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They decided to pivot to innovation that does not require extreme CMOS scaling. For example, they focussed heavily on ultra-low-power SOI at 28nm.

Keep in mind that your iphone only has very few chips in <10nm technology. The rest is using much larger groundrules, even the memory.

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But that stuff tends to be much lower margin, and while this year you might have the best power/price numbers, next year someone figures out their product is even lower power on some newer fab that is slowly lowering its price and now the competition forces the margin even lower. Repeat until you have some 40 year old fabs and no customers.

Consider also that 28nm planar transistors are more durable than FINFET, especially in the dissipation of heat.

The automobile industry showed us that there is demand for older nodes.

90 % of chip demand is in older nodes anyway.

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