Part of what saved AMD was spinning off their fabs into a separate company. Besides the cash flow, they could focus on design and weren’t hitched to what their own fabs could produce. They could choose the best fab contract they could afford.
Pat Gelsinger floated the idea of spinning off the fabs, but the US government shut it down as part of the deal for building new fabs with government money. The fabs that Intel may not even finish now.
Another factor for AMD was having their SoC in consoles. Kept some cash flow going when they desperately needed it. Intel doesn’t have that benefit, either. AMD owns the PS5 and Xbox, while Nvidia has Nintendo. Steam Deck-like handhelds are a small but growing market, and all the ones people want to buy run AMD.
So the question comes up of what Intel can even do for cash flow. Their GPU division might start showing real profit in another generation, but they have to survive that long while taking a loss. One more uncompetitive generation of CPU releases will probably doom their core product, and the best they can hope for there is “not completely suck”. The datacenter market was holding on because Intel has traditionally been rock solid stable, but that argument was killed with the 13th/14th gen overheating issues (which did affect equivalent server processors, as well). Their other hardware, like networking chipsets, comes with the same dark cloud looming over it, and it isn’t enough to keep the company running, anyway.
Part of what saved AMD was spinning off their fabs into a separate company. Besides the cash flow, they could focus on design and weren’t hitched to what their own fabs could produce. They could choose the best fab contract they could afford.
Pat Gelsinger floated the idea of spinning off the fabs, but the US government shut it down as part of the deal for building new fabs with government money. The fabs that Intel may not even finish now.
Another factor for AMD was having their SoC in consoles. Kept some cash flow going when they desperately needed it. Intel doesn’t have that benefit, either. AMD owns the PS5 and Xbox, while Nvidia has Nintendo. Steam Deck-like handhelds are a small but growing market, and all the ones people want to buy run AMD.
So the question comes up of what Intel can even do for cash flow. Their GPU division might start showing real profit in another generation, but they have to survive that long while taking a loss. One more uncompetitive generation of CPU releases will probably doom their core product, and the best they can hope for there is “not completely suck”. The datacenter market was holding on because Intel has traditionally been rock solid stable, but that argument was killed with the 13th/14th gen overheating issues (which did affect equivalent server processors, as well). Their other hardware, like networking chipsets, comes with the same dark cloud looming over it, and it isn’t enough to keep the company running, anyway.