I'm only adjacent to that part of the industry, but from what I hear process still maters _but_ the situation has changed in a couple interrelated ways: - The

I'm only adjacent to that part of the industry, but from what I hear process still maters _but_ the situation has changed in a couple interrelated ways: - The number of players with top tier fabs has shrunk to three (TSMC, Samsung and Intel), everything above experimental volume on a <12nm feature size is coming off one of their lines. TSMC is all foundry-for-hire, Samsung does some of their own designs and some for-hire, and Intel is mostly their own products but currently expanding their foundry business. Strictly, Intel is a little behind at the moment because a couple of the process bets they made have proven difficult to get ready for volume production, but they're still ahead of everyone else. Getting onto the hottest, newest process is still an in-house thing for Intel and Samsung, but for everyone else (Apple, Nvidia, etc.) it's basically a question of who offers TSMC the most lucrative deal. AMD and IBM both divested their fabs (and hence most of the world's SOI process capacity since they were the two players heavily invested in that) into GlobalFoundries, who have since dumped most of IBM's old fabs to OnSemi. They aren't doing anything strictly cutting edge. - The era this article was written in was right at the end of truly, holistically hand-tuned at the transistor level designs. The level of abstraction required to deal with the scale of modern chips is more reliant on standard-ish cells and automated design tools (provided at large cost by the CAD vendor and/or Fab owner to match the process being targeted) with some local optimization on performance critical parts. That kind of levels the playing field because it means everyone is getting some access to the fab-specific details through licensed cell libraries, pre-tuned IPs, process consultants from the fab owners and companies like Cadence, etc. and no one is really hand-tuning big logic parts. - The hardware IP market has exploded. For example, among ARM processors, the magic in "Apple Silicon," other than paying for priority access to TSMC's 5nm capacity, is that Apple (and about 10 other companies) are building their own hand-tuned ARM cores on top of an Architectural License to which they add their own special sauce, while most players are licensing "off-the-shelf" cores (this is the "Cortex" brand) from ARM Ltd. and integrating them. - I'm only talking about microprocessor-relevant fabs here, there are a handful of bleeding-edge hot shit fabs for processes suited to other things, like the fancy GaN fabs for high power/high frequency switching applications.