For years, Intel sat on its CPU monopoly and now the tide turns against them
seekingalpha.com
seekingalpha.com
Intel's acquisitions have been pre-existing disasters, also-rans and underdogs looking for their big break, often hoping that getting access to Intel's fabs could make their next generation of chips more competitive. Many—if not most—of their acquisitions over the past decade only really make sense if they were intending to leverage Intel's supposed core competencies to not just get Intel into new markets, but grab a lot more market share in those new segments. And then being part of Intel ended up not really helping those companies, because Intel couldn't deliver on their core competencies.
Putting the money they spent on acquisitions, into manufacturing technology, process innovation, etc. would have kept them right up front.
As for paying for talent, they certainly paid enough dollars for talent, but could have directed those same dollars at fewer resources with the talent they actually needed. That means paying top dollar for the right people, and skipping the rest.
If they let others poach, that is because those competitors were smarter at valuing talent while Intel either slept or fell victim to broken HR policies.
Namely that it enabled the manufacturing process to glue together slightly broken CCXes to enable high core count lower binned parts.
I certainly might, and all applications that I have written commercially since 2000 make use of parallel programming and concurrency.
I would be curious to know which companies pay more for process engineers than Intel in the US. My best guess would be Samsung?
So as the Andy Grove generation retired out, very competent and talented but ultimately risk-averse replacements came in.
So they failed to make meaningful inroads into mobile and are now getting flanked by the myriad of companies who did as those companies are moving upstream with lower power, lower heat and thus potentially more scalable chips.
Intel also failed to rise to the occasion of "pivot or preserve" and just went to a "preserve at all costs" strategy even when it was clearly not working out for them. Chips got delayed 6 months, then 12, then 18, then got redefined just to get something marginally better out as their true intentions continually got pushed further.
And now, instead of say, sniping some stars from Rockchip or the other amazing up and comers, they did a reorg from within; a very GE/Texas Instrument style move that usually does not work - especially when you have already passed a generational changing of the guards.
But they have plenty of market still captured, a continued strong brand identity in the vast majority of the public, plenty of money to pad a runway and plenty of decent products so there's still significant time to turn their ship around and not continue to ignore every word of every book of Jack Trout, Al Ries, Clayton Christensen, Geoffrey Moore, and Steve Blank. First they need to stop believing "it can't happen here" when it's clearly already happening here.
If they don't, they might become another Bethlehem Steel or Sears; deftly unable to read the cards despite evidence attacking them from all directions. They need to realize their old ways will not carry them into a new world.
Look how Microsoft flipped. As a hardcore Linux user I would have never thought I'd ever be giving cash to Microsoft (via GitHub and Azure), and monthly at that! These things are possible: "When losing ground focus on your potential instead of preserving position"
Even after whatever AMD is going to say on October 8 and whatever Nvidia is going to do with ARM, the chip ball is still in Intel's court for now and it's still their game to lose. I am pretty confident they will figure out this rough patch and a substantial recovery will come (come see my stock positions if you don't believe me). My tune may change in 6 months...
---
* The modern Sperry-Rand, at Unisys, for instance, is STILL maintaining their UNIVAC operating system - why? Good question. Do they think that's still a potentially winning hand? A path for recapturing a market they lost 60 years ago as if say, somehow hot new startups will start choosing OS 2200 running on Univacs? I don't know either. I downloaded and tried their free virtualized x86 version about 6 months ago just to see what it was like and I got a high-touch white-glove sales-treatment of emails and phone calls. It all felt very desperate. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS_2200 and https://www.unisys.com/offerings/clearpath-forward/clearpath...). I wish them the best of luck, they'll need it.
They had Patrick Gelsinger. But he was pushed out. You left with a Board lead by former CFO Andy Bryant, chooses a CEO that fits his taste.
It was all Politics.
And this has trickled down since.
I would actually argue those two had strategy problem rather than execution. And those two had comparatively little politics / power play involved.
Intel has both, and politics.
The mantle passing to ballmer came at the objection of many major stock holders but some tiny cabal of gates et al overrode it. For years there were protests and threats that people would sell off millions if they didn't can him. There was substantial slippage and he lost all support and bounced, like Lee Iacocca except without any glory days
If your business is in an industry with very rapid innovation, would it be wise to lose focus on your core products and processes?
Now, the Tiger Lake performance per watt story just isn't that impressive compared to the competition.
>Here we present the 15W vs 28W configuration figures for the single-threaded workloads, which do see a jump in performance by going to the higher TDP configuration, meaning [Tiger Lake] is thermally constrained at 15W even in [single threaded] workloads.
Comparing it against Apple’s A13, things aren’t looking so rosy as the Intel CPU barely outmatches it even though it uses several times more power, which doesn’t bode well for Intel once Apple releases its “Apple Silicon” Macbooks.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16084/intel-tiger-lake-review...
I wonder how the 3070 and 3060 are going to compare, in terms of performance per watt, when compared to the 2080/2070 series. Based on the current numbers, they'll possibly show very little improvement.
Is 3080 vs. 2080 Ti the correct comparison?
Given the 3090 is not too much faster than 3080, it seems there may not be room there. But then again, the 1080 Ti was as fast as the Titan X. So…yea.
I think 3080 vs 2080 Ti is the only possible comparison, but websites should make it very clear that it's an unfair comparison.
Probably the only comparison that actually makes sense is the (future) 3070 vs 2080 Ti. I'm not suprised that Nvidia pushed the release (it was supposed to be released earlier).
Algorithmic improvements, custom domain specific ASICs, and maybe quantum computing or other physical processes in the future are where large efficiency deltas might come, but for now small improvements are here to stay for all chip makers.
>Wong, who is vice president of corporate research at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp, gave a presentation at the recent Hot Chips conference where he claimed that not only is Moore’s Law alive and well, but with the right bag of technology tricks it will remain viable for the next three decades.
“It’s not dead,” he told the Hot Chips attendees. It’s not slowing down. It’s not even sick.”
https://www.nextplatform.com/2019/09/13/tsmc-thinks-it-can-u...
[0] https://www.eetimes.com/bipolar-zener-combo-takes-on-cmos/
In fact, multiple gates can be created in the same transistor, in an effect SFN calls “multi-tunnel.” Multiple NOR and OR gates can thus be created from a single Bizen transistor, allowing creation of logic circuits with many fewer devices. This can result in a three-fold increase in gate density with a corresponding reduction in die size for integrated circuits based on the transistors. Summerland said that SFN is also creating a reduced device count processor architecture to enable analogue computing with Bizen transistors.
What makes sense to accelerate, how to integrate it and balance accelerators vs. general cpus, and how to expose it all to the programmer all seem like fun and interesting problems.
The 2xxx series wasn't terribly impressive to many so they've just started to peak out in the way that Intel did at least 5 years ago. We're heading into AMD's 4th iteration of processors that basically mop the floor with Intel from a price/performance and performance/watt standpoint and it's just starting to become accepted in the mainstream that Intel is in trouble. It will take another generation or two of products before the press catches on to the fact that what nVidia is telling everyone isn't true. Of course it will be helpful if there's some competition to point to that helps make the case.
They may be very nice machines but they won’t be in the race for a very large portion of the market.
That is not the market that Apple cares about, nor NeXT did that much, other to gain market share when things were looking dim.
It’s a lot different from the Win32/x86 duopoly situation.
Platforms have been mostly abstracted away.
Yes, most tools are cross platform (not necessarily cross-arch but that's a matter of time) and performance is important - I don't care if it's Apple silicon or Intel or AMD, or what OS GUI I'm using - I just want faster builds and iteration
So there’s good reason to believe it may be macOS only.
Personally I’ll believe it when I see it... because right now there are no 3rd party iPad or iPhone operating systems. So a better question is probably: what makes you think there will be 3rd party OS support?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24636166 (Apple’s T2 security chip jailbreak)
Yep, curious world.
Getting Windows to run on this is a pretty tall order, and without significant investment it won't happen. And significant investment from whom? Not Apple surely. I'm guessing Microsoft has more stake if anyone. At best we're going to see Windows on ARM virtual machines.
Speaking from what people expect from a "Windows PC" - Windows on a current MacBook makes a decent Windows PC. Windows on a future MacBook makes for a very poor Windows PC that will make customers regret their purchase.
Apple currently uses standard PC architecture, with identical CPUs, GPUs and Wifi chips to standard PCs, and a (sort of) standard EFI booting mechanism. With ARM Macs, it won't. Clearly Apple in its hardware design is already not invested enough to support Windows - they could use standard EFI on ARM, for example. So why would they spend a lot of money to do it in software, so people can run a "crippled" version of a competitor's OS?
Note I don't actually believe Apple will actively lock this down. I do believe we will get native Linux on these things to some extent. But I do believe Apple will not lift a single finger to make alternative OSes happen on ARM Macs. Apple only cares about macOS and virtualization. I also think Windows on ARM is a great product, but I also know that common people that just want to use a Windows computer won't agree with me.
The "Apple is going to lock down the Mac just like the iPhone" narrative has been with us since, well, the iPhone. But despite the alarm at tighter security measures in more recent versions of macOS, that hasn't happened yet -- and if a Secret Nefarious Lockdown Plan (tm) was going to come to fruition, the year that they shifted CPU hardware and radically redesigned the operating system's UX would sure as heck seem to be The Perfect Moment. And it still hasn't happened.
Past performance is not a guarantee of future returns and all that, but I don't think there's any reason to think Apple is going to make it any harder to run different operating systems on Apple Silicon hardware than they do on Intel hardware. (Of course, I don't think there's any reason to think they'll make it easier, either.)
But arm macs are really an Apple A series processor plus a number of coprocessors like the t2, nueral engine, etc.. and the default is that windows will not work on this specialized hardware.
So unless there’s evidence that Apple is actively going to help 3rd parties develop operating systems for the Mac, the best we can hope for is a fairly acceptable OS with reverse engineered drivers for those chips. We’re either going to get an unstable OS or a severely crippled OS.
With intel macs Apple just had to stand back and let 3rd parties do their work. But they would have to actively assist with arm macs.. and there’s no indication theyve ever done that much less intend to do so in the future.
And I don't think it's a coincidence Apple is slowly but surely moving OSX towards a locked down platform. It's already made pretty hard to run normal software.
“We’re not direct booting an alternate operating system,” says Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering.
There's no reason to believe this is true.
apple iphones run ios, only.
apple computers run macos and windows.
Thing is - which precedent will win?
“We’re not direct booting an alternate operating system,” says Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering.
Apple has already confirmed they have no plans to allow third party software to run on Apple Silicon based notebooks.
The former requires their support. The later just says they won’t oppose reverse engineering. The later is far more difficult and will likely mean any OS will be buggy and flaky. Unless Apple comes out and says they will actively support 3rd parties, it’s just going to be a shit show with no good alternative OS options.
How so? Apple's market share is something like 10% so it's a minority of Intel's market.
People will instinctively write off this idea, but this is the new pricing strategy Apple has been employing with the $329 entry level iPad, $399 iPhone SE, and the new $279 Apple Watch SE. The Macintosh now remains Apple’s only major consumer product line that hasn’t seen aggressive price reductions to make Apple services accessible to a broader range of consumers. The move to Apple Silicon, which could save Apple potentially hundreds of dollars per device, is the perfect time to move the Mac to this pricing strategy. If this happens, it would absolutely eat into Intel’s consumer market share.
iPhone SE: 1321
OnePlus 8: 898
On multi-core it's a little better since there seem to be seven Android phones that can outperform the iPhone SE:
iPhone SE: 2737
OnePlus 8: 3281
OnePlus 8 Pro: 3216
Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra 5G: 3107
Samsung Galaxy S20+ 5G: 3102
Samsung Galaxy S20 5G: 3078
Huawei Mate 30 Pro 5G: 2918
Huawei Mate 30 Pro: 2835
However, all of those Android phones cost quite a bit more than the SE.
Intel’s failure to get their fabs running has put them into a death spiral unless they pull off a miracle.
Also, if Apples ARM chips are really that fast they will be purchased by the shipload to be sent to performance critical operations like HFT. They will be put into servers or turned into them to squeeze and eek out every possible advantage... which will shit on intels most profitable lines (Xeons for single threaded workloads).
It’s gonna be a crazy time.
It’ll help Apple cement their dev tools as industry standard, it’ll further amortize overall dev costs by increasing volumes, people can develop better algorithms with their custom hardware accelerators for ML and etc, it’s a great way to fight the current anti-trust cases against Apple.
There are some pretty good reasons for Apple to sell their chips to 3rd parties.
Then again, they started their own TV studio, so what do know.
They're just ARM chips. So long as Amazon otherwise plans to build their own ARMs, there's no real benefit. Apple is looking out for #1.
I'd like to see the ARM16 and ARM32 variants die too, as they are also bad.
Actually, the Xserve platform really had nothing to do with that. Xserve’s were partly designed and built for the high end video production industry (as an extension of the Mac Pro hardware) and partly as a general purpose small to medium size business file server / web server (which the Mac Mini has subsumed what’s left of that space).
Apple Silicon may beat Intel/AMD and Apple Silicon is ARM, but that doesn't mean that ARM is beating Intel/AMD.
I hope bootcamp will be updated for the new macbooks eventually. I don't expect it to be out on day 1 but maybe a couple months after release?
You're saying that if Intel had used their leading edge semiconductor fabs to make ARM CPUs that were exceptionally good, they would not have stood a chance in mobile? I disagree. Qualcomm would have faced serious challenges keeping up with these hypothetical Intel ARM processors back in the early 2010s. They still might, but Intel hasn't even tried.
Intel was just too proud to do something like that. They wanted x86 to become the smartphone standard, which it obviously didn't... and now they're suffering defeat on all fronts.
The mainstream Intel CPU line is relatively limited in variations. Yeah, we have different core counts and presence of SMT or iGPU, but you can get there with basically a single die design, or a small family of them, and blowing some fuses after binning.
Mobile SoCs tended to be a lot more bespoke. The same basic CPU block might need to e paired with different modems, and physical space and production costs probably don't accommodate doing the "low-end by fusing off bits of big higher-end chips" model.
As I understand it, Intel wasn't fond of that sort of product diversity-- the Atom they developed for mobile devices was much more a take-it-or-leave-it proposition.
I also suspect the concept of being an external single source was unappetizing for buyers. Samsung has the choice of buying Snapdragons or making their own Exynos parts; low end manufacturers can cross-shop MediaTek or Allwinner. If you're too reliant on a uniquely Intel design, what happens if they have a production kink and you have a million phones awaiting processors?
Qualcomm's success on mobile market has nothing to do with their processors but everything to do with them exploiting their "FRAND" patents.
ARM is not a panacea.
Or that the future was Netbooks with Atom CPUs. But yes, they bet very wrong and didn't hedge that bet. I think Intel was even an ARM licensee at the time, and I'm sure ARM would have been happy to take more money from them.
That said, I think they blew it the the cellphone market, and now this has haunted them. They aren’t competitive in the broader market, and more the cost to switch from arm there is high. AMD I think is a near term issue in the server market, but ARM is the real issue.
It doesn’t matter how deep your pockets are if you’re unable to successfully integrate or manage what you buy, and this speaks to management/organizational dysfunction, which money also doesn’t easily fix.
However, market growth switched so quickly from PC to mobile/IoT, they couldn't get in. Instead, they just wasted resources on projects like Moblin which became boondoggles.
It wouldn't matter at all to either AMD or Intel until Apple starts supplying these chips to other OEM's. Till then, it will just be used in the walled garden of Apple products, which is the very thing that makes it very unattractive for many users.
Also, it will be interesting how Apples market share develops, as th AS could make the Macs much more attractive. Both from the performance and price and of course, because of the iOS compatibility.
Apple's pricing strategy over the past few years has been to reduce the entry-level costs of their devices thus increasing their marketshare, ecosystem lock-in and services revenue. It's the strategy they've employed with the entry level iPad, iPhone SE and Apple Watch SE, and I fully expect them to bring to same strategy to the Mac, now that they no longer have to pay Intel's profit margins.
We'll very likely see a MacBook in the $700 price range in the upcoming months. That would put the price of Apple's entry-level MacBook right around the that of an average notebook computer in the United States, while providing far better performance than their competitors in that price range (see A14 benchmarks). This would naturally provide Apple with a big marketshare boost in the consumer notebook space.
Ultimately nobody but Apple knows exactly what their pricing strategy will be with Apple Silicon based notebooks. However, if I were competing with Apple in this space, I'd be tremendously concerned.
On the software side you have Gatekeeper and SIP. On the hardware side you have T2, soldered RAM, their weird custom SSDs, and their lawsuits against hackintosh manufacturers.
Yes, there are still ways around some of them, but it's pretty obvious where they want things to go.
It seems unlikely to me that PC OEMs will just stand by and take it. Windows on ARM already exists and this may be the spark that really ignites that fire.
With Apple Silicon, the game changes a bit. Not only is there the prospect of the AS being really fast, as Apple is going to make a complete transition, software companies have to support AS, if they want to continue to sell to Mac users. And suddenly, any Linux user also has a great ARM platform to work on, via a VM running on the Mac.
This might even have a direct impact on the Windows software offerings. So far, they could sell to Mac users running a x86-VM. This will be no longer possible. As much as Mac users contributed to Windows verndors revenue, they have to either give up the Mac market, make a native Mac application or hope that Windows on ARM becomes available in a VM on the Mac. But then, they at least need to fully support Windows on ARM.
With smartphones it's not such big a problem cause you don't do anything productive on smartphones anyway.
With PC/laptops it's a big disadvantage I don't see changing in a few years just because of small performance advantages, even if the prices weren't an issue.
Those enormous piles of cash could build out a world-class service that would be attractive both to developers servicing iOS applications, and just to developers, period, a lot of whom use Macs.
That would indirectly take a chunk out of Intel's server dominance, and might get the other players thinking about whether Intel is the best platform for them to stick with as well.
> It wouldn't matter at all to either AMD or Intel until Apple starts supplying these chips to other OEM's. Till then, it will just be used in the walled garden of Apple products, which is the very thing that makes it very unattractive for many users.
Well, there is another possible path: if Apple Silicon is seen as a PoC, someone else could decide to pursue the server market with an Apple Silicon inspired ARM-based offering. Perhaps aimed at FaaS deployments or something similar.
The only x86 servers were running a mix of NT 4.0 and Windows 2000.
Apparently it worked.
One just needs to properly configure mount points and remote sessions.
There was hardly any difference between my X sessions and local development.
Developers! DEvelopers! Developers!
ARM should be in consumer space, millions of laptops for developers first running Windows and Linux
The only issue would be libraries available only in binary form for AOT compiled languages.
In other words Nuvia.
- They would be vertically integrated with Apple Silicon
- Apple themselves are increasingly depending on cloud services
- Async/Await in Swift will likely land next year, making Server-Side Swift much more appealing
- Apple is greatly increasing cloud / Kubernetes hires
- Could share a single Apple Silicon ARM architecture from client(ios) to dev(mac) to cloudMost of the special sauce from GCP and AWS is the integrated software services anyway.
Can u give some more details? I am not really familiar with Apple eco-system
But wouldn't most of it (storage, web, streaming) be based on commodity C/C++ projects ?
What if Apple outperforms both Intel and AMD with their Apple Silicon? People will keep buying Windows and ChromeOS PCs.
AWS is testing the server market right now with Graviton2, basically a drop-in replacement for x86 that's faster and cheaper. It's going to be fascinating to watch and I hope AWS reports architecture usage share over time.
No
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=epyc-vs-...
First, Apple wasn't a supplier. If Silicon takes off, they could become a supplier. Second, the reason they're switching to Silicon is the same reason they switched from IBM to Intel - the chip suppliers didn't react to the changing consumer landscape.
By making consumer devices, Apple is much more in tune with that landscape than IBM/Intel is. They can adapt chips much better and won't be handcuffed by chip suppliers in the future.
I highly suspect we’ll see a switch from intel to arm in the server space in next 5-10 years.
The cloud vendors have so much to gain by building their own arm chips.
I'm not convinced, parallelism is not inevitable for individual applications, it can be hard or not applicable. I understand there are certain CPU intensive programs where the benefit is too great to ignore, but for the rest it still seems like it's not worth the developers time.
The best model I've found so far is cooperative multithreading, that is, coroutines that explicitly yield control, combined with well-isolated worker threads and a rendezvous mechanism for passing parameters and getting results back. I can write code all day long in this model and not run into very hard to find concurrency issues . . . or at least, not as many. I've written a ton of code in the "every thread for itself, have fun with locking" universe, and man, life is just too short for that stuff.
Naturally you run out of processor headroom in this model because you're essentially single-threaded; message passing between processes and running multiple services, one in each process, is one good approach to scaling. Often you can scale out to the network, too, and with 1K cores you need start worrying about the blast radius of your services when things eventually go sideways so getting off the box is a good idea. And things will go sideways.
I can see a thousand cores being useful for embarrassingly parallel things, like classic graphics algorithms where you're doing mostly SIMD with a few variations. But I can't imagine wrangling a zillion cores to do "random logic" type applications where you have to use traditional low-level synchronization primitives. See above: life is short.
Feel free to color me a dinosaur. I've only got another 20 years of my career to figure this out :-)
On WinRT with how everything turned out with UWP, now as per Reunion reboot, they are supporting again both models, as that was one of the reasons why many devs did not jumped into UWP app model.
On the Android side, they eventually came up with WorkManager and Concurrent. Also for those in the Kotlin train, co-routines.
As for what best models, I use to like doing thread based stuff, but came to enjoy using good old processes instead.
Security and stability issues haven proven that having the process sandbox, with OS level IPC is a much better way to work with parallel/concurrency programming, and processes must not even run all on the same computer, so one can scale across the cluster as well.
So most people just hand wave one assumptions as day dreaming and they go back their tools as they always did.
All the sentences are grammatical, but they didn't say anything
That said, the cash cow is servers, and the AMD advantage in cores, RAM and I/O is overwhelming except for a very few niches that care about single-thread performance (high frequency trading is probably most of it).
Now that led them to a new microarchitecture that will likely suck on servers and laptops, due to the high power usage, and might not even win on the desktop compared to Zen 4 CPUs (Alder Lake will mostly compete with Zen 4, not Zen 3).
As a chromium developer, I'm pretty sure Chrome has been leveraging multi-core for a long time
Chrome seems very much not to run single core; from what I've read of it's process/threading architecture, it is both aggressively multiprocess and it's processes aggressively multithreaded, with work pushed out as widely as practical, using as many cores as it can, with a strategy around keeping the UI thread and each process’s IO thread as responsive as possible.
The initial projection was that Intel could scale their transistor down indefinitely, we could somehow cool Pentium 4 effectively, and management think clock speed sells, so some day they could scale to 10Ghz CPU.
That was when they hit the TDP ceiling. Internally named as Thermal Wall by Intel CTO Patrick Gelsinger. Before Pentium 4 Intel saw the rise of Laptop computer where energy efficiency was the key. And Pentium-M was a side project from (cough) Patrick Gelsinger. Which ultimately saved Intel's Pentium 4 fiasco.
The market might have unlimited Dollar for performance. But it is still limited by TDP.
I wonder if performance per dollar will ever come back ?
Unfortunately it does. Just different sort of ways. If you want 64 Core, And you have max ~250W TDP CPU on a computer ( Assuming no fancy cooling ). You are effectively limited to less than 4W per core. Even less if you exclude memory controllers and Interconnect. You could argue you want 32 Core or even 16 Core, but scaling the up the clock speed curve beyond optimal level will means power increase exponentially. i.e You are still hitting the same wall.
And I should note, with anything per dollar, the question isn't really technical per se, but function of market. AMD is pretty good at performance per dollar right now, and will be more so once they announce Zen 3.
Some day if I could be bothered I should write a blog post on it.
Performance per watt matters for mobile, obviously, but also for "hyperscalers". If you plug a chip in and run it at full tilt for five years, the cost of the electricity eclipses the cost of the chip quite handily.
I worked on a well-funded effort to build a top-of-the-line mobile AP (the Broxton half of these [two cancelled programs]). It was a shit show from start to finish. There is so much mismatch between Intel's strengths and what the industry demands that I don't see Intel being successful in this domain if they make another attempt. Things would be worse now than in that attempt, as Intel has suffered significant brain-drain since then.
[two cancelled programs]:https://www.anandtech.com/show/10288/intel-broxton-sofia-sma...
I was eagerly awaiting Broxton & successors, and now FPGAs and Optane just aren't going to be as big as GPUs and mobile. They have no choice but to keep investing in GPUs and hope for the best in CPUs.
The problem I saw was that the design philosophy at Intel was not conducive to fast turnaround, and the mobile market does not wait.
Now if you're talking about in the future, the biggest hurdle is going to be Apple and AMD since they got there first and already have contracts for specific amounts of fab time/wafers. Intel coming in now is basically only able to take whatever table scraps are left.
"…U.S. chipmaker Intel said it faces delays for its next-generation chips and could outsource some of the production.…While Intel didn’t name potential third parties, analysts see TSMC as being a contender."
Also there's a reason Intel's 14nm chips can compete with AMD's 7nm chips. Manufacturing and design working together has advantages of its own.
Finally it seems like they plan to make some chips at TSMC.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/15974/intels-xehpg-gpu-unveil...
I have hopes that Swan can kick out the dilletantes. Too much engineering going on at Intel that doesn't translate to actual progress.
It's just AMD's good fortune that Intel's consistent stumbling have made their great engineering look even more outstanding in comparison.