nabla95 hours ago
Title poses a question, then the last paragraph explains why it was not relevant and the article was just created for the title.
AMD and Nvidia are fabless.
>But more importantly, Intel spends billions on new semiconductor production process technologies. Every new manufacturing process typically requires billions in upfront research and development investments. Intel also develops packaging technologies, which require a lot of R&D money.
sct2024 hours ago
TSMC spent about $6b in R&D last year, so they could swap out either AMD or Nvidia in the headline with TSMC and the title would still work and be a little more apples to apples.
orwin4 hours ago
I don't think TSMC use their own lasers anymore (not since 2016), so even then I'm not sure.
DJBunnies4 hours ago
Yea but TSMC produces good stuff.
slowmovintarget3 hours ago
In part, thanks to ASML.
ItsTotallyOn4 hours ago
This is why they provided a normalized comparison versus market cap. They should have probably done it with revenue, but this does provide a means of analysis of the relative efficacy of value creation via R&D dollars.
jsheard4 hours ago
Intel's current drive to catch up with Nvidia and AMD GPUs probably isn't cheap either.
throwaway484764 hours ago
It's not that it's expensive, it's that they've gone about it in such an incompetent way that they're losing money on it hand over fist.
nsteel4 hours ago
Apple are fabless...
steveBK1235 hours ago
Well yeah, this is exactly what I was going to point out before I even had to open the link. Intel isn't fabless like the other two.
Design R&D is mostly spending on staff & software.
Fabs have billions of dollars of hard infrastructure to build.
pclmulqdq4 hours ago
A lot of people blame the waste at Intel on the MBAs, but I have to say, the PhDs might be equally to blame. I know quite a few people at Intel who do cool R&D work that will clearly never make it to a real commercial product (except maybe a DoD toy), but are quite content to have Intel pay for it for literal decades.
throwaway484764 hours ago
If you knew what would be able to be commercialized it wouldn't be called research.
thenaturalist4 hours ago
> clearly never make it to a real commercial product (except maybe a DoD toy), but are quite content to have Intel pay for it for literal decades.
OP posted that context?
Surely there is, especially within the constraints of a commercial company, a reasonable a) direction and b) limit to research.
Research for the sake of it is called academia.
pclmulqdq4 hours ago
Nominally, corporate R&D should in fact have a good chance of making it into a real product if the technology works. It should not be a certainty that the technology will work.
Intel's R&D produces a lot of technology that works but never makes it into a product.
autonomousErwin4 hours ago
I think this is right, it's a gamble. Discoveries and advancements are made by people tinkering with things without the mind to commercialise it.
1-64 hours ago
Cranking up R&D especially during a time to perfect the trade sounds backward. Intel probably has 6 more years then to release anything into full production.
rgbrenner4 hours ago
AMD + TSMC = ~12B vs Intel at 16B
For anyone that wants a closer comparison.
quantum_state4 hours ago
It’s not only the spend … often too much easy money from the government or military would do the opposite …
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