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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • I’m not sure about that. The trend in the industry overall has been towards separate designers and specialized fab operators, in part because the capital costs and expertise for running a modern semiconductor foundry are incredibly high. ARM, AMD, Qualcomm, IBM anre all fabless. Samsung makes their own chips, but they’re essentially ARM reference designs. Apple’s expanded their own in house design team, but even with their enormous piles of money don’t want to take on the risk of running their own fabs.

    Then look at Intel’s constant stumbling towards newer process nodes vs the guys who do contact work. AMD and IBM spun off their chip manufacturing into GlobalFoundries, and AMD now uses TSMC for their CPU cores and chiplet packaging. Even Intel is talking about using TSMC for producing some of their chips.

    (I know technically Intel now counts as a contract foundry, but all of the major names that were part of the IFS announcement have backed away. I’m skeptical)