AMD strictly moderated (AMD)

[chipguy]

These days, if you went to a veture capital firm with a proposal to start a new high end CPU with new ISA, I think a secretary would call the paramedics, and would have you escorted out to a room with padded walls

Yes, it would not make sense to propose a startup to make
a new ISA for high end MPUs. However what IPF bashers
fail to realize is that IPF costs Intel far less than it would
as a stand alone MPU business for another firm, even a
fabless semico. The IPF team uses existing mature, high
volume Intel processes and fabs and can access existing
design flows, libraries, manufacturing data etc long proven
in silicon. It is a very high margin incremental business
that runs on top of Intel's high volume x86 business.


IPF itself is bankrupt many times over, only kept alive because Intel can move large sums of cash from its profitable PC business to unprofitable Itanium business.

ROFL. Yeah it sure costs a lot to develop those IPF MPU
specific processes and build and run those dedicated IPF
MPU fabs.