You have a very unique record in my life. Do you know what that is? The speed at which I have developed a friendship with you. I don't think I've developed with anyone else. And it's not a function of me. I think it's a function of just how good you are at doing the kind of amount of things that you do, on a regular basis. But, thank you for coming here.
Well, thank you for inviting.
Tell us a little bit about Intel. It's a national treasure. Intel has gone through some tough times. You are bringing it back again to life. But there's so much that needs to get done. Walk us through the current state of Intel. Where do you think it is? Where do you think it should go? How should people think about it?
Yes, I think first of all, I joined the board for two years and then something's going on. A lot of good friend of mine from Intel and, it took me a while to decide to take this role. And that says to me, no, that's not easy. A lot of my friend told me, don't do it. And we have a great reputation in AI and eventually investment that is, you know, you'll love it. And I took on this one. I finally decided that this is iconic company is very important for the industry and also for United States. So I finally convinced my wife, let me do it one more. And so up the cadence and the heads up for me to do it one more time. And just to update, I think, I just passed ten months coming to 11 months and, and I kind of call it and marching off the map. So something that, somewhat surprised us, I don't even know. And, so you had to kind of reacting at that real time basis and learn from it. So in some way, I think it's good to have and then just update. And, we have a very complex company. You have a foundry that's strategically very important. And then the other part is the product. And then you know, so clearly you need to balance a tool.
And then the other part, do you believe your foundry business becomes a general purpose foundry that's outside of just your products?
Yes. And so that's the intent. And, we have 18 and I'm, when I took over the years, quite poor. And so I really get all my friends to help from PDF Solutions to Clay in the equipment to make sure that we have that 7 to 8% yield improvement per month. And, you say the yield improvement per month, that's why. And that would be the best practice. And, it took me a while. Finally, I now I seeing 7 or 8% yield per month. So in a way, it's very helpful that you opened up the kimono and let people come and help you. And then so I think one is 18, we just announced the Penta Lake. And, and I can really count on my fab to produce that. And then, interesting enough, couple customers are knocking on my door now say, hey, seems like your 18 is doing well. We want to be a part of that. So I think we are delighted to see the customer want to see that. But we are laser focused on the 14 and that will be, you know, is very important is 1.4, you know, and this is the most advanced and we're going to be in risk production 2028 and then we'll be in volume production 29 and, like any foundry. And I learned a lot. And, you need to have not only the yield improvement, you need to have the variations so they're more predictable. And you also need to have the final product that know what is the you look like and the bit spin and all the detail. And second part, you need to have all the IP available. You know, if you want to have multiple customers, you've got to have all the low, low power IP to have other. You can serve the customers. So there is something is missing in the past. So I really put something in place. And then so that we can have both and then serving the customer. Good news is a couple of customers are very excited. You know 0.5 PDK this month we will have that. And the customer can use a test chip to work on us. And so I think good news is, a couple of customers are engaging heavily and we are looking forward to serve them hopefully second half of this year. I will see the volume commitment from the customer, which product they want to have, and I can serve them.
On the second half, you will see the volume commitments on the foundry or on your core products, on the customer, on the products in the way they need to let me know what products and what volume they need.
Got it. Then I can. And the one thing to people will see, because first of all, I'm not going to announce any customer. This is confidentiality. We need to support the customer. And what are we going to do is when you see me starting to put money into, subscribe is a very important material. And then secondly, some of the CapEx equipment I need to have and scaling it, I mean, that I have real customer I've committed to it. That's kind of discipline. I have.
So on the fab side, to get to mass scale, what does mass scale look like for you and what's the timeframe that you feel like mass scale could happen where you could be a formidable fab for third party chips?
Yes. So it's a very challenging to operate the two because one is on the product. You have to try innovation, drive the product roadmap. The other part is really a service. Business culture had to change and in some way I kind of tell my team is this is the business of grinding, you know, it's not like you have good innovation, good technology. You would be people will come. You have to grind until something that you put the you they can call on you to make the production. And then their whole revenue profit depend on it. There is a lot of trust and responsibility and we have to earn it. So I think those are the thing that, scaling is important. And that's why I always ask customer, give me the customer, the biggest product that you have, the most important product, give me five, 10%, 20%, 50%. Let me earn it and earn your trust. And there are many of them. They I work with them when I was running Cadence. So they trust me. So somewhere that I think back to your point trust is very important for AI. So I think something that, even more important in foundry is that customer trust.
Now, if you think about the constraints that are there right now, do you think that the energy constraint is, with power cooling, all of that is more severe or right now is manufacturing capacity, which one limits growth?
First, I think in terms of the AI, the biggest challenge I think for a lot of my customer is memory. Memory, actually, there's no relief as far as I know. When I talk to the, you know, only three key players, two of them I talk to very frequently. And then, they told me the HBM, there's no relief until 2028. Why is that? Because I think this whole AI is, suck up a lot of memory in out of our mutual friend the Jensen tonight. You don't talk to him, and I'll. Clearly he need a lot of memory for his Rubin. And the next generation product. And, so I think it's very important to have that memory, if anything, kind of slow down, going to be at the memory. So I think it's one. Secondly, I think is clearly enough from the compute side. And I was very happy to hear that they know customers are all crying for more products, and I did them prepare the production enough to meet their requirement. And so I think people need to find out that in application, CPU actually is more useful in terms of, performance for all the in the compute requirement. And in fact, a friend of mine, he mentioned that Moore's Law double used to be a 3 to 4 years and now is like 3 or 4 month. So the increase of compute is increasing so much. And right now my biggest challenge is focused on our production of supply chain. Make sure we can meet that requirement. Almost every CEO they call me up Lip-bu, can I have more? I'm your friend. I'm your customer, the most important customer. I want to have more of that. So I think, you know, somehow is kind of encouraging for me to see that computers become very important. And then the other part, very important to me is beside memory, beside the compute. And then the other part is the thermal. We just talk about the cooling technology. So in terms of some of the high performance processor, either GPU or CPU, you sometimes you have to guide the gigahertz down because your thermal issue and the power in the power management. So those are the one that you want to find a new way of cooling in terms of, you know, liquid cooling. Air cooling is not cutting it now. So liquid cooling, microfluidic cooling, immersion cooling. So I think those become very important. The other part also that you mentioned, I think something that Cisco have is really good. Is that interconnect. Yes. It's getting become very critical. Used to be more in the copper you know and the like in our create semiconductor and I sterile lab I invest in. But now moving to optical optical and so optical become very critical. And so that's something that is a new wave because the speed and latency become very important. So another issue the other part of the constraint is the software. And then so if you really want to address some of this like the Moore's Law, you need to really look at the whole full stack. So not just a silicon. And you need to the cooling. And then you need to have the interconnect. And then the other part is a software, you know, open source I'm very strong believe in it. And then of course a code that compatibility is very important. And even more important right now is a cluster of GPU or CPU. And then you become the cluster manager, the software and right now in the sometimes you behave problem, you don't even know where to look for it. And now there's a lot of new startup coming. I'm coming to me. It's a depot that will be area that we want to work on so that we know exactly how to solve some of this cluster, issue that you're going to face. Kubernetes is great, but you cannot find a real issue there. So I think those are kind of interesting being a venture capitalists and running CEO of Intel, it give me that kind of perspective of what are the new thing coming. And quantum computing is another big area coming up is around the corner. And so something that is interesting to see after I, you know, we talk about generative AI, the next big wave is the physical AI. The next thing going to be quantum. So I think that's kind of exciting.
And so you talked about open source and talk to us a little bit about like your perspective on open source in the United States. How important is that? What needs to happen?
Yeah, very good questions. You know, I'm very passionate about education and, you know, one involved with MIT, CMU and Berkeley and, and others. The key part is in the one thing that I'm worry a lot is the foundation fundamental research. We're starting to not continue a lot of university there, the best professor being we could out to Asia, to Europe. And, so I think the fundamental research, some of the public companies like Cisco and ourself, we have some short term mid-term, requirement. You cannot invest into a long term ten years, 20 years from now. And so that part to me is an outcry on foundation, research. The other part is the open source. I'm a big fan of open source. And for any speaking couple of people that could be very knowledgeable people that told me, Lip-bu, well behind China, I know. And so that's something that we have to pay attention. I think deep seek is just a wake up call.
