3 ms·

I don't see it as that much of a risk. One of the reasons Intel has so thoroughly dominated for so long was that they were at least at parity to slightly ahead

• n7pdx 5y ago
  It is quite a bit more than parity to slightly ahead. From 130nm to 22nm the Intel process advantage was enormous. That the horrible P4 architecture was able to compete and be cost-effective is testament to that. Intel architects and designers never had to work very hard to beat the competition. That is one of the reasons Intel was able to get away with their garbage in-house EDA tooling and processes. Intel was also able to get away with delays to fix their bugs (due to awful validation methodology). Even if Intel process catches up TSMC, they would have fix their design tooling, hire talented engineers and get rid of the entrenched hacks who built their careers on mediocrity.
• threatripper 5y ago
  I think some of the advantage comes from synergies of having microarchitecture development and process development under one roof. You can fine tune them together to get the best performance/power ratio. Even if both alone are just on par with the competition, together they are still ahead by a few iterations. Also they get out new products a bit faster. The problem is that by switching to another fab they lose these advantages.