_Stacy Smith: "By configuring itself [INTEL] to be able to handle a wider variety of chip designs from third parties"!
Building that foundry capability
Smith conceded that the company's revenue and unit volumes from contract chip customers are quite small today. However, he stressed that having the capability to service those customers has "a lot of option value to [Intel] as a company. ... But I don't want to minimize that the capability to flip it around and show that foundry face to our internal [system-on-a-chip] organization is absolutely key," Smith said.
He added that he and Intel Client and Internet of Things President Murthy Renduchintala want to make sure that Intel's own system-on-a-chip teams can "land a product very quickly and take advantage of our Moore's Law benefit."
A really important capability
One of the big strengths of the contract chip manufacturers is that their manufacturing processes, design tools, and intellectual-property libraries are all designed to allow chip designers to quickly put together a diverse range of system-on-a-chip products.
That makes a lot of sense, given that, historically, those contract-chip makers have been required to service a lot of different customers with a wide-ranging set of requirements. TSMC, for example, builds everything from Wi-Fi chips all the way to high-performance graphics processors.
Intel, on the other hand, has built its business primarily around high-performance microprocessors targeted at the personal-computer and server markets designed by in-house teams.
As Intel tries to push into new areas, and as its core markets require an increasingly diverse set of products, the company needs to make sure that its internal design teams aren't hamstrung by the very manufacturing technology that Intel management cites as a key strength._
WTF? WTF! So now INTEL says to ARM server fables competitors: c'mon, guys, we are your friends, so we are going to build with our superlative technology for you ARM servers, which will beat our server technology to the ground and impound us out of the game???
Bwahahahaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa... :-)))
INTEL Morons! Incredible, isn't it?
Time Will Tell