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Comment by screye | Hacker News Reader

To be clear, Pat was pretty clear about it from the beginning and the industry experts mostly agreed with the board's push to split up the company.

From stratchery.

> Given this, you can make the case that Gelsinger was never the right person for the job; shortly after he took over I wrote in Intel Problems that the company needed to be split up, but he told me in a 2022 Stratechery Interview that he — and the board — weren’t interested in that:

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Doesn’t the foundry rely on money generated by the product side for research abd development funding?

Where would that funding come from if the product side is a totally separate company?

From other customers.

TSMC took the lead with Apple funding for example.

But where is TSMC going? As far as I can understand it, they would need to rely on geopolitical argument to take customers away from TSMC and I think that's either ultra low volume or a frigid global environment where global trade is winding down.

Yeah only viable way is to be able to compete with TSMC. This requires 10s of billions of dollars of investment (capex amd NRE). This can work if Intel foundry is independent and open to do business with everyone. Apple loves to have a second supplier, nVidia too would love the extra capacity.

The foundry also very much relies on Intel as a customer, and as a semi captive customer who is tolerant of the fab climbing the yield curve using Intel wafers to bring that up. I don't know if the board has thought this through.

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