US Intel

I really wonder, why so much noise about this case. I agree, semiconductors are extremely important in current world, but did you know, Volkswagen AG is partially owned by State of Lower Saxony (~ 11.8%)?

Also worth to remember cases of Rolls-Royce, Ericsson, and some other unfortunate Western companies, important for many humans, but once became unable to stay economically viable. (BTW it make me laugh, when I got info, Bentley now under WAG, when RR under BMW, as technically, they many decades was one entity)

WAG case is different from Intel case (and other I mention), but there are also many similarities, because of which I think, Intel case may be special for US, but is not too special for West.

And I think, such cases are bad, they are great shame, but also they are signs, we must do something, to make Western produced semiconductors more competitive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_Group

I'm confused why you mentioned Rolls-Royce and then in relation to BMW.

The government intervention of RR was nothing to do with the cars.

The original Rolls-Royce company, which included the car division, was nationalized by the British government in 1971 due to financial issues with its aerospace business.

The car division was separated in 1973.

The parent company, Rolls-Royce plc (nothing to do with cars), was sold to the public in a share offering in 1987, meaning it was no longer government-owned.

In 1998, BMW purchased Rolls-Royce Motor Cars.

> I'm confused ... > The original Rolls-Royce company ...due to financial issues with its aerospace business.

Well, it is because you do not understand economy of business. Unfortunately, main goal of any business is to be viable, not mean profitable, just be good enough to pay expenses need to run things defined as goals.

By definition, ALL old automotive companies started as hybrids - car division to make profits and motors division to make use of outstanding knowledge gathered when making consumer cars (as highest technology of that time). There are nearly no exceptions - Daimler began as Daimler plus Maybach; BMW began as motorized vehicles garages production plus motors business; Renault began as aviation motors business, made automobiles to make additional cash.

When Rolls-Royce divided to aerospace motors and cars, it was already semi-dead business, because their aerospace behavior was non-viable without donations from car division.

To be exact, I don't mean, aerospace impossible to be viable, just RR was.

And returning to our ontopic, Intel was caught in same hole - they lost their superiority and cannot survive without external help, absolutely as RR business.

I think the main counter example to this in the case of Intel is Global Foundries success after splitting from AMD. However GF had to find their own niche downmarket to the cutting edge nodes that AMD requires. So in the case of RR, it’d be like if the turbine segment gave up on SOTA aero engines and instead transitioned into electricity generation turbines (or some less sexy end market).

My personal bias is that in the long term, keeping the different divisions as one whole makes both sides less fragile in the long run.

The other problem I think you’re getting at that being on the cutting edge of a market that is extremely capital intensive is a tough sell to the banks & financiers. I feel like every industry outside of finance is increasingly squeezed out like humanity can survive on securities arbitrage alone.

> Global Foundries success after splitting from AMD

As I know, in ~1990th HBR written article about constantly under-loaded semiconductor fabs and concluded, it is unprofitable to tightly couple them to R&D.

Counter-argument was, that Intel used ties to fabs, to achieve extreme level of scalability, to fill market demand fastest, so marketing won.

What really happen, appeared few new specialized classes of semiconductors - signal, accelerators, high-power (high-current), and low-power (energy effective), and independent fabs made universal pipeline, to fill all market demand, but Intel stuck on desktop CPUs and failed all other classes (as example, Intel was unsuccessful in try to got niche on smartphones SoCs - still have not made cellular modem and nearly failed on GPUs).

To be more exact, Nvidia in reality is most software company from hardware companies, and AMD with their GPU division constantly competes to Nvidia literally head-to-head.

And what was gamechanger - when AMD struck to limits of reliable transistors on one die, they decided to switch to chiplets - they made 2.5D multiple-die design with silicon interimposer, while Intel used their manufacturing superiority to make huge dies with all included.

- Once appeared, with chiplets, AMD could achieve much better performance on weaker but much cheaper technology and won.

So my point - Intel suffered from too tightly couples with fabs, so once they have to adapt their designs and marketing to semiconductors, when AMD successfully avoided this trap. BTW, for this exist much better example - similar problem once killed Atari and Commodore.