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Comment by Wytwwww | Hacker News Reader

> Intel needed to be split in two as well

Wouldn't that just pretty much guarantee that the foundry business would fail since Intel wouldn't have any incentives to shift most of their manufacturing to TSMC? The same thing happened with AMD/Global Foundries..

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AMD has a big wafer supply agreement with GlobalFoundries, and has since the spinoff. It was exclusive until the seventh WSA in 2019 which allowed AMD to purchase 7nm and beyond from other suppliers (without paying penalties) which was the only reasonable resolution after GloFo cancelled their 7nm fab (which may have been the best thing to happen to AMD). But AMD increased their GloFo orders in May and December 2021 during the chip crunch to $2.1B total through 2025. If you look at the first WSA amendment from March 2011 it includes AMD agreeing to pay an additional $430M if they get some (redacted) node in production in time.

Anyway, whatever woes GloFo is facing you can’t blame them on AMD. They had an exclusivity deal for a decade which only got broken when it was no longer tenable and AMD still buys a ton of their wafers. I suppose AMD may have bought more wafers if their products didn’t suck for most of that time but it had nothing to do with shifting production to TSMC which only happened after GloFo gave up.

right. so glofo couldn't keep up abandoned the bleeding edge. what's the evidence that intel foundaries, divorced from design, wouldn't suffer the same fate?

With the design side, Intel foundries have struggled to keep up with TSMC. It's not clear that the design side helps. My guess is that it's actually a question of corporate culture, and that AMD's ambitious, driven people stuck with AMD.

No evidence, intel doesn't have the resources to be fighting tsmc, and, arm and nvidia, apple and samsung in different technologies at the same time.( foundry, gpus, cpus, NAND ,SSD etc) They already sold the NAND memory business to SK hynix in 2021.

They will have to focus, that means getting out lines of business which may likely die.

That would be better than going bankrupt and your competitors picking the pieces

Yep, one business line is an albatross around the other. Some think this means it’s better they stay together. Others think you can save one by separating the other.

I, personally, found my life to improve when we decided that the cleaning lady could be someone from outside the marriage.

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