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Comment by Alupis | Hacker News Reader

Extremely well, yes. AMD, in fact, did not go bankrupt.

Keeping their Fab arm was quite literally going to bankrupt them back when they made the decision to spin it off.

They could not afford to sink the R&D cost into newer, smaller process fabing and recognized maintaining their own Fab would (a) bankrupt AMD attempting to push into newer processes and/or (b) prevent AMD from ever being competitive in the x86 market due to using old process.

In hindsight, it was a brilliant move, and now has allowed AMD to partner with any Fab that has the technology AMD needs.

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> In hindsight, it was a brilliant move, and now has allowed AMD to partner with any Fab that has the technology AMD needs.

For AMD, it was the best possible move both long and short term because they never had a leadership position. That doesn't mean it's the best thing for Intel. Intel has for years commanded a premium because of their branding and platform power. They need to demonstrate a technological edge or their margins are going to collapse.

It was brilliant -- but it reduced the number of leading-edge fab players from 3 to 2. Intel pulling the same move would reduce the number of leading-edge fab players from 2 to 1.

See the problem?

What? Intel hasn't been a "leading-edge" fab in years and years at this point.

And that is exactly why they've lost their "advantage" over AMD. Intel got bogged down in very expensive R&D, and failed over and over to produce yield good enough to mass produce retail chips.

As far as I know, TSMC and Samsung are both considered leading-edge.

Samsung is burning money to produce chips a node behind TSMC. They are a leading-edge fab right now like Intel is a leading-edge fab right now. You're right that they are a contender, but the fab market is always going to be this way: one player will be the best, the others won't be. If you design CPUs but don't manufacture them, your supplier will always have a natural monopoly, meanwhile your customers have more options every day. Ditching the monopoly market to focus on the competitive market is not a good long-term strategy.

Intel has been stuck on the same process since at least 2018, and continually delayed their next node process.

Right now current estimates put Intel's 7nm node at least 2-3 years away... and that's after all the delays that they have already experienced. It's so bad, Intel is seriously considering outsourcing chip production for not just GPU's, but CPU's as well - that means Intel believes it's in a really bad position.

By the time Intel finally gets their 7nm process working at acceptable yields... 7nm will be old news. TSMC is working on 5 and 4nm processes right now, and of course AMD will be using them to their advantage at the earliest date possible.

Meanwhile, Samsung shipped AMD chips for Ryzen 1 (and 2?), and is producing GPU chips for AMD to this day. TSMC is producing Ryzen 3 (and possibly other things for AMD). Both companies will be producing something for Intel soon, it seems.

Like it or not, Samsung is obviously producing things Intel cannot.

Clearly, allowing Intel to use current state-of-the-art fab processes from whichever company at the time happens to be the best is a sure winner for Intel.

I'm well aware of the situation, and no, 2018 was not the beginning of the problems.

> allowing Intel to use current state-of-the-art fab processes from whichever company at the time happens to be the best is a sure winner

That's the type of one-move-ahead thinking I expect investors will love right up until AMD and Intel give up all their margins bidding against each other for the kingmaking process. Intel would still be behind 50% of the time, when they lose the bidding war, with the difference being that the 50% of the time they are ahead they don't get to keep the margins.

I'm curious what you feel Intel should do then?

Intel's deep pockets have got to be starting to feel lighter at this point - and they're looking at many more years of sinking money into a black hole before being able to produce useful things. (during which time AMD will be leapfrogging to newer fab processes as they become available)

We're already starting to see OEM's use AMD cpu's like we haven't in nearly 2 decades. The server and datacenter markets are coming around to AMD and it's Threadrippers as well. Eventually Intel's sweetheart OEM deals will expire, and who knows if they'll be renegotiated or ditched completely? That will be exceptionally painful for Intel... as those OEM deals are largely what Intel has been coasting on for all this time.

I just don't see an option for Intel, unless they want to gamble their competitiveness possibly permanently. They're not quite in dire straights like AMD was when it spun off Global Foundries... but the outlook is much the same.

> That's the type of one-move-ahead thinking I expect investors will love right up until AMD and Intel give up all their margins bidding against each other for the kingmaking process.

Seems like a major win for consumers. There's no reason to have a $10,000 consumer CPU today, with the exception of lack of competition in both price and performance.

There's a reason that every desktop and server CPU (ignoring APUs) AMD is shipping have a 12nm die manufactured by Global Foundries in addition to the 7nm CPU chiplets. It's a brilliant workaround within the scope of their wafer supply agreement with GF.

amd buying radeon is really what almost bankrupted them. they barely got both divisions working properly now although gpu is behind by about 1 gen on some stuff.

GPU is now on par minus the wank RT stuff, stuff you have to disable anyway if you want to have good framerate.

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