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Intel Corp. is poised to announce plans this week to cut more than 20% of its staff, aiming to eliminate bureaucracy at the struggling chipmaker, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.
AMD did that, but Global Foundry doesn’t do that well, at least compared to TSMC. Also Intel was going strong with their fabs until AMD started building better chips architecture wise. I’m just saying that splitting might not work.
The Global Foundries split was probably a way to get AMD out of the hyper-capital-intensive fab business. And without a tier-1 customer, Global had less reason to pursue smaller nodes.
Intel has that national-champion thing to keep it afloat. I can imagine there are defence contracts that will never go to a “TSMC Arizona Division” and they’ll pay whatever it takes to keep that going.
Yeah for a long time there Intel was way ahead of the fabless AMD. Back then people were saying it was a mistake for AMD to split the fab business.
It still could be a mistake in the long term, though. Imagine the wise US administration slapping 1,220,332% tariffs on Taiwan? Or China wreaking havoc there. I still think Intel could fare well with better leadership handling their fabs.
Yeah, having fabs in the US as well as other countries could pay off yuuugely. If potential fab customers are truly afraid of Intel copying their designs - Intel could enter an agreement with say Qualcomm that it won’t design any ARM CPUs for X years. Surely there’s a market for US made SoCs once you can assemble the logic board of a smartphone in the US, and a smartphone from parts. You’d still import some parts but shift production to the US for what’s possible - but you need to start with the end product and work your way down because otherwise you’re shipping components back to China for final assembly. And the more expensive the components you can produce in the US, the less you’re affected by tariffs.