Part of what saved AMD was spinning off their fabs into a separate company. Besides the cash flow, they could focus on design and weren’t hitched to what their own fabs could produce. They could choose the best fab contract they could afford.
Pat Gelsinger floated the idea of spinning off the fabs, but the US government shut it down as part of the deal for building new fabs with government money. The fabs that Intel may not even finish now.
Another factor for AMD was having their SoC in consoles. Kept some cash flow going when they desperately needed it. Intel doesn’t have that benefit, either. AMD owns the PS5 and Xbox, while Nvidia has Nintendo. Steam Deck-like handhelds are a small but growing market, and all the ones people want to buy run AMD.
So the question comes up of what Intel can even do for cash flow. Their GPU division might start showing real profit in another generation, but they have to survive that long while taking a loss. One more uncompetitive generation of CPU releases will probably doom their core product, and the best they can hope for there is “not completely suck”. The datacenter market was holding on because Intel has traditionally been rock solid stable, but that argument was killed with the 13th/14th gen overheating issues (which did affect equivalent server processors, as well). Their other hardware, like networking chipsets, comes with the same dark cloud looming over it, and it isn’t enough to keep the company running, anyway.
I would be absolutely shocked if Intel spun off their fabs. Having worked at an Intel site (Ocotillo), they are extremely controlling of everything going on inside the factory to their own detriment; so much so that if hopping on one foot while doing a specific task on a tool somehow improves yield by any metric, then it’s added to spec and never questioned again.
Hell, they were still running their 1272 process (14nm) on some tools when I left in 2022.
TL;DR - They need to spin off the fabs for their own survival. And its gonna take an act of god to do so.
Exactly this but people I have spoken to recently say that they are pretty much past the point of no return already haven taken (as said) a load of government money around the globe and cannot finish the fabs they were paid in advance to help them. Pretty much the worst fall from grace ever.
AMD was absolutely hitched to global foundries for years, it was only because glofo decided to not go for 7nm, that AMD was allowed by glofo to use TSMC for the Ryzen 3000 series (Zen 2), and was partially released from the agreement ahead of time, provided they still had substantial orders with GloFo, which they honored with continuing discounted sales of the Ryzen 2000 series produced at glofo 12nm, and also using GloFo 12nm for their l3 cache chips.
AMD maneuvered the situation brilliantly, and turned necessity into an advantage.
Part of what saved AMD was spinning off their fabs into a separate company. Besides the cash flow, they could focus on design and weren’t hitched to what their own fabs could produce. They could choose the best fab contract they could afford.
Pat Gelsinger floated the idea of spinning off the fabs, but the US government shut it down as part of the deal for building new fabs with government money. The fabs that Intel may not even finish now.
Another factor for AMD was having their SoC in consoles. Kept some cash flow going when they desperately needed it. Intel doesn’t have that benefit, either. AMD owns the PS5 and Xbox, while Nvidia has Nintendo. Steam Deck-like handhelds are a small but growing market, and all the ones people want to buy run AMD.
So the question comes up of what Intel can even do for cash flow. Their GPU division might start showing real profit in another generation, but they have to survive that long while taking a loss. One more uncompetitive generation of CPU releases will probably doom their core product, and the best they can hope for there is “not completely suck”. The datacenter market was holding on because Intel has traditionally been rock solid stable, but that argument was killed with the 13th/14th gen overheating issues (which did affect equivalent server processors, as well). Their other hardware, like networking chipsets, comes with the same dark cloud looming over it, and it isn’t enough to keep the company running, anyway.
I would be absolutely shocked if Intel spun off their fabs. Having worked at an Intel site (Ocotillo), they are extremely controlling of everything going on inside the factory to their own detriment; so much so that if hopping on one foot while doing a specific task on a tool somehow improves yield by any metric, then it’s added to spec and never questioned again.
Hell, they were still running their 1272 process (14nm) on some tools when I left in 2022.
TL;DR - They need to spin off the fabs for their own survival. And its gonna take an act of god to do so.
Exactly this but people I have spoken to recently say that they are pretty much past the point of no return already haven taken (as said) a load of government money around the globe and cannot finish the fabs they were paid in advance to help them. Pretty much the worst fall from grace ever.
My best guess is that it gets sold off to the company who buys the most $1M/plate dinners with Trump.
AMD was absolutely hitched to global foundries for years, it was only because glofo decided to not go for 7nm, that AMD was allowed by glofo to use TSMC for the Ryzen 3000 series (Zen 2), and was partially released from the agreement ahead of time, provided they still had substantial orders with GloFo, which they honored with continuing discounted sales of the Ryzen 2000 series produced at glofo 12nm, and also using GloFo 12nm for their l3 cache chips. AMD maneuvered the situation brilliantly, and turned necessity into an advantage.