I think their problem is less about material knowledge to shrink nodes but about development tooling to make chip design more efficient, scalable and allows experimenting with more new approaches/allows larger shifts without planing years ahead for it.

TSMC by collaborating with many different customers with different needs had a lot of insensitive to not just create powerful tooling for one kind of CPU design approach but also being very flexible to allow other approaches for other needs. And AMD has repeatedly interrelated on their whole tool chain and dev. processes for many years while Intel was somewhat complacent with what they had.

And a bunch of the recent issues with CPUs internally dying sound a lot like miss-design issues which tooling should have coughed (instead of looking like fundamental tech/production issues).

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lotyrin 5 days ago | parent [-]

From what I could gather while I was inside (2010-ish, but not directly involved with chip product lines) there was just incredible hubris company wide. "Intel Architecture is the best because we made it and we're the best" essentially.

They were wasting a ton of time and effort eagerly trying to convince Apple to put IA into phones despite obvious failures to deliver power-effective chips (Atom being the result of these efforts from what I understand). They were spending a lot of time and money trying to start up like a junk ware app-store thing for PCs that they could use OEM relationships to peddle, as if the PC ecosystem belonged to them the way that Android did to Google or Apple's ecosystem to Apple, not realizing that if anyone has that power it's Microsoft (but they also don't).

It was pretty shocking coming from a hacker/cyberpunk culture where everybody had been dunking on Intel designs for over a decade. (I personally had been waiting for an ARM laptop since around 2000.) A lot of leadership I got to interact with were business/people-people types that truly seemed to believe that the best product boiled down entirely to social perception of status and has zero basis in reality. Basically the company seemed to be high on the Intel Architecture's accidental monopoly over personal computing thanks to PC-WinTel becoming so dominant (and Apple's later capitulation) and seemed to believe that it was all because of their "genius" Intel Inside marketing campaigns (which were pure social status signaling, but with an effect of avoiding price competition with lower-cost IA rivals AMD,Citrix,VIA and holding power over OEMs rather than being responsible for the market situation around IA in the first place).

Maybe something in the Hillsboro/Beaverton area's water? Both they and Nike seem to entirely consist of a diet of their own farts.

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bee_rider 4 days ago | parent [-]

It also probably didn’t help with that arrogance issued, that ARM laptops were tried… more than a couple times, and didn’t generally work out. I mean, these new Snapdragon things might be good. But Intel successfully fended off multiple generations of Surface RT devices from their pseudo-partner Microsoft, from 2012 until recently.

Of course, one could have done an ARM Linux device at any point in that timeline, but using efficient software is apparently cheating.

	▲	dathinab 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		> didn’t generally work out agreed, but that was often not necessary a hardware issue but a ecosystem issue and Intel executives maybe not seeing/realizing that is pretty incompetent On one side you had the whole windows was absolute garbage on ARM until very recently, and needed Apple to show them how to have a low friction support extension/transition. And if you instead shipped it with Android or Chrome OS it supposedly didn't count anymore (except a lot of non tech afine consumers have replaced home desktop/laptop with a tablet anyway (cheaper and does everything they need)). On the other side there was a best technical fit/best customer fit mismatch. Best customers where tech enthusiasts which want to try out new things and can live with a bit of friction (if it's small enough) and are also often willing to pay _slightly_ more. But the best price/product fit is the low (initially, then to mid) end devices except they aren't really that interesting for enthusiasts and due to low (initial) production quantity also not necessary that cheap either and for the people which normally buy this devices buying a similar priced android tablet is most times just better and with a bit of effort you can get an even better x86 PC, through with many 2nd hand/hand me down parts. and outside of 1) means to pressure MS for better deals, 2) Steam Deck/OS, there just weren't any meaningful large/well known hardware producers shipping with Linux (yes Lenovo and Dell do care (do they still? idk.) for Linux compatibility in _some(few)_ of there expensive business focused lines. But outside of exceptions in 1) don't ship with it so no "normal" consumer pics it up, and Linux shipping ORMs are on the larger consumer market picture just too small to make a big difference. So ARM Linux stayed relegated to niche, too.