Why would the US govt allow a merge with AMD?
Sure they won't allow Intel to be bought by a foreign company, but surely everyone would much rather see Intel being bought by literally any other company than AMD and Nvidia.
Sure they won't allow Intel to be bought by a foreign company, but surely everyone would much rather see Intel being bought by literally any other company than AMD and Nvidia.
They'll barely allow Nvidia to acquire anybody at this point, no matter how small. See recent EU response to Run:ai. Intel would be considered 100x worse.
Huawei is trying to make establish domestic Ascend/MindSpore ecosystem, but they are limited by the SMIC process (~7nm). Amount of defects is allegedly rather high, but they are the only "official" game in town (other than smuggled NVIDIA cards or outsourced datacenters in Middle East).
Well they obviously would..
Also EU has promised various significant subsidies to Intel. They obviously has fabs in Ireland and building one in Germany and perhaps even Poland..
If not, look up e.g. Microsoft 's purchase of Activision, both US companies.
They already do networking, photonics, GPUs, high speed interconnects, and CPUs. They are planning on selling their FPGAs (the Altera acquisition) to Lattice.
The only things left are their fab ops, thunderbolt/usbc, wifi, and ble.
Their fab ops would take over a decade of heavy investment to catch up to TSMC or Samsung and idk if even Nvidia is ambitious enough to take that on.
Wifi and BLE could be good additions if they wanted to branch out their mellanox portfolio to wireless. Thunderbolt/USB C also might be worthwhile.
But that IP is probably going to be cheaper to buy piecemeal so idk if it's worth it to buy the whole company outright.
So if Intel sells, everyone is fucked until whoever buys can renegotiate the terms of the agreement. And if that's Nvidia, they could just sit dead on the IP and starve AMD of the bulk of their CPU revenue (which is what is keeping the company solvent). And requiring they keep the agreement they currently have would mean requiring AMD to give Nvidia a pretty detailed look at the AMD secret sauce which would increasingly push AMD into the red until they become insolvent, again leading to a Nvidia monopoly.
The US government as well as the EU will not allow that to happen so however things slice, ownership of the x86 ISA patents would not be going to Nvidia.
[0]https://www.kitguru.net/components/cpu/anton-shilov/amd-clar...
One of the reasons where Intel "let" AMD compete in the x86 space is US Gov requirements for being able to source chips from two vendors at least
I heard they’re building a iOS / android replacement. Think of the vertical integration!
I’m picturing a boot-looping cargo plane full of hummers dropping like a stone — doesn’t get much more vertically integrated than that. Think of all the layers they can eliminate.
I can see them wanting certain parts of the business (GPU mainly) but on a whole it doesn't make a lot of sense.
I don't see Intel as a single entity being valuable to any US business really. You're essentially buying last years fall line, theres very little use for Intel's fabs without a huge amount being spent on them to get them up to modern standards.
It'll all come down to IP and people that'll be the true value.
The only way it happens is if it is kept separate kind of like the Beats acquisition. Apple lends some chip designs to Intel and Apple starts fabricating their chips on Intel fabs, but otherwise the companies operate independently.
Even then there is zero indication that Apple would ever want to do their own manufacturing.