"ASIC" is usually used as a stand-in for "standard cell ASIC", meaning (with some hand waving) that the chip is implemented with suboptimal, general building bl

"ASIC" is usually used as a stand-in for "standard cell ASIC", meaning (with some hand waving) that the chip is implemented with suboptimal, general building blocks. In contrast, Intel CPUs are traditionally "full custom", where the chip is designed to be near-optimal for this design down to the transistor level. Full custom chips have the highest NRE costs and longest development cycles. Standard cell ASICs are less energy efficient, slower, and provide generally less logic density, but are cheaper and quicker to develop.