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Comment by darby_nine | Hacker News Reader

Apple seems to be just as much a player as Intel.

There’s a big difference between designing chips and manufacturing chips. The concern here is Intel is the last US HQ CPU fab that matters, and its relevance is waning.

> The concern here is Intel is the last US HQ CPU fab that matters, and its relevance is waning.

I gave up on US fabs a long time ago; are they really that relevant to begin with outside of paying lip-service to those concerned about offshoring manufacturing jobs? We just went through (and are continuing to experience) a chip crunch and it's not like Intel came through despite having a domestic fab.

Apple designs chips, but does not print them as Intel does (both)

Apple's shareholders would riot if the company started building its own semiconductor fabs.

Moore's SECOND law is the big kicker here.

The cost of a current top end fab is astronomical for experienced semiconductor companies. There is no "skunkworks" to get a top end fab going.

The real prayer is that Moore's FIRST law / node shrinks run fundamentally out of steam in producing efficiency or speed results, and that gives the entire industry time to optimize and drop fab equipment costs for near-top-end fab performance. This may actually start to happen in the next 5-10 years.

I think Jensen Huang stated that Moore's law is dead a few times. I've seen projections of cost per transistor for the leading node being more expensive than the trailing node. The only reason to pursue it would be that the market can bear the additional cost because power or some other attribute is better.

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