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0 pointsUncleOxidant1y ago0 comments

Sure he knew how to get there: build SOTA fabs that can compete with TSMC. The problem was that it was going to cost $100B and take 10 years. The board wasn't patient enough and wanted a quick fix. There is no quick fix.

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YetAnotherNick1y ago

They already spent 10 years and probably $100b. 14nm with Broadwell was launched in 2014 and they never recovered from there. They just launched one node process in 2019 in full capacity after that and by that time it was too outdated.

There is no way to justify that a market leader would fall this bad this fast and couldn't recover and loose billions in process, except something was terribly wrong.

fc417fc8021y ago

> fall this bad this fast

That's just how fabs are. Yeah, something went terribly wrong. That much is obvious.

Regardless of who was picked as CEO getting back to the cutting edge was always going to be horrendously expensive and take on the order of a decade. There was never a magical unicorn CEO that could avoid that.

The only obvious (at least to me) alternative is to sell off the foundry business. But someone is going to be running a cutting edge process at scale in the US. The federal government will presumably see to that.

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