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Comment by nabla9 | Hacker News Reader

Title poses a question, then the last paragraph explains why it was not relevant and the article was just created for the title.

AMD and Nvidia are fabless.

>But more importantly, Intel spends billions on new semiconductor production process technologies. Every new manufacturing process typically requires billions in upfront research and development investments. Intel also develops packaging technologies, which require a lot of R&D money.

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TSMC spent about $6b in R&D last year, so they could swap out either AMD or Nvidia in the headline with TSMC and the title would still work and be a little more apples to apples.

Yea but TSMC produces good stuff.

In part, thanks to ASML.

I don't think TSMC use their own lasers anymore (not since 2016), so even then I'm not sure.

This is why they provided a normalized comparison versus market cap. They should have probably done it with revenue, but this does provide a means of analysis of the relative efficacy of value creation via R&D dollars.

Intel's current drive to catch up with Nvidia and AMD GPUs probably isn't cheap either.

It's not that it's expensive, it's that they've gone about it in such an incompetent way that they're losing money on it hand over fist.

Apple are fabless...

Well yeah, this is exactly what I was going to point out before I even had to open the link. Intel isn't fabless like the other two.

Design R&D is mostly spending on staff & software.

Fabs have billions of dollars of hard infrastructure to build.

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