Granted, the Big Gorilla is faster to shrink the processes, because they have no problem dropping a few billions on a brand-new fab, but what good did that do?

Granted, the Big Gorilla is faster to shrink the processes, because they have no problem dropping a few billions on a brand-new fab, but what good did that do? Their best-in-industry process is actually sort of a problem for them, because they need those billions they dropped to translate into high margins. Which means they need their fabs to be making Xeons, not Atoms. Or to put it another way: it isn't clear that mobile CPUs can pay for expensive fabs, which means the cheaper fabs in Taiwan have an advantage. Intel more or less admitted this when they ported the Atom to TSMC's process. But then the question becomes: is an Atom made at TSMC better than an ARM made at TSMC?