Intel has its own fabrication plants pouring out ~100% Intel chips, and in addition it will claim a portion of TSMC's production capability. That's one smart, if not underhanded, way of beating the competition. I wonder if the folks at AMD ever regret letting go of GF and consequently GF dropping out of the cutting edge technology race entirely, ending up as a nameless contract fab instead. Although if splitting off GF saved AMD from bankruptcy, I reckon regretting it wouldn't be relevant.

The big problem with Global Foundries was they weren't competitive with cutting edge technology. It may well have just come down to revenue. But I'm glad they still produce some stuff for AMD. But I'm very glad they moved onto TSMC.

Kaarme:

Intel has its own fabrication plants pouring out ~100% Intel chips, and in addition it will claim a portion of TSMC's production capability. That's one smart, if not underhanded, way of beating the competition.

I've always said that this is just a sneaky way of Intel being anti-competitive. They're not doing anything illegal and technically, you could argue they need to do this if their own nodes aren't doing what they want/need. But, it either makes AMD's contracts more expensive or limits how many chips AMD can get from TSMC. Even if Intel sells fewer chips than AMD, just by simply making it harder to buy AMD chips is a win for Intel.

I wonder if the folks at AMD ever regret letting go of GF and consequently GF dropping out of the cutting edge technology race entirely, ending up as a nameless contract fab instead. Although if splitting off GF saved AMD from bankruptcy, I reckon regretting it wouldn't be relevant.

If AMD kept GF, I think they'd be in much worse shape than they're in today. For one thing, GF would have been underfunded pre-2017, where they wouldn't have even got 12nm. So, while 1st-gen Ryzen would have been cheaper for AMD to produce, it would have been worse simply because the node was less mature. AMD would have put some money into GF though, and that would have meant less money going toward Ryzen. So, the architecture itself would have been worse too. I think AMD is at a point where they could re-merge with GF, but they're so technologically behind that they would likely struggle just to get to 7nm, let alone 2nm. AMD would be better off just starting from scratch.

Kaarme:

Intel has its own fabrication plants pouring out ~100% Intel chips, and in addition it will claim a portion of TSMC's production capability. That's one smart, if not underhanded, way of beating the competition. I wonder if the folks at AMD ever regret letting go of GF and consequently GF dropping out of the cutting edge technology race entirely, ending up as a nameless contract fab instead. Although if splitting off GF saved AMD from bankruptcy, I reckon regretting it wouldn't be relevant.

I also dislike this move by Intel because it´s going to hurt AMD and Nvidia more than doing any favours to Intel himself... But this dick move is not illegal so Intel can go ahead and cripple competition even before they get their products out of the factory... As for AMD still owning GF instead of selling, that would be even worse because AMD didn´t have the money to invest in GF so they could invest the same money on better nodes. Selling GF was a life saver for AMD!

H83 & Schmidtbag are correct. silicon fabrication is expensive & difficult. selling GF was a force multiplier for AMD as it's stock is over five times higher (than the date of sale), it's market share is more than doubled, and it's technology leadership is unquestioned (at least in uArch). compare and contrast that to AMD being an afterthought yes Intel is a huge swollen dick, yes they are being anti-competitive, but what else is new? the funny thing about this is it is a double edged sword for both Intel and TSMC. for Intel it means temporarily edging out AMD @ 2n. - but AMD is not as vulnerable to "process wars" as Intel since they've gone to chiplet based uArch. they can do for one model year what Intel has done for ten (re:uArch). for TSMC it means dealing with the devil because this fat contract allows long term competitiveness - by underwriting new fabs in America. for Intel it's a stop-gap to allow their fabs to catch up - but once they do "it's on like Donkey Kong" and we'll see the real fab wars. what i'm hoping for is Samsung to improve their density and yields to truly become a large scale player in contract fabbing instead of the third rate player they are now.