Sorry to bust you New Years joy! Pat, BoD and executives are all lost!
https://semiwiki.com/forum/index.php?threads/root-scientific-causes-of-tsmcs-leadership-intel-and-samsungs-failure.14630/
@2iyh+1es3urE8
Key takeaways.
Multiple TRILLION dollar ecosystem has un-paralleled scale to drive R&D forward at a pace that other's can't match. Intel's PC market, while large, isn't growing and is dwarfed by the aggregate foundry ecosystem which is an order of magnitude larger.
Related to #1 is that volume drives yields. More volume -- better yields. Intel can't compete there as the PC volumes aren't large enough to compete with foundry volumes which include mobile phones (huge), GPUs, FPGA and so on.
Singular focus on pure-foundry. Nothing else. No drones, no anti-virus software acquisitions, no vaporware AI startups, no dead-weight anthropologists masquerading as engineers, no bullsh!T Meego software, and no other miscellaneous and pointless R&D.
Service oriented culture. Related to #3. Their success is highly dependent on their customer's success so it's a win-win. Intel has conflicts of interest where customers are competitors. Intel must also trade-off design optimization for in-house CPUs vs. conflicting customer requirements. The in-house CPUs pay the bills, so those requirements will win.
Intel simply does not have the scale to compete in the "angstrom" era.
Intel has fundamental business model problems that create conflicts of interest.
If Intel wants to succeed in foundry, they have no choice but to spin out the fabs as an independent business entity and focus in the way TSMC focusses. They will still need large government dollars to catch up with TSMC to achieve their scale and so they need to bag a high volume leading edge customer. It's a bit of a chicken and egg as the big customer isn't going to risk their bread and butter product on an unproven fab and the fab can't achieve scale without said customer.
There's a reason TI dropped out of building fabs.
And Motorola.
And Global Foundries.
Once you lose scale, you never come back...
Intel RIP.