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Right now Intel is hamstrung because there is no separation between the fab and design sides. Nobody is going to trust Intel to fab their latest and greatest while the two sides are joined at the hip.

The sooner Intel spins out the fab side into its own entity the better positioned it will be to pick up the business that TSMC doesn't have capacity for.

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But the whole problem at Intel is that they're not at the level of TSMC, they're years and generations behind. Splitting them up won't just magically make the fab business be better, and without the profit margins of the sale of processors it's unlikely they'll have the resources to invest to get them to be good. Case in point: AMD are doing very well after spinning off their fabs, but their fabs are not doing very well (relatively of course - they're just stuck to where they split and haven't had meaningful advances; but they're still a profitable business because those older chips are needed too).

I've seen plenty of Amazon's competitors running on AWS, plenty of Google's competitors using gmail, and suchlike.

People will overlook a lot, if the product is compelling enough and the sales guys can keep a straight face while promising not to peek.

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