the supply chain moved to asia and the just so stories about ricardian free trade + an inflated stock market made everyone believe, while the ultra-rich got ultra-ultra-rich
and now we sit down to our banquet of consequences
Missed on: mobile, custom chips in the data center, graphics cards, ai, and building out fab services they can sell.
Meanwhile, they took at least 5 years off of making their chips faster, and we're treated to the absurdity that the m-series chips are as performant in single core as anything Intel can build on a power budget 1/10th of Intel's.
I'm not sure what that has to do with outsourcing? It looks more like a comprehensive lack of execution.
High-end fab is a volume game and that was the time frame when Intel was still process competitive and could have competed for Apple's business (and Nvidia's, ...). But that would never happen as a division of Intel, nobody wants to send their designs to a competitor.
Even 10 years ago Intel was a blue chip stock, saying they should have cannibalized their lead to go into a lower margin market for volume would have gotten you kicked off any executive role.
Imagine being in a boardroom in 2010:
- You're printing money with 60%+ gross margins
- You have a 2-3 year process lead over everyone
- Your R&D budget dwarfs competitors because of your integrated model
- PC sales are still growing and servers are booming with cloud build-outs
- Also you are betting that Apple is going all in on your foundry to drive the volume and R&D