[teemwerk]

Maybe a bit tangential, but from an economic it's interesting to see Intel's market cap vs TSMC, given that TSMC is purely a foundry. Nowadays what 10nm or 14nm actually means is a lot fuzzier than previous nodes, but the general consensus seems to be Intel's fab tech lead is either pretty precarious or already gone, so I'm just gonna assume even (which is admittedly a poor, oversimplified assumption).

Then TSMC and Intel are pretty even, which is slightly interesting to extrapolate all manner of conclusions.

Intel has slowly opened it's fabs to outsiders, however the first one was Altera, who Intel now owns, so... Main point is in 20, 30 years, is Intel's main business going to be fabbing their own chips, or someone else's? I dunno, I just enjoy following the industry.

[SomeHacker44]

If TSMC's fab is as good as or better than Intel's, then fabless companies like AMD and Apple will reap competitive benefits over Intel, which now has to have IP for CPUs it sells as well as IP for its fab business.