Interesting, thanks. And yeah, I too find it utterly baffling at how Intel is turning into a has-been before our eyes. They were The Chip Guys for ages, and then the fucking quants got put in charge and carved away so much of the engineering leadership and underpinnings that it’s a husk of what it was in the 80s and 90s.

I would, however, point out that TSMC’s whole deal is “define, and produce at scale, the bleeding edge of integrated circuit designs”, so the bit about them cribbing off of people hasn’t really been a variable in their equations for at least a couple decades. They have been major (arguably, the predominant) pioneers in chip lithography for a while now.