Disclaimer: I work for a competitor to Intel in one of Intel's many markets. I would indirectly stand to gain from Intel spinning out their fabs. I would love

Disclaimer: I work for a competitor to Intel in one of Intel's many markets. I would indirectly stand to gain from Intel spinning out their fabs. I would love to see Intel open up their fabs. More fabs in more locations would be beneficial to the chip world overall. However, I don't know if Intel can do it successfully. The vertically integrated strategy pays off when you have enough volume in the money maker (CPUs) to justify the heavy investment in the bottom of the stack (fabs). Intel is nearly at a threshold where they risk losing hold of the CPU market. I see about 4 paths. I don't know which one we're closest to. 1. The ideal future for everyone (except for their their competitors in the manufacturing space) is that Intel successfully spins out their fabs and we have a viable near-leading process available for the chip industry in the large. There's still a lot of money in not-quite-bleeding-edge processes. 2. There's a future in which Intel doesn't, they bounce back, and everyone calling for them to spin out their fabs looks like an idiot. 3. There's also a future in which Intel doesn't, they don't bounce back, and their process falls into irrelevance as they lose the volume to fund their fab development. 4. Then there's a future in which Intel does, they do or don't bounce back, and Intel's fabs are still not competitive enough to be used by anyone but Intel. It's still an open question whether Intel can reach the volume they need to make this pay off, for example. It's also not obvious that Intel's process, on a technical level, is ideal for anyone but Intel. The ideal time for this to have happened was years ago when Intel still had a process advantage and could leverage that to bring in new customers despite the other risks, but it was precisely because they had a process advantage that they weren't going to do it. In fact, they went the other direction and let go of much of their custom foundry expertise, which was quickly scooped up by (now) more successful companies, and purchased firms that moved to the Intel process rather than maintain a customer relationship. Now they have to contend with the fact that they don't have an advantage and they aren't as accustomed to working with partners for manufacturing. It's an uphill battle, but it's doable. The geopolitics might be compelling enough that they can overcome this with pressure and funding from three-letter agencies. Culturally, this might be better regardless of any of the technical details. I've often heard that manufacturing runs the ship at Intel and that they suffer from severe internal politics between orgs. Splitting up might be the right tool to reign all of those problems in. But, it might also be that Intel truly has been infected with the managerial MBA rot that technical folks like me like to complain about, or Intel has irreversibly shed its manufacturing talent. In that case, I don't know if manufacturing can be saved.