Uncle Sam shouldn't own Intel stock

It's not as easy as "nudging, cajoling and creating incentives for major customers to diversify their supply chains and use Intel capacity". Changing out process tech isn't like changing the tires on your car for another brand. It requires, in many cases, a substantial redesign....and directly working with Intel.

Why would a company support two different chip designs, for the luxury of deployment on an inferior technology platform, coupled to a troubled company that has a history of not being able to keep up or consistently deliver the latest process tech? It's a substantial, long-term investment that has wide reaching implications on the performance of your own products you are building. Who pays for that and sets up their company for failure like that?

If you build on Intel, you are making a decision that exempts you from competing in the top of market for your products. Your designs will run hotter, consume more energy, have less yield, and lower clock. The design will be more complex and costly and have very little shared between other vendors. You'll need to maintain and inventory two different BOMs for a critical component, and you'll likely have subtle hardware differences or completely missing features that will require further software customization, creating even more complexity and headache to delivering a modern tech product. Hardware designs are hard enough as it is and companies don't have infinite resources or capacity. And don't count on Intel taking the lead from one of the others, giving your product a boost -- anticipate them further falling behind, or lagging behind at best.

Like always, the government doesn't understand any of this and the outcome of this latest missive is going to be completely predictable.

> If you build on Intel, you are making a decision that exempts you from competing in the top of market for your products. Your designs will run hotter, consume more energy, have less yield, and lower clock.

Most of semiconductor production is not on the leading edge. Most big SoC production is not even on the leading edge. There's a lot of room for older fabs. And the customer can demand a lower price as a result of lower yield and performance.

> You'll need to maintain and inventory two different BOMs for a critical component

Most of this stuff that is not on the leading edge doesn't have a "leading edge variant".

Of course, I wouldn't build on Intel for other reasons: they've been terrible as a foundry and they have been changing directions seemingly weekly. That is the hurdle that you can't get over: you can't rely upon them as a partner.