a New York Times bestseller, Financial Times Book of the Year. Took Chris 10 years to write it, and it's incredibly timely, considering what Secretary Raimondo just talked about. He talks about the development of the transistor on up through, like, you know, the last few years. Now, Chris, in a speech in October, said this quote to the employees. He said, quote, unquote, "Intel is the most important company of the last 50 years." So I called Chris, and I said, "Are you okay if I say this publicly?" He said, "Yeah, okay. Go ahead.
Good publicity for the book." You know, I've been associated with Intel, like I said, for 43 years, 37 years as an employee, six years as the Chief Supply Chain Officer of HP. I came back to Intel 3 months after Pat did because I believe this quote to be true, and I believed it long before Chris said it. What you're gonna hear in the next 40 minutes or so is all the reasons why Chip War: Season Two is about to begin. So let's start from the beginning. Gordon's original paper was called Cramming More Components on Integrated Circuits. It was published in 1965. Every time I read it, I'm stunned by how prescient he was. But if you read all through the paper, and by the way, I know Pat talks about physics and Moore's Law and periodic tables.
Read the paper, it's also about economics, and in fact, it's the foundation for Moore's Law. It's about driving strong economics. In the last section of the paper, Gordon remarks of, "We've come to a day of reckoning." Quote, unquote, "It may prove to be more economical to build large systems out of smaller functions, which are separately packaged and interconnected." This is why I believe we're in the era of the systems foundry. You can no longer do just monolithic devices. You have to break it up. You have to adjust for thermal profiles. You have to address costs. You have to have flexibility. This is all driving a new level of systems thinking into the foundry business. At Intel, we're no strangers to systems thinking.
We started in 1980 with Multibus, 1990 with PCI Express, the idea that you could put a common bus architecture inside of a PC and create whole new markets. We moved on to Centrino, where wireless created an explosion of notebook demand. And today, we're at the AI systems foundry, this idea that you have to do open architectures, reference platforms, open standards in order to foster all the innovation you need to go meet the demands of what AI requires. In this systems era, you not only have to have open standards between devices, you have to have standards on the device. Think about the fact that to do a training model a day requires 100,000 CPUs, all running in concert, all on the same data set. The next round of training models will require 1,000,000 CPUs.
That's something that requires standards everywhere, from chips inside to chips outside. This is what's necessary for our customers to succeed, and this is the fundamental reason why Intel is a systems company turning into a foundry, not the other way around, and that's what makes our entry in this market so powerful. So now that we've described, you know, system thinking, let's look at how the original foundry model was created. Now, since C.C. Wei has been kind enough to mention us in his last few earnings calls, I thought I'd return the favor and talk about TSMC in my presentation. Now, this was a presentation that Morris Chang gave at MIT last October. In it, he describes the foundry model.
He says, "It's research and development, it's wafer fabrication, it's advanced packaging." And he says, in the red line, that's what TSMC does, and said in the blue line, Intel or everybody else does everything else. You might even call that an IDM 1.0 kind of manufacturer. Now, TSMC has been incredibly successful with this model: discipline, execution, discipline, strategy, consistent innovation. But to quote Bob Dylan, "The times, they are changing." Let me tell you why. This. There's an idea of systems technology co-optimization, where you look at application workloads, software, system architecture, memory interconnect, advanced packing tech - packaging technology, core, all these different things. What happens today is people focus on their layer and maybe the layer up on top of it, and in fact, this is really what a classic foundry does today. But we're now in the realm of the exponential.
You know, Sam Altman's gonna come out later on this afternoon and talk about he doesn't have enough capacity to do what he wants to do. And as we talk to our customers around the world, we're now realizing that it's not just enough to do Moore's Law, it's not just enough to do a systems, you know, kind of implementation. You have to look at all of these combinations. You can get a couple of things right, but to do a system that coordinates the activities of solving a training model across 100,000 CPUs requires you to get all the gear ratios right. If you're mismatched in memory, if you're mismatched in networking, you wind up throwing away valuable cycles and valuable resources. So we got to get 100x more out of what we're doing. So we described the evolution.
Now, let's build out the strategy and talk about what's the revolution in all of this? We like to think about this in three basic layers. First off, we have to be a world-class foundry, right? Roawen Chen , the CFO of Qualcomm, talks about the fact that silicon speaks, and silicon speaks in four different ways: performance, power, area, and cost. Without that, you're not in the business, and so we're absolutely focused on making sure we are world-class across all four of those dimensions. On top of that, you have to have an ecosystem. We're gonna talk about the ecosystem at length throughout the day. That ecosystem is what allows you to take advantage of PPAC. The next layer of the triangle, or the pyramid, is all about resilient, sustainable supply.
And that's what Pat just talked about earlier, and that's what Secretary Raimondo talked about, this need to have capability around the world to build this and to build it in a sustainable fashion. The top layer of the pyramid is this idea of systems of chips. We're putting system inside a chip, and we're working with our foundry partners to create systems of chips. So let's walk you through what that means. Now, Pat obviously was very proud of his, his children, his grandchildren, or relatives, I'm not quite sure. So I won't go into a lot of detail on this, but I will point out to you, and you'll hear from Ann a little bit later on this afternoon, that what we do with 18A has been incredibly well-received by the hyperscaler community. Why? Because 18A has two key attributes.
One, it has, we think, the world's best transistor structure, but it also has this idea of PowerVia, this idea that you supply power to the bottom of the device. Why is that important? Because these AI devices are 1000 W devices. They take hundreds of amps of current. To do this the right way means you have to come up with a totally different way of developing backside power, and I'll talk to you how we've developed that and why we think it's so robust. Pat mentioned we're extending out our node families. The thing I want to just spend a little bit of time on, since you're gonna hear a lot more about the roadmap, is the bottom, where it talks about Tower, the partnership we signed with them just recently for our New Mexico factory, and what we're doing with UMC.
What's so important about those partnerships, those collaboration agreements, is that they give us a way to load balance our factories, to give us the best possible cost structure, take advantage of the investments we've made in tools, in people, in buildings, and rounds out our cost structure dramatically. In fact, we just are now in conversations with Tower about ways we can develop the next extension with them, possibly even 40 nm. Just started just recently. These abilities to take advantage of this world-class factory network and extend it in multiple ways is the thing that helps us get the C part of PPAC, the cost part of PPAC. By building at scale, we'll absolutely be able to hit that.
The next part of the ecosystem is around all the folks you saw walking in this hallway, the 30+ suppliers, the EDA vendors, the IP vendors, the people bringing complex IP so that when you get our process, you have the capability to design all sorts of things because we have a rich assortment of IP and EDA solutions. We're not asking you to pick a certain path. We're making sure we cover as many paths as possible, so the way you do your business now is the way that you can do it with us. We round that out with design services and cloud providers. We just announced a partnership with Faraday in order to help our customers build out complex ASICs. Our cloud providers run all these EDA systems at, in a cost-effective way. And lastly, we're creating a separate ecosystem for the military and aerospace customers.
It's important that their needs are taken care of. So with folks, with Cadence, Synopsys, with Siemens, Flex Logix, Draper, Trusted, these are the folks who help us develop specific things for military applications, and it's a very powerful thing for us as a country when they do that. So this is how we make it easy for our customers, and I would encourage you, as you're walking out through the showcase, and by the way, we sort of made it so you had to walk past them. You know, some really duty-free, same kind of thing. Talk to them. They have made an incredible investment with us, and we're gonna talk a lot more about this a little bit later. Now, the next layer of the pyramid, this idea of resilient, sustainable supply.
You know, Pat touched on this, and later on in the afternoon, Keyvan will lay out targets for what that means, because sustainable supply is not about PowerPoint slides. It's about a culture that works at this for decades. And I would strongly invite all of our competitors to match the targets that Keyvan's gonna lay out. They are tough, they are demanding, they are essential in this world, where we all want sustainable, resilient supply. Now, there's another box in here on security. Why is security so important? In a speech given by Matt Kay at one of our federal conferences a few months ago, Dr. Kay talked about the need to give our troops asymmetric advantage in the battlefield. What does that mean? It means we give them today's technology today, not technology that was done 10 years ago.
You know, in our discussions with the defense community, they've always wanted this, but we haven't found a way to take the things that they regard that give us that asymmetric advantage, the things that are highly confidential. How do you build it cost effectively? How do you get it out on time? By working closely with our DoD partners, we have solved that problem... and that's one of the reasons the U.S. government gave us a billion-dollar contract a few months ago, is to go take that to the next step, to go be able to create this trusted, secure environment. So the things that our colleagues in DoD know about, the things they want to embed in our silicon, but the things they want to protect, will be done so in a secure fashion.
It's super powerful, because we all want to give our troops asymmetric advantage. Now, I talked earlier about this day of reckoning, what that means. It's happening now. We can no longer do designs at a monolithic level. We are now at reticle-limited designs, die sizes that are 800 square millimeters of silicon. The vast majority of customers we talk to are absolutely moving this idea of this aggregated design because we have to move beyond reticle limits and thermal constraints, and by the way, even cost constraints, because when you're building these really big die sizes, they're really expensive. Isn't there a better way to take advantage, as Pat talked about with Clearwater Forest, to take smaller tiles on the more advanced nodes, get better yields out of them, package them together, have more flexibility?
To do all that really requires, if you will, a system on a chip. So you can see in the animation here how we build it out, and this is literally how we're gonna build out in the factory. The idea of a substrate, the idea of base dies, the idea of logic tiles, the idea of I/O tiles on the side. Why do this? It gives our customers the ability to optimally trade for what they need for their design. The things that you do for a training engine will be different than what you do for an inference engine, and only by having all these levers to go pull, can you get this done. Now, we learned a lot through a device called Ponte Vecchio, or as the branding people call it, Intel Data Center GPU Max Series. I call it Ponte Vecchio. It's an SoC.
It's a 1 billion transistor, a 100 billion transistor SoC. It's dozens of chiplet tiles, 47 of them. It's multiple suppliers. By the way, we coexist with TSMC in the same package, right? We developed testing techniques to go off and do that. We do this idea of Singulated Die Test. What does that mean? It means every single die that goes into that package is a Known Good Die. Why is that important? Because you want every one of them to be good. The assembly test yield on this device is 95% plus. It is the Super Bowl of integrated design. Now, what do you do with it? Well, if you're Argonne National Labs and our partners at HPE, you build a really big supercomputer, and they built a computer that was 66,000 Ponte Vecchios, 20,000 Sapphire Rapids, and it looks like this.
Okay, what do you do with something like that? Well, you solve some really hard science problems. If you want to model the airflow across a wing, you can do that on a workstation. If you want to model the airflow across a plane, you do it on this. If you want to model fusion reactions, which are pretty tricky things to model, you do it on a device like this. If you want to model, if you want to model cancer, curing drugs at the molecular level, you do it like this. It's 600 tons of compute. It's four tennis courts. It is the weight of an Airbus. It has 300 miles of optical cable. It takes 34,000 gallons a minute to cool. By the way, your faucet at home, it's 1 gallon a minute. 34,000 gallons a minute.
So when we talk about how to design this stuff, we have to find ways to make this more power efficient, to make this more cost-effective. This today is the second fastest supercomputer in the world. By the way, at 100,000 CPUs, roughly, you know, to handle the demands of AI, we're gonna go far beyond that, and that's why this idea of scalability is so important. Now, let's go through the top of the pyramid, this idea of systems of chips. You know, systems of chips require, as Pat mentioned, great packaging technology, and we're making that packaging technology available to all of our customers. It requires this idea of standards. We've created a standard called UCIe, which allows chip-to-chip connectivity.
Think of it as the PCI Express of what we did back in the mid-1990s, this idea that you can add and mix and match. By the way, you can mix and match different foundry suppliers. We like that because we're sort of an underdog in all this. Some of our competitors, not so much. But our customers want this kind of flexibility, and we're gonna talk extensively about this later on in the afternoon. Choon is gonna talk about optical interconnects as an example. But there's one thing I really want to point out at the bottom, and that's that little IEEE symbol for Ethernet. So as you can see from the rendering, what we're doing is taking systems on a chip, and with new Ethernet standards, we're working closely with a number of partners, you are gonna be building systems of chips.
Why do you need systems of chips? Because it's the same problem I mentioned earlier. You need to train models with 100,000 CPUs now, and 1 million potentially down the road, and then maybe up to 10 million. When you're moving and coordinating data across all of these devices, you need to have standards and connectivity, and that's what we provide. And really, when you think about it, what is... what's it gonna take to bring AI everywhere? How do you make it cost-effective? How do you make it capital efficient?... You know, yes, yeah, I know Sam's asking for trillions, but we wanna make sure he's spending all that money in the most cost-effective manner possible. So let's break that out. You have data center chips doubling year-over-year, but the efficiency needs are the things that are really eye-catching.
You know, the New York Times ran an article that AI could soon need as much electricity as an entire country. So I'm sure you're curious, like, which countries? Sweden, the Netherlands, Argentina. If you were to run all of the AI servers that market estimates have on DGX-2, DGX-100, those kind of devices, you would take 85 TWh-134 TWh. TWh. By the way, the great state of California, its entire power generation capability today is 30 TWh for the entire state. So bringing AI everywhere is gonna require us and our foundry partners to figure out how to do this cost effectively, and this is why the essential elements of an AI foundry are these things: Start out with us being the stewards of Moore's Law, right?
The idea that we're gonna double the amount of transistors every couple of years and make them power efficient. Add that with continuing systems innovation. You know, one size won't fit all. And in this AI era, foundries are gonna have to do a lot more. So what I'd like to do is sort of build that out for you for the next five years, because this is what this roadmap is gonna take. And this, I think, is what makes us different than other foundry approaches. You have to start off across - first off, with table stakes, right? As I mentioned earlier, you have to start off with a great process. And with what you'll hear from Ann, and Choon, Keyvan, we have a great process delivered at scale. Add to that, packaging, which is, we believe, a unique differentiator for us. Why?
We build a lot of server parts, and we're taking everything that we learned from our server business and offering up to our foundry partners. These are table stakes, and this is what it takes to be a foundry player. We'll innovate for the next five years, and I think this is what one of the conversations we have with customers that's so intriguing is, we're not just one and done. We have this planned out, literally across all these dimensions for the next five years. So in substrates, Intel is the world's largest consumer of substrates. So as such, we play a pretty influential role in how substrates get driven. Later on today, Choon is gonna talk about this idea of glass substrates. Why do you care about glass substrates? You can put a lot of parts in a package on a glass substrate. It doesn't bend.
We're gonna work closely with our partners to give the world a new way of looking at substrates through glass. Let's talk about cooling. I mentioned that Aurora needs 34,000 gallons a minute to cool it off. The next wave of devices are gonna have to be immersion cooled, and today, Intel's Xeon product line is the only product that offers an immersion cooling warranty. Immersion cooling allows us to deliver power much more effectively in a data center. We're going to take what we've learned there, and we're gonna offer that up to our foundry customers so that when we start looking at 2,000 W devices five years from now, we're gonna have a way to cool those. Memory. Pat mentioned this idea of a base die technology. We're working with all the major memory manufacturers right now.
How do we optimize that interface for HBM3E, for HBM4? How do, perhaps, do we put memory on the device itself, so it's more computationally cost-effective? And over the next five years, you're gonna hear us talk a lot about new technologies and new ways to increase memory bandwidth, while decreasing the need for energy consumption. A five-year kinda look. Interconnects. Interconnects between chips, the idea of having high-speed SerDes, high-speed interconnect, all the things that you expect from a foundry provider is what we're going to give you, and we're gonna not plan out for just what's out there today.
Keep in mind, as a standards company, we do this across all different standards, and it's our job to make those standards available to all of you. And last, you know, put on that, networking. Think about a NIC card that's capable of handling demands of AI modeling. What you do with Ethernet today isn't good enough. So we're working closely with a number of Ethernet standards partners to figure out ways, how do we make Ethernet more capable to develop the idea of systems of chips? And Ethernet provides that low cost, high bandwidth potential to go off and do that.
Add to that photonics, add to that technologies beyond that. Here again, it's another five-year roadmap. And then lastly, we have 18,000 software engineers at Intel. Why don't we harness those software engineers and help people figure out how to make these systems boot up, how to develop the firmware and software necessary to optimize and get those gear ratios absolutely correct? So for us, this is what true systems foundry means to us, and it's why we believe we have a differentiated approach in the marketplace.
The only way we're going to get to this exponential scale is by taking all these elements and multiplying them together, and that's why we think we have a new way of looking at the foundry business for all of you. To do that, we can't do it alone. We have to have partners, and we're doing everything we can to give our customers choice, to have a full stack of availability from a number of EDA partners... to do Systems Technology Co-Optimization, to have open standards and reference designs available to speed the innovation that these fundamental technologies provide. We're not gonna just do it with the folks of today, we're also going after partners to fuel the next wave of innovations. Intel Capital makes equity investments in startups. They make strategic investments in scale partnerships.
They make ecosystem investments for foundry at scale, and there are a number of examples that Intel Capital has successfully invested in, that people are bringing unique technology. Ayar Labs, a photonics startup, doing some incredible work in photonics. That's how we're gonna capture customers large and small. But we have to start back even further than that. We have to go to the universities and talk to them about what do the students need to learn? As Gina Raimondo said, "How do we create an engineering population capable of taking what we're doing in these factories and making it available broad base?" So I'm proud to announce today that we... Our first 18A partners, the University of Michigan, my home school, and Berkeley, Tsu-Jae's home school. No connection whatsoever. 500 academics, 60 research group, 100 use test chips.
What we're doing with U of M and with Berkeley is we're finding a way to bring 18A and make it available to students. Today's technology, not yesterday's or three years ago's, but today's technology, and we're developing innovative ways to provide little, tiny shuttle seats that students can run their test chips through our factories. It's gonna be fascinating to watch this develop as we go out and embrace the university community with this new technology. We have one more thing to talk about. Oops, I'm sorry, go back one slide. We're not only doing this with partners in universities, with Intel Capital; this morning we're announcing a new partnership with Arm, Emerging Business Initiative. How do we take advantage of all the programs that Arm has to offer to bring design capability, design education out to all of their customers? We're doing this with Arm.
We will make co-investments, we'll do joint programs, we'll provide shuttles at scale, Arm will provide IP at scale, and this is how we're gonna fuel this next wave of innovation, and it's truly exciting. Now, I mentioned we have our 30 ecosystem partners out there in the hallway, but there are five of them coming on stage today that I'd like to talk to you about. Arm... Oops, there we go. There we go. Arm, Ansys, Cadence, Siemens, and Synopsys, the Big 5, the folks that you turn to when you're doing their designs. So after the break, you'll hear from the EDA CEOs. In a research report that I read yesterday, one of the commentators remarked: "Is the ecosystem really going to show up? Are they really gonna be here?
What are they gonna say?" What you're gonna hear from these four companies is hard data, not marketing slides, although there are a couple of slides on AI, you'd expect that. Hard engineering data. What does 18A performance look like? What does it take to design with it? What are they seeing from us? Why do they like what they're seeing from us, and why they view us as a great partner in this journey? But for the next few moments, I wanna talk about our most important partner, and that partner is, believe it or not, wait for it, Rene Haas from Arm. So what I'd like to do now is invite Rene to come up on stage with me and talk to you about what we're doing with them.
Hello, sir.
So good to have you here. So Rene, you know, first off, you know, it's really unusual for an Intel business unit leader to make the statement: "Arm is my most important business partner." And in what kind of universe would you have ever thought that you'd see Arm and Intel standing together? But, you know, this is a brave new world for us, and when we started talking with Rene and his team about a partnership, you know, we rapidly came to the realization that 80% of the wafers TSMC runs has an Arm device in them. There is no way you can be in the foundry business without a partnership with Arm, and so we kicked out discussions months ago.
Yep.
They have been absolutely fascinating, and I think you'd like to probably tell us about a few of them, starting with perhaps the announcements you made this morning.
Yeah. Well, thank you for having me. As you said, this is a bit of strange bedfellows. I was trying to think of a parallel that I might give-
I can't.
... relative to this story, and only thing I could kinda think of is for those who can harken back, is when Walt Mossberg asked Steve Jobs what it was like to see iTunes run on Windows. And I think he said it was like an ice water in hell, but I won't go that far. I won't go that far. No, it has been, it's been fantastic. We started these conversations, you know, not long after I took over as CEO at Arm, because we felt, you know, fundamentally, that the technology that Intel was bringing to bear, as you've just shown earlier between you and Pat, is industry leading, industry changing, and we need to be a part of it. So thank you so much for having us.
Great to have you here.
Yeah. So, you know, our... The announcements that we made earlier today was around our Neoverse product line, which is, the product line that we use for the data center.... which has just been, exploding. It was in a very, very high growth trajectory prior to the AI wave, and now it's become, even, even stronger. The Neoverse V3 that we announced today, which is 50% faster than, the Neoverse N2, and then our Neoverse N3, which is 20% faster, but also, much more efficient. And when you think about these AI data centers, which are pulling, hundreds of megawatts and, and more, efficiency matters. So, you know, today was a big day for Arm. We just made that announcement earlier today.
Congratulations, and we're super excited about it.
Thank you.
So let's talk, you and I have been in many, many meetings, our teams have been in many meetings, and, yeah, as we talked, I remember one of the senior staff members at Arm said, you know, literally, one of our lead engineers said, "You don't talk to us like a foundry." And that's good because we're doing so much in the way of systems innovation, which is maybe talk about the dynamic of how we're working together.
Yeah, the transparency is required. You know, we're working on cutting-edge technology. When you talk about 18A and Intel Foundry and the packaging, this is the tip of the spear in terms of innovation. So when the engineering teams are working together, we need total transparency, seamless communication. We need to act like we're working with Intel Foundry and not the side of the house that we might be considered a competitor, and you guys have been terrific. It has been an absolute joy to work with your groups. The level of engineering engagement, the depth of the technical discussions, the information that we get, we would not be able to announce the partnership that we've forged without it.
Thank you. Well, we appreciate that.
Yeah.
So we've had a lot of discussions about process technology, and, you know, how do the engineers feel about what they're seeing?
Oh, it's great. I mean, the results so far are terrific. I think later today, Ann is going to show some very specific detailed data about what we've seen from a performance standpoint, also in terms of area. And I think you'll see it's compelling. You guys have done a great job, and we are ready to take that next phase and have customers start using the product.
So one final question before we talked a little bit about Faraday.
Yep.
Let's talk a little bit about what the role Faraday plays in Neoverse and CSS, and why, what... You know, maybe define for the audience, what is CSS?
Yep.
and why is it so important-
Yep
for everybody here in the audience?
Yeah, so we announced a new strategy some months ago around what we call compute subsystems. And the way to think about this is essentially, rather than Arm delivering blocks of IP, a mesh network, a memory controller, the CPUs themselves, we deliver a full subsystem, fully verified, completed. That is, if you want 64 cores, 96 cores, 128 cores for a CPU, we deliver everything in terms of that system, validated, verified, and it will work. Now, one of the big benefits of this is simply the fact that time waits for no one, the classic, you know, classic quote. The amount of time it takes to design these SoCs is really, really hard, and it's really, really long. If we're delivering final IP to a customer, they still need to put all those pieces together.
If we can put all of that together for them prior, at the same date, they would have got the block of IP, that's a huge, huge benefit. And then when you add on to it, you know, the processing cycle times that are getting longer and longer, I know you guys are doing your best.
We are.
But, you know, more EUV steps means more complex time through the fab, and that just means that ultimately, the processing times are long. You have complex packaging, you know, that adds a lot of time. So anything you can do on the front end to benefit the design time is really beneficial. So we announced this program called Arm Total Design, of which Intel is a partner. And in that model, customers can come to their partners and work with those folks to get their design out, and that's what Faraday is. So Faraday is basically doing that. They'll be able to put their IP together with our blocks and something that just, you know, end quote, "works," and everyone wins. The product's out faster, it's compliant, and you know it's gonna work.
Outstanding. Well, Rene, thank you for coming and joining us on stage today.
My pleasure.
Totally appreciate the partnership and everything we're doing together-
Good luck today.
... and everything we're going to do together.
Yeah. Thank you.
Thanks again.
Thanks, all.
Okay, so we're now moving to our fireside chat. It's my pleasure to bring on stage Eric Fisher, the President of MediaTek North America, and Dr. Yuan Xing Lee, Vice President, Central Engineering for Broadcom. Folks, come on out.
Thanks for having me.
Thank you. So before we get started, Eric, tell us a little bit about MediaTek and what they're driving for, and maybe some words on, you know, what their AI strategy is. But mostly, what is MediaTek doing today? What's their big focus?
Sure. It's an interesting company. It's an exciting company. We are, we've had a nice little spurt of growth here over the last four years. We've doubled the size of the company since 2019, or pretty close to that. And it's really been driven around four key areas of focus and investment. First is our investment in our capability and our modem technology, trying to make sure that we stay, you know, differentiated in a leadership role in modem. Second is our Wi-Fi connectivity technology. And the third area for us is really making sure that we keep a focus on high performance, low power design methodology around our Arm-based SoCs. And the fourth pillar for us is our investment capability in AI.
particularly at the edge, given the number of devices that we service across the edge, and really staying focused, and investing our capabilities there. And what that's done for us is created the breadth of products we have today. We're in everything from mobile handsets, where we have a number one market share position in Android-based handsets. We are in TVs with our SoCs, we're in tablets with our SoCs, we're in OTT with our SoCs. And then in addition to our traditional markets, it's allowed us to pivot into new markets, where we're gaining momentum in automotive, gaining momentum in data center and carrier infrastructure, and then, of course, industrial and IoT.
Outstanding. Yuan Xing?
Well, thank you, Stu. It's truly an honor to share the stage with you and Eric today. Broadcom, as you know, we offer a broad range of semiconductor enterprise software and security solutions. We provide connectivity from the edge to the cloud. As an example, at the edge, we have Wi-Fi and broadband products connecting consumers and enterprises to internet. And you move it to the service providers, we have routing, switching products powering the core and the metro networks. On the cloud and the data center space, we have server storage, connectivity, optics, and networking products. So we take pride that the fact that the 99% of the world's internet traffic passes through at least one Broadcom chip.
So, you know, as a technology company, we look to continue invest in key areas like AI and the HPC workloads. So AI, as we all know, has reshaped the industry landscape completely. We have gone from CPUs to GPUs, to now the clusters of tens, maybe you said hundreds or thousands of GPUs, interconnected together. As large language models are getting larger, so are the clusters, and then the underlying workloads running on the clusters also have started evolving. The Ultra Ethernet Consortium, which promotes the open hardware ecosystem, has been formed, and the Intel and Broadcom are the two proud steering members of the UEC.
So UEC provides the connectivity technology, mainly Ethernet technology, which connects both the front end and also the back end network of the clusters. So, you know, I also want to like to mention about the optics. Optics are used to interconnect clusters, and within clusters, coppers are used for interconnecting.
Thanks to Broadcom's industry-leading long-reach SerDes technology. And as you are trying to build larger systems, the line rates going from 100 Gbps to 200 Gbps per lane, it becomes apparent that the co-packaged optics, and you mentioned them as well, silicon photonics-based technology, becomes necessary to allow economy to scale and also to provide additional about a 40% power reduction in the era of AI. You know, that's the market we are going after.
Yeah, and that's outstanding because, yeah, we know today from published papers that, you know, only 30% of the flops in these big systems are effectively used, and a lot of it goes to waste. So having that kind of connectivity is so important to get this right. So I'd like to maybe perhaps just move on to a couple of questions for you. You know, Eric, we started out with MediaTek a few years ago back in this, you know, really disruptive supply chain area. And, you know, as you first started working with us, what were your considerations? But, you know, how do you feel about the journey, and what do we do together, and how do we address issues together?
So the things we looked at, as we look for new partners are, you know, capability and credibility, for sure. You know, diversification, resiliency of the supply chain, and making sure there's a global footprint. And then kind of the partnership, how are we gonna work together and, you know, the what capabilities that partner brings. So when you look at where we started with Intel Foundry, the credibility and capability was there, right? Intel's been investing in silicon manufacturing for well north of 50 years, and I think that provided a lot of confidence to the team that clearly Intel knows what they're doing in that space.
And then you've got other factors to consider as well, as you know, you've got this massive dependency on the silicon from a global, global, application perspective across all industries. So it's crucial to have diversification across your supply chain. It's crucial to have resiliency across your supply chain as well. So those were factors we took into consideration. Also having a really strong partner. One kind of interesting fact is, MediaTek ships north of two billion chipsets every year, and we need somebody that can scale, and we can get a steady, competitive, and innovative supply of technology and components. As you know, we've got a long history of having a diverse supply base, and we push really hard on our partners, and we have high expectations.
And, we felt that, that Intel could, step up and meet and exceed those expectations. The, the final thing that we looked at was, what else other than foundry could we get? And you showed it earlier on your screen, right? So you talked about, you know, packaging and substrate, interconnect capabilities. All those are really important to having, you know, when you look at a partner, not just foundry, but having access to all those other technologies and capabilities as well. And we think that with this partnership with Intel Foundry, that we can, accomplish our strategic goals really around diversification of our supply chain and keeping that resiliency high.
Well, thank you for the vote of confidence. Yuan Xing , your thoughts?
Yeah, sure. You know, as an industry, we are used to the doubling of bandwidth, throughput, and performance from every new generation of products. You know, those developments, and as we look at the content growth, essentially, you know, despite all the innovations on the design side that we do, the chip already almost approaching the full reticle size of the lithography steppers. So, we would have to restructure the chip architecture and the system solutions, because content grows faster or much faster than the process can scale.
So you would have to disaggregate the main compute jobs into multiple dies. Across multiple dies, so when you do that, you know, you essentially trying to mitigate the area scaling challenge. And the less scalable contents, like analog I/O stuff, they could be left done in less advanced nodes. Furthermore, the on-die SRAMs, for instance, could also split from the main dies to maximize the real estate, silicon real estate for the main dies. All those sort of things are done through chiplet technology. Chiplet technology has gained traction, significant traction as an industry trend. We wanna thank you, Intel Foundry, for driving the chiplet technologies forward. And then, you know, in the chiplet technology, essentially, at the end of the day, a product is no longer just one chip.
It is a collection of numerous, many heterogeneous tiles or dies. They are interconnected laterally or vertically through some very fine interconnect technology, as we also pointed out today, to accomplish the one complete a product function. So, you know, in my perspective, that is really the trend we're going after.
I think, you know, in the conversations we're having now, we're really exploring: How far can we push this technology? How... You know, some of the switches you do, the Tomahawk switch, for example, thousands of connections. I mean, these require huge packages, and I think we've had some fascinating engineering discussions on what that might look like in the future.
Absolutely. You know, we have been looking at your technology for a while, and so chiplet technology addresses area scaling challenge. The power challenge must be also addressed. The backside power, as you also showed in the morning, you know, does provide or is promised to provide a significant savings on both area and the power, mainly for power reason. Those are the much needed additional area and power benefits that customers are looking for. \
So again, I wanna, again, thank your team for a very strong support and excellent collaboration. And we've been looking at your technology and working together to evaluate your technology. And we're gonna looking through all these offerings that you have, and we'll be actually going through the process, and then we'll assess the suitability of applying the offering from your foundry, Intel Foundry, to the needs of our products.
Yeah. So, you know, Eric, we've got, you know, some interesting things that we've had learned over the years with you. When we first started out, right? You know, things, we, we learned a lot. So I wonder if you talk about the experience you heard from your factory people.
Sure.
How we did, what we learned, where we're at.
Sure. I think, I think I can kind of put it into three kind of buckets, if you will. One was, you know, the experience around the engagement and enablement side. And in that particular bucket, as I'll call it, I guess, is the team really looked to align with your teams to figure out, you know, how do we optimize, right? How do we refine the designs? How do we work best together, to maximize power, performance, and area?
I think what we found the team was very pleased with, you know, we got to a point where Intel Foundry really leaned in, and, in many cases, put people on site from an engagement perspective, working side by side to help us with those things, to help us make sure that, that we understood, you know, how your process worked, and it was optimized with the tools, and then, you know, your team understanding what our design priorities were. And so that design engagement was really critical in that enablement side. And there's multiple instances where the team was really pleased with the engagement and, and the reaction that, that Intel took to support us. The second part of this is just the overall interaction around fab and fab operations and manufacturing readiness.
You know, the team really felt that, that Intel listens to feedback, and that they were open to that feedback, that they, they would take the time to thoroughly understand the issue, and then respond in a way that, that addressed the issue. And it might have taken a little bit of time to understand it, but once we figured it out and there were commitments in place, Intel quickly executed to it. So, I would say that, that the comment was made that there is exceptional capability from a fab operations perspective from our team. The one challenge we had early on was in the test chip yields, as you're well aware, and the team was really pleased with how quickly the Intel team reacted and worked with our team.
In less than nine months, we went from really challenging yields to very, very competitive yields. The team, the word that they used was remarkable progress on that. The yield ramp was exceptional, you know, once we got it, the challenges fixed. Then the third part that I would comment on is just the overall mindset, and the culture of Intel Foundry focused on our success. We believe that Intel truly understands what it's required to be a foundry partner, what we need as a customer. We think that they've made significant adjustments along the way, both organizationally and in their process and workflows over the last couple of years. We found them, like I said earlier, to be very open-minded in their approach, very customer-oriented in making us successful.
And so overall, the team is very confident that with the level of collaboration and teamwork we have with the Intel Foundry team and the commitment just to continuous improvement, that the partnership's gonna allow us to really effectively service our customers going forward.
Well, we truly appreciate your feedback. In talking to our customers this morning... Yeah, I think what you've heard from our two customers up here on stage today is we are committed, you know, we are listening, we are providing what I hope to always be exceptional service and support, and we have the table stakes necessary to make both Broadcom and MediaTek successful. So with that, thank you for joining me up on stage today. Really appreciate it.
Thank you.
Thank you. Appreciate it.
So I hope the last 90 minutes of discussion this morning has helped illustrate the progress that we've made as a company. I think you'd see what we've established is a strong foundation of technology and innovation across multiple dimensions. I hope you see that we have resilient, secure, sustainable supply chain. I hope you see that we have this idea of a systems foundry that allows us to create not just systems on a chip, but systems of chips. So to finish out my talk, I'd like to go back to where I started, which was our people. Because our people, as you heard from Eric so eloquently speak about, our people is what makes the difference, their commitment to be in this business. They're the ones that make the everyday miracles of physics happen at scale.
So our factory teams are also the teams that inspired the iconic Bunny Man. This is an ad rolled at the Super Bowl, 1997, the year the Green Bay Packers beat the Patriots. The halftime show was the Blues Brothers and James Brown, and it was eight years after Taylor Swift was born. I had to do it. You can't associate the Super Bowls without Taylor Swift. You know, and this commercial was iconic, but, you know, things have changed a lot over the last several years, and that change is only gonna accelerate as AI impacts your work, your business, your life. AI is a key theme today for our next session.
When you return, our EDA partners are going to talk to you about how AI has impacted the design cycle, how AI improves the capability for your engineers to do so much more with so much less effort. So what we decided to do with this commercial was take a generative AI view of it. So this commercial, no bunny people were harmed. We did 100% AI rendered. It was done by a very creative director, Dave Clark, out of Los Angeles, and he's a big advocate of using AI tools not to take away creativity, but to amplify creativity. So as you leave our session today, remember this: that the only limitation to what we can do with AI is your imagination. Thank you.