Considering how much money Nvidia has, it might as well buy the whole company and bring Intel back from the brink.
Intel needs expertise that only a few hundred people on Earth have, and most of them are in Taiwan, already working for someone else.
You don't just buy an EUV and start printing, you buy an EUV and give it to a wizard to use as a wand. Intel needs wizards.
None of this stuff is published (externally) and there are no discussion forums or stack overflows to help you either. You need to get through academia, prove yourself, and then you can start working on a chance to get access to the trade secrets that make it possible.
After all that you will be placed as a researcher on a handful of steps in the multi-thousand step process of making SOTA wafers. And probably not make crazy money, but at this point, you're not in it for the money anyway.
It's important to note that it wasn't always like this. Up until the mid-90s this stuff was all published in the open literature fairly quickly.
There has been a steady culture shift towards ultrasecrecy since then.
TSMC's market cap is US$ 1.560 Trillion
It turns out when you are manufacturing nvidia's GPUs, Google's TPUs, AMD's CPUs and GPUs, Apple's processors, and the flagship smartphone chips from Qualcomm, MediaTek and Broadcom - and none of them can go elsewhere because your products are so far ahead of the competitors - that's pretty valuable.
Convincing TSMC to sell you their chipmaking trade secrets? You might as well try to convince Apple to sell you their smartphone division.
This is something I don't understand. These companies make good profits -- why don't they pay their experts well?
They don’t make good profits. TSMC has fairly mediocre numbers by the standard of the tech industry. Intel has really bad numbers for the last several decades. AMD was having so much trouble with foundries that they spun it off.
That is actually a big part of how TSMC got ahead. It's a race. All those years of being able to get PhDs to work midnight-8am (because you're the most prestigious employer in the country, by far) move you to the next node just a bit faster. It adds up.
Why work smarter or harder? Do both!
Their latest node 18A is already in production and should be a lot closer to TSMC's latest and greatest, with the first products shipping early next year.
Edit: I see a lot of confusion on the topic. The anti trust does not need to be from US to be essentially binding, UK, EU, etc have also a de facto veto on mergers of global companies, even if those are US based, this is especially true in global sectors like semiconductors where everybody depends on everybody else from patents to machinery.
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/insider-says...
I wonder how AMD would have fared against Intel post-Conroe if Jensen was CEO. They were behind but still competitive until the Bulldozer flop, only recovering with Zen (and even then it took a few generations for Zen to mature).
Zen was a beast from day one. Zen 1 more or less matched Intel on single-core perf and outmatched it on multicore. Zen 1 blew Intel out of water on perf/$, so much so that the morning after booting up my Zen 1 computer, I bought as many AMD shares as I could afford.
And I don't really see the situation being that obviously different if it was Nvidia who they merged with and Jensen was CEO.
The big issue was simply that AMD didn't have the cash at hand to both pay for ATI and maintain investment in R&D, at least without their next few products completely dominating the competition. I don't see a different CEO changing that. Unless Jensen was willing to value Nvidia significantly less than ATI at the time.
Hindsight is 20/20. I suspect Zen chiplet success was a result of AMD's deliberate strategy of design partnership with other companies (XBox, PlayStation) and re-using IP[1]. Jensen might not have done the same road on partnerships, or may have chosen the Arm (Tegra) over doubling down on x86
1. There's an informative interview with Lisa Hsu from 2 years ago that lays out the strategy. It's not a big leap to imagine Infinity Fabric eas designed to increase design flexibility across disparate workloads. The impression I got from the multistage Apple-Nvida fallout is that Nvidia probably doesn't have a culture of accepting notes on it's products.
That's why, for example, any meaningful collaboration between Intel and Nvidia under this partnership has to be released in the form of an Intel product using Nvidia tech, rather than an Nvidia product using Intel tech.
Which is absolutely enormous, so this distinction is splitting hairs.
But believe what you like.