But Intel has never been in worse shape. So I think it’s less about Intel considering it and more about if it gets forced on them either by activist investors (I remember seeing an article that Intel prepares to defend against that) or necessity.
It actually has, but this is more public while their long term forecast is really dark.
If they cut costs more they should be fine, they’re basically in a similar place as amd but with no consoles but more defense and government contracts. Also they lost this round of hyperscalers which might be one of the last.
Amd is better off because they started in a bad place (piledriver) and have done an incredible job fighting their way back to the top, so their overheads are lower.
Why don’t they start by cutting the head off of the monster that got them in this position. That should be the first step. Stupid sharks loose their teeth, not their fins that actually do the work. Like, everyone in corporate should be sued and owe back every bit of their pay from the last few years. This is a steering problem. So replace the wheel and fuck up the old one.
“Sorry, guys. Instead of making a decent product and sell it at a reasonable price, we’re just gonna pay our executives a huge dividend and then give up. Bye! 🖕🏻
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.