Well, he’s not technically wrong. You need the actual production metrics to say if he’s full of shit though.
Tldr it should be yield rate per area
It’s not the right measure for progress. It’s the right measure for viability. If yield is terrible, the end product may cost too much to market.
If yield rates aren’t a good metric, what does he think is then? It’s certainly not layoff numbers, or C-suite compensation.
If after all that investment you’re only able to produce TEN PERCENT of the product successfully, that’s a failure, by definition. Even if they quintuple the yields, that’s still incredibly poor
Yield over die area should be the metric.
If you have a chip that is 50% of the wafer area, a single fault will lead to a yield of 50%. Now compare it with a chip that is 1% of the wafer area, the same single fault gets a yield of 99%.
So comparing the yields of two processes without factoring in the die area is not a fair game.
Gelsinger was hired as a known long time engineer, rather than as a business expert. I would trust his numbers from an engineering perspective, even though I was laid off under his rule
