[threatripper]

If we assume that intel gets successful with 18A with their x86 processors, would they even have the money to finance the node after that? And the node after that which gets exponentially more expensive?

In the past x86 raked in enough money to burn a lot of it on new fab tech but non-x86 has grown immensely and floods TSMC with money. The problem for intel is that their fab tech was fitted to their processor architecture and vice versa. It made sense in the past but in the future it might not. For the processor business it may be better to use TSMC for production. For the fab it may be necessary to manufacture for many customers and take a premium for being based in a country in need. So, a split-up may be inevitable and this fabbing a competitive ARM chip surely helps in attracting more customers. Customers who may pay a premium for political and security reasons.

[blackoil]

Apple, Nvidia and US govt can provide the required funds if they have confidence in its ability to deliver. These companies will benefit from breaking current monopoly of TSMC.

[mallets]

Samsung is already in a much better position for this. They have external customers and experience facilitating them. Unlike Intel's track record which doesn't inspire confidence at all.

[close04]

Intel has something Samsung doesn't. It's a US company operating mostly on US soil so the US government has a vested interest to keep this strategic asset going for as long as possible.

[epolanski]

Tech hardware is a cutthroat business, tech companies are gonna order at Intel if it has something that others don't on a business point of view: more performing, cheaper, faster delivery.

The US government can wish and encourage all they want, as long as Samsung, TSMC and any other produces better chips for less, the money will flow there.

[DanielHB]

Governments can keep companies working for as long as they want. Usually that makes them less competitive over time though and it is all done at the cost of the tax-payer and adjacent industries.

The Chaebol model of Korea is a way to spin it while avoiding the less competitive part by forcing the companies to compete internationally while keeping the domestic market locked into the Chaebol offering.

For example the US gov could force (or subsidize) all datacenters in the US to use intel chips made in intel foundries located in the US. But on the international market intel would need to compete with its rivals.

This is all theoretically possible, but very hard to pull off politically. And it is not necessarily good for the country long term and certainly a tax to the country citizens/adjacent-companies in the short term.

[close04]

If a government finds a sector or company to have strategic importance they will not let it die. The rest is free-market absolutism that never comes to be. I believe today more than ever the US considers Intel to be of strategic importance.

> the money will flow there

Which money? The CHIPS act [0] isn't only for the ones who produce "better chips for less".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIPS_and_Science_Act

[epolanski]

The fact that US taxpayers will subsidize Intel does not mean that Nvidia, Google, AMD, etc are gonna other their chips there.

[zimpenfish]

> Apple, Nvidia and US govt can provide the required funds if they have confidence in its ability to deliver.

Given Apple's history with Intel's ability to deliver, I'm guessing the confidence there isn't high.

[walterbell]

Are you referring to 5G radio modems or another chip?

[indemnity]

Probably Intel’s fumble when Apple asked them for better performance per watt for the laptop CPUs and whether they wanted the iPhone CPU business back in 2006.

[chasil]

A more recent motivation might be Apple's switch to in-house ARM for MacOS for similar reasons.

[dannyw]

Well, they’re already funding so much ARM custom design, it’s not that incremental to tweak and scale for their laptops.

[toxic72]

Probably the Intel CPUs in Macbooks before Apple made the push for the M1 - circa the Intel quad core era where their laptop chips had major heat issues... ~2012 IIRC?

[dannyw]

I’m not defending Intel here, but those Intel MacBooks never had appropriate thermal design or headroom for the processor’s operating specs.

[toasterlovin]

I think the theory is that they had an appropriate thermal design for cpus which were supposed to ship but never did.

[LarMachinarum]

I wouldn't count on either to save Intel as it still is (i.e with the fab business still attached to the CPU/GPU business). While it's true that having Intel fabs as a second source would be nice for them to alleviate the dependency on TSMC, they are also competing with Intel on the CPU/GPU side.

My guess is, they're gonna let Intel rot a little further while doing their best to pressure for Intel to split off their fab biz (as AMD had done back then), and then invest just in the fab.

[Frieren]

> Apple, Nvidia and US govt can provide the required funds

When the first tough about investing is to go to big corporations and the goverment instead of going to investors is a telling about how nowadays the economy works.

I love that the Orange guy has opened the door to the nationalization of big tech. I hope that the next president is bolder on this regard. If all these companies depend on monopolies to exists, they should be state owned/controlled.

[roboror]

Yep, that's exactly what they did with TSMC. Foundries don't just build massive production lines and hope someone will use them, even TSMC.

[toasterlovin]

Yeah, everyone is focused on TSMC as the company with the secret sauce, but really it’s Apple. Whichever foundry Apple goes with gets the majority of leading edge transistor volume.

[cromka]

Amazon and Google probably as well?