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>I'm no cheerleader for Intel but if Intel really wanted to they could release competitive ARM offerings. They've got enough money they could just buy an existi
by im_down_w_otp 6y ago
>I'm no cheerleader for Intel but if Intel really wanted to they could release competitive ARM offerings. They've got enough money they could just buy an existing ARM developer and then produce those chips in their fabs.
The problem is that Intel no longer has the leading state of the art fabs. They used to be two generations ahead of everyone else, and now they're two behind. The inertia of x86 has kept them afloat, but the longer Intel fabs lag the more ground ARM has been able to make up.
Intel fabbing ARM parts isn't going to do them much good unless they also manage to get their process shrink delays worked out and behind them.
- giantrobot 6y agoIntel does have manufacturing issues at smaller node sizes but that's a really complicated thing to measure, node size claims from various semiconductor manufacturers are more marketing than anything else now. There's been some suggestions to replace node size claims with better density metrics https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9063714 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9063714. It's not like TSMC's fabs are some order of magnitude more advanced than Intel's fabs. If Intel had an ARM chip to produce today they could use their considerable fab volume to produce them profitably. Even at large process sizes they could still produce competitive ARM chips. It's not like their current x86 chips at 14nm are slouches.