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I'm waiting for Intel to divest of either the arch/micro-arch business or the fab business. They can invest in one or the other, but what is crippling them is h
by redshirt 9y ago
I'm waiting for Intel to divest of either the arch/micro-arch business or the fab business. They can invest in one or the other, but what is crippling them is having to invest in both simultaneously. I can definitely see them doing something like HP and split off into Intel-Fab and just Intel. Would enable the arch/micro-arch to use all the fabs and allow the fab to focus on what it does best, processes research and development. Intel already fabs chips for other people (https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeanbaptiste/2013/10/29/exclusive-intel-opens-fabs-to-arm-chips/#6c0129fb3078 https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeanbaptiste/2013/10/29/exclusi...) why not expand that relationship to maximize their profits/capacity.
- baybal2 9y agoIntel has tons of money, and their core business is still a giant cash cow.
- redshirt 9y agoExactly, break them apart while they still can.
- Symmetry 9y agoI think there's too much synergy to be had by having the process engineers work closely with the architects when deciding on the design rules.
- old-gregg 9y agoI am not an expert, but based on what I've read about this (my interest got sparked by the resurgence of AMD with Ryzen), Intel's vertical integration may actually even grow in importance. The processes developed by Samsung, GloFo and TSMC are all optimized for low-power designs required by mobile applications. There are far more phones out there and they're on a much faster upgrade cycle than desktops/servers, that's why foundries optimizing for mobile. This creates a problem for AMD because high power/freq Ryzen CPUs can't compete with Intel's if they're made on a node optimized for low power ARM cores.