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by ryukoposting
663 days ago
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> The problem with keeping the foundry business is they're probably never going to get back to competitive at leading edge and that dooms end products that rely on having the best process to be competitive. FWIW I feel like I remember hearing similar remarks about AMD when they spun off GloFo. It's easy to assume that whoever is currently in front, will stay in front. On a 1-5 year time scale, it's a safe bet to be sure. Yet, Intel's own loss of process leadership tells us that things can change in the long run. I posed this question in a top-level comment, but I'll throw it out here too: world governments are more interested than ever in making sure their fabs are on the leading edge. Could this serve to create more parity than we've seen historically? |
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As for whether this dynamic helps level the playing field between governments, I don't see how it would. Ever more expensive fabs make it harder rather than easier to stay competitive.
The aviation world has some historical parallels. China has been working to catch up on jet engines for at least 40 years and they're still not quite there yet. Not for lack of effort, engineering talent, theoretical understanding, etc, certain kinds of industrial capability are just hard and slow to build. A much smaller country would have no hope. My guess is chip production ends up being similar.