What you say is a bit dismissive of where Intel currently is. They are maybe a year behind TSMC and have been "printing" EUV in high volume since 2023 and shipping it in high volume since 2024.
Their latest node 18A is already in production and should be a lot closer to TSMC's latest and greatest, with the first products shipping early next year.
You need an army of wizards who are willing to do, for the most part, lab-tech work for lab-tech salary while having a graduate degree in relevant field
They don’t make good profits. TSMC has fairly mediocre numbers by the standard of the tech industry. Intel has really bad numbers for the last several decades. AMD was having so much trouble with foundries that they spun it off.
Bean counters/“profesional execs” have been in charge for a long time (as is usually the case when founder CEOs leave/die), middle managers are box checkers that can’t differentiate good employees from bad employees and nobody cares as long as salary&stocks are deposited in their account. All of this gets lost in the cogs of the 100k employee machine.
That is actually a big part of how TSMC got ahead. It's a race. All those years of being able to get PhDs to work midnight-8am (because you're the most prestigious employer in the country, by far) move you to the next node just a bit faster. It adds up.
How much money are those wizards making that Nvidia can't easily afford to both 1. pay them to come fix Intel's problems for a while, and also 2. pay TSMC to rescind their non-competes to enable them to do that?
It turns out when you are manufacturing nvidia's GPUs, Google's TPUs, AMD's CPUs and GPUs, Apple's processors, and the flagship smartphone chips from Qualcomm, MediaTek and Broadcom - and none of them can go elsewhere because your products are so far ahead of the competitors - that's pretty valuable.
Convincing TSMC to sell you their chipmaking trade secrets? You might as well try to convince Apple to sell you their smartphone division.
Get a PhD in some kind of esoteric field like chemical kinetics and then spend a decade learning about oxide surface conditioning under someone who spent their life working on it.
None of this stuff is published (externally) and there are no discussion forums or stack overflows to help you either. You need to get through academia, prove yourself, and then you can start working on a chance to get access to the trade secrets that make it possible.
After all that you will be placed as a researcher on a handful of steps in the multi-thousand step process of making SOTA wafers. And probably not make crazy money, but at this point, you're not in it for the money anyway.
Unlikely to pass anti trust, they failed already acquiring ARM back in time.
Edit: I see a lot of confusion on the topic. The anti trust does not need to be from US to be essentially binding, UK, EU, etc have also a de facto veto on mergers of global companies, even if those are US based, this is especially true in global sectors like semiconductors where everybody depends on everybody else from patents to machinery.
I don't think that's allowed under the terms of the x86/x86_64 cross-license deal with AMD.
That's why, for example, any meaningful collaboration between Intel and Nvidia under this partnership has to be released in the form of an Intel product using Nvidia tech, rather than an Nvidia product using Intel tech.
What I find somewhat humorous: AMD originally wanted to acquire Nvidia, but walked away when Jensen apparently insisted on becoming the CEO of the merged company.
I wonder how AMD would have fared against Intel post-Conroe if Jensen was CEO. They were behind but still competitive until the Bulldozer flop, only recovering with Zen (and even then it took a few generations for Zen to mature).
> only recovering with Zen (and even then it took a few generations for Zen to mature).
Zen was a beast from day one. Zen 1 more or less matched Intel on single-core perf and outmatched it on multicore. Zen 1 blew Intel out of water on perf/$, so much so that the morning after booting up my Zen 1 computer, I bought as many AMD shares as I could afford.
Zen1 was further behind in ST perf than Intel is today in it's desktop offerings. They really exploited their strength in MT and price, and showed that the market was already chafing under Intel's reluctance to go beyond 4 cores on their consumer line, presumably to avoid stepping on the toes of HEDT. But that just caused the competition to pretty much invalidate that entire line instead.
And I don't really see the situation being that obviously different if it was Nvidia who they merged with and Jensen was CEO.
The big issue was simply that AMD didn't have the cash at hand to both pay for ATI and maintain investment in R&D, at least without their next few products completely dominating the competition. I don't see a different CEO changing that. Unless Jensen was willing to value Nvidia significantly less than ATI at the time.
> And I don't really see the situation being that obviously different if it was Nvidia who they merged with and Jensen was CEO.
Hindsight is 20/20. I suspect Zen chiplet success was a result of AMD's deliberate strategy of design partnership with other companies (XBox, PlayStation) and re-using IP[1]. Jensen might not have done the same road on partnerships, or may have chosen the Arm (Tegra) over doubling down on x86
1. There's an informative interview with Lisa Hsu from 2 years ago that lays out the strategy. It's not a big leap to imagine Infinity Fabric eas designed to increase design flexibility across disparate workloads. The impression I got from the multistage Apple-Nvida fallout is that Nvidia probably doesn't have a culture of accepting notes on it's products.
Different country (UK vs US) + different administration might change the results. Who said you can't just try the same thing over and over again until it works?
"De facto" is the keyword there. Only the nation of origin has any say on company management and infrastructure in a de jure manner. The only power non-origin nations/entities have is via leveraging their ability to do business in the region and/or their local holdings.
