Comment on Intel to Announce Plans This Week to Cut More Than 20% of Staff
Jaysyn@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Nothing at all to do with the tariffs, I’m sure.
Honestly, Intel has been up shit creek for a while now. No one big wants to use Intel’s fabs because they’re afraid that Intel’s design team will copy their homework.
Vertical integration has fucked Intel. TSMC’s fabs get all the important contracts from Nvidia, Apple, etc. And the massive client volume allows them to accelerate the evolution of their fab tech.
Intel needs to break their chip design business and fab into two separate businesses, otherwise it’s a continuation of the death march.
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.
No one wants to use their fabs because they’re bad!
(Not awful, but not cutting edge really any more)
A lot of their chips are fab’d in the US and Israel and Germany and others though.
…with global parts and materials.
untakenusername@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
They’ve been struggling a lot recently, but this stuff with the tarrifs cantve made it any easier for them.