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Comment by agoodthrowaway | Hacker News Reader

Intel does not support a fabless semiconductor business model. Lots of other chips are necessary besides CPUs.

In case of war it can be forced to, the question is whether it is competitive with TSMC in medium/long run?

Really not that easy to release a PDK and get the industry familiar with it particularly for anything that is high speed analog.

A modern chip design-to-production pipeline takes roughly five years, 2 years if you crunch it and dot try anything fancy. And yes moving from TSMC/GoFo production nodes to Intel would require significant redesign.

Are you saying I can't make a random chip using Intel's fabs?

"Random" has some connotations that probably aren't helpful.

He's saying you can't make arbitrary chips at the Intel fabs. So you could end up with a proverbial car with no wheels. Looks cool but it ain't going anywhere.

I just meant if I had a design I wanted to make could I make it with Intel in the same way I could with a TSMC partner like Broadcom. My previous experience is that you could, we had them come deliver us a presentation some years ago. Their offering was no good at the time as they didn't have some of the IP macros available in the time frame we needed. So I find the parent comment confusing, unless things have changed.

Honestly that was news to me, but I'm only paying enough attention to this space to make a stock pick or two.

I think I'd appreciate a [citation needed] as well.

Looks like it's still a thing: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/foundry/overview.htm...

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