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Comment by mlindner | Hacker News Reader

Intel was there. If a company gets far ahead then they start to rest on their laurels and then competitors catch back up. It's cyclical.

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I think what hurt intel in the long run was actually their fully integrated stack.

They couldn't really sell fab time to other companies cuz they didn't have a good attempt at fabbing for 3rd parties. So they were only fabricating intel chips, that's not nearly as big of a business as TSMC. So basically, TSMC can keep their last 3+ gens of fabs open and making product, while intel couldn't really reap any benefit from keeping old process nodes open.

AMD made a good call selling off global foundries when it was apparent they couldnt keep up with Intel even.

I think the really rough issue here is what happens if China does try to take Taiwan (and this is not unrealistic as China has been more aggressive towards them recently).

TSMC is now a strategic asset for the USA. We've been attempting to get them to build a fab in the states for exactly this reason.

Intel fabs plenty of stuff at the 22 nm node, including chipsets for their CPUs[1], RF and other analog uses[2], novel RAM technologies, and their Lakefield/Foreveros thing. Given Intel's expanding product portfolio, there's likely additional internal customers for older nodes.

[1]: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-14nm-shortage-h310c,...

[2]: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9075914

Is that enough volume to cover all of their older , and large, fab capacity ? i'm not so sure.

Intel has a large number of fabs and I think capacity is reallocated over time; for example, a 22nm fab might be converted to 10nm to adapt to changing demand. They can eventually get down to just one 22nm fab which won't require as much demand to fill.

To be fair, there are limits on how far and how fast one can upgrade a fab and upgrades are planned out many years in advance. Equipment for the smaller nodes tends to be larger and more complex and involving more steps; this requires more space. Additionally, ASML only makes around a dozen of the EUV machines each year and they are booked years in advance.

What percentage of the equipment changes between nodes ? Is it mostly the lithography and inspection tools ?

Intel fanning for themselves is more than twice the business of TMSC fanning for many others.

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/317769-intel-tops-semi...

What hurt Intel was missing the mobile CPU boat. If Intel wasn't so braindead in management, they probably could have won a substantial segment of mobile.

Because of mobile, TSMC had so much revenue to advance their process and catch/surpass Intel. Heck, Apple's M1 is probably due to the same reason in the Apple ecosystem, they couldn't win the iPhone either, and IIRC various "what's wrong with Intel" threads stated many of the best Intel engineers went to Apple.

> Because of mobile, TSMC had so much revenue to advance their process and catch/surpass Intel.

Intel never been chasing pure revenue. They were always conscious of their profitability, to please sock market analysts.

Agreed, that's what happens when the MBAs infect your company.

Same with Medtronic, a medical engineering company gets overridden with MBAs and now the only innovation they do is acquiring other companies.

each iterative cycle requires exponentially more r&d, making it prohibitive for that one firm to catch up

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