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Intel is reportedly considering splitting itself apart after a disastrous year
(www.xda-developers.com)
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this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2024
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Let me guess, the inevitable class action over 13th and 14th gen processors is about to get shifted off to some split off company which will conveniently go bankrupt while Intel continues business as usual?
I don't think so. The degrading processors are certainly bad, but in the grand scheme of things won't move the needle. The reputation loss is probably worse than whatever fine they end up paying (and they will drag it out).
The split would be between design and manufacturing. And it would mean a massive shift, not business as usual.
The design side is probably in better shape and would increase their use of TSMC instead of using the now spun off Intel fabs.
The manufacturing side would have it rough. But we are talking about only one of 3 manufacturers of leading edge chips here (together with tsmc and samsung), not something you "conveniently let go bankrupt". They'd try to raise more money to finish their new fabs and secure customers (while trying to make up for the lost volume from the design side). But realistically I'd say that similar to Global foundries they would drop out of the expensive leading edge race.
This happened before, IBM sold global foundries to amd, who used it till they went broke and spun glofo off.
They had problems keeping up on tech, but they did spin a ton of defense silicon happily.
Intel fabs unleashed could be a second path, right now I would probably not consider a tape out to anyone other than tsmc, or maybe Samsung, but Intel might be an option.
The only issue is: I think they'd probably be assholes, I suspect they used to be to their internal customers, that's why things like their fovea chiplets got caught for a decade in their internal politics during knights landing.
Tsmc are good to work with, you trust them and they try to make sure your design will work. Intel would have a lot of work on the libraries and other stuff (which they should have done more on with the altera integration) before I'd trust them to handle my design.
The smart move would be to work with some clients to generate portability libraries for their IP to make it easier to come over from tsmc.
Time to pull a Meta/X and change name
The issue is that would at best "reset" their reputation to zero. But the state that they'd like to go back to would be similar to "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM", which ofc only works with the existing name. And this line of thinking is what got damaged by the degrading processors (and maybe how they handle it).