On one hand, everyone who cares about the newest smallest nodes either has their own fab (Samsung, Intel), or uses TSMC. Like AMD and Nvidia share TSMC, and they are far from buddy/buddy.
On the other though, AMD legitimately does have fairly close ties to Apple. Jim Keller has bounced around a lot, but Apple and AMD is where he started new major uarchs. And Hugon Dhyana, and the game consoles show that AMD is more than willing to work with high volume OEMs to have semi custom designs, particularly to empower their security architectures. Yes, Intel includes custom logic for security, but not to the same degree as AMD. I think Intel includes all of their customer's custom logic on most of the masks, but fuses or otherwise hides the functionality; AMD goes hog wild with custom masks.
You've given me a bunch to think about, thanks! I hadn't really considered AMD here.
On the other though, AMD legitimately does have fairly close ties to Apple. Jim Keller has bounced around a lot, but Apple and AMD is where he started new major uarchs. And Hugon Dhyana, and the game consoles show that AMD is more than willing to work with high volume OEMs to have semi custom designs, particularly to empower their security architectures. Yes, Intel includes custom logic for security, but not to the same degree as AMD. I think Intel includes all of their customer's custom logic on most of the masks, but fuses or otherwise hides the functionality; AMD goes hog wild with custom masks.
You've given me a bunch to think about, thanks! I hadn't really considered AMD here.