Assuming they follow on with a credible laptop CPU, AMD is a clear BIG underdog winner, and Intel has some reflecting to do. It's a pretty unique moment in time.
Interestingly enough, I'm hoping that intel does the same to nvidia in the GPU space. Nvidia is still the choice if you want the best performance, and cuda is the standard. That might change (and prices might drop) if intel's cards end up being good. Fingers crossed.
Such a configuration would surely beat the pants off of any capitalist environment regardless of the regulatory structure imposed. Not to mention, by having goals that put the people first, would end up with a society of better served, happier people where empathy was the rule rather than the exception.
And just to be sure all is fair you will in charged of defining this quota.
What prevents a government-led project from hitting the same problem? Without serious competition from AMD, I'm quite sure there would be no price reductions and we'd be paying more for inferior products.
There is nothing wrong with trying different approaches in parallel, but why does it have to go all the way from cradle to market that way? At a certain point it would be obvious which design was the better one, and then the group who was working on the design that proved inferior could then join the more successful group and double their productivity. If it was possible to cut losses way ahead of the curve, imagine what could have already been achieved.
This is just bias. How can you know what the ultimate best judge of anything is? You would have to know what all the alternatives that could ever be conceived would be.
And I can prove you wrong more directly. If the market is the best judge of the of the best design, why is so much money spent on advertising? If a better designed product with less advertising faced a worse designed product with better advertising and always won, since "ultimately the market is the best judge of which is the best design", then there would be no point spending money on advertising at all.
And it didn't work very well, even on purely economic grounds. Cars are a prototypical example to think about, and they were spectacularly awful for decades. It turns out the benevolent leaders are good at figuring out what's good for their careers, and less interested in making useful products (meaning safe, reliable, fast, efficient, etc.) Even in the west there was too little competition, but it turned out that duplicating almost everything GM did independently in Japan was a great investment to be making.
Another way to say this: If 2 competitors each develop the thing, then in the worst case they spend twice as much money as in utopia. But we can't get to utopia. And in situations where there is only one option (be it enforced by the state, or just a monopoly) it's easy to go wrong by a much larger factor than 2. If you don't like cars, think about drug companies, or academic publishes, who seem happy to increase prices by 10 or 100 times if they can get away with it.
When Intel's fabs were doing well they were dominant. When they ran into problems they were stuck in a way AMD wouldn't have been if TSMC had problems.
Oracle tried to beat that system with pricing tied to the clock frequency. That approach was kind of funny...they were lining their pockets with effort that other companies were putting forth.
Once the ones that are successful bear fruit, those that are working on the failures can be moved over to the successful groups. And instead of the current environment, where there is a lot of wasted effort allowing an inferior product to go all the way to market to languish there, the decision can be made much earlier than that, saving all those wasted resources.
I think it is a result of human nature responding to the incentives provided by their company, their education, and culture. Most people, if hired to lead the work on an idea, will become upset or stressed if they learn of another group at the company that is also focused on the same area.
Companies can adapt their culture and organizational model to create an ecosystem in which diverse efforts can develop at their natural pace. However if that was easy to do well then there would be no need for companies to hire external design agencies.
At the scale of chip manufacturers such as Intel and AMD they probably feel that they are considering many diverse opinions, but each company has its view and once they decide on the path forward they will cut any staff that are not contributing directly to that path (or at least AMD will.)
Your idea is appealing in basic theory, for sure, but a few thousand years of experiment and more sophisticated theory of actual human nature disproves it.
If we expanded what we thought of as “us” from just the individual unit, however small that might be (the familial unit for some, just the individual self for others) to to include the entire country and government running it, there is no telling what we could achieve.
Please consider that people have historically tried to achieve the Utopia you describe, where everyone is expected to put the State before the individual. It degenerates into totalitarianism, since forceful coercion and defining a "them" to the "us" is necessary for that to happen.
I much prefer the arrangement of putting more emphasis on the individual and money being wasted on duplicated r&d than what you seem to be arguing for.
The fault lies with human organizations in general. Everything will stagnate and there will be a boss ”We have always done it this way”. Only by coming from outside can one go around these issues.
In the 50s or so US was actually worried what you say might be the case and communist society would trash capitalism because factories would share innovations instead of competing with them.
For some reason the innovations didn’t really come.
To put that point into context, Intel's operating profit in just its most recent quarter ($6.55b) is greater than AMD's revenue over the last four quarters combined ($6b).
What sucks is that Intel used illegal means to fight AMD , so despite having the better CPU the OEMs were not using AMD in their builds.
https://www.techspot.com/review/1863-two-years-later-ryzen-1...
If the result of this is that AMD gains in power and market share for a few years and then the there will be another major leap in CPU quality due to Intel, I'd consider that pretty good.
They could always surprise me. (TSMC does fab power-sipping mobile chips too!) I just don't have super high expectations.