[bsedlm]

but it's all about the managed lag.

how else would all those billions in R&D would be worthwhile for investment institutions?

as I see it (and stretching my reasoning), the lag is also part of what maintains the prestige of many academic and research organizations.

the billions in R&D are not all about the outcomes, a lot of them are spent making sure it's really damn hard for any rivals to catch up. how exactly? I cannot know but I can infer it's got a lot to do with having nobody able to see the whole picture, anybody can only know either how to design the chips, xor how to build them.

if everybody is as good as MIT, then MIT is no longer MIT. somebody has got to make sure some of those 3rd party (and far away) institutions stay there, in the back.

if everybody could do "2nm" process (whatever that means), then TSMC wouldn't be ahead of Intel, and so on...