They have had decades of close collaboration an customer feedback from their internal design teams, they have process technology teams using some of those desig

They have had decades of close collaboration an customer feedback from their internal design teams, they have process technology teams using some of those designs as reference points to improve upon for the next node. Don’t underestimate the kind of gravity well that creates, especially in a large organization like intel. Their process is well tuned for high performance Xeon chips. Its not impossible to change that, but extremely hard, and it will take tim. At the same time they currently have near 0 external customers trying to use their process, they are having a hard time figuring out what their customers need. (I have no doubt they are working hard to change that) But is there a way for them to improve a process node for an external customer? What if it creates an ever so slight downside for x86 products? These are the difficult decisions they will need to make at some point. TSMC, on the other hand, has decades of experience of doing exactly that: designing a process for everyone with every fabless company in the world, for type of chip, whether it’s server or tiny ultra low power class. And they have a very broad range of flavors of every node to show for it.