Whether you or I use INTC or not is irrelevant. This is no longer Andy Grove's company. Since Andy retired, NVDA has grown to more than 2.25 times the market cap of INTC, AMD had come to within 5B of Intc's market cap and is now about 20B less. In Andy's day, they were totally insignificant and he kept them alive to help ensure that the Antitrust folk didn't carve his company into ineffective pieces.
INTC had always been the leading edge company, letting their "competitors" catch up, then almost immediately leapfrogging to the next generation technology, and doing so before AMD or NVDA could recoup much of the investment that it took to catch up with INTC.
INTC seems to have totally underestimated the foundry threat. TSM is at least 2 generations ahead of INTC and continuing to increase the gap. So INTC's chips will continue to be more costly, require more power, more cooling and more space than those being made for their competitors by TSM.
While I'm no longer current with the industry, I suspect that INTC's only chance of catching up would be by hiring several of TSM's best fab engineers (with their current strategy of having their own fabs).
Buying the skills and knowledge that they now lack may not be possible. The best engineers are unlikely to leave a very successful company to go to one that is struggling and failing.
They should have recognized that their industry was going through another stage in its continuous revolution a couple decades ago.
They didn't. Now, I suspect that the only way that they may regain a leadership role is if they sit down with TSM and negotiate the best deal they can for TSM to provide Fab Services located in the USA for INTC. I doubt that any such deal could be crafted that would allow them to keep the US Gov't funding earmarked for building their own leading edge fab.
So I don't see any way that INTC will catch up let alone leapfrog any time soon, if ever.
They may still have the ability to design the best chips in some areas
but they're so far behind, I don't see them delivering anything that competes with products from NVDA, AMD and others any time soon.
They've locked themselves into a losing position.
IMO,
Ian
