I don't expect a good reason given the history of this Administration, but a reason in my mind to save Intel is there's only 3 license holders for x86 CPUs. Intel, AMD (American), and VIA (Taiwanese). A dead Intel leaves a single American company that is able to make x86 processors, and a monopoly for actually good x86 CPUs. But somehow I suspect there's no logical reason for this besides lining the pockets of those in the Administration.

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kardianos 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

What is missing is that Intel has US based foundries and US based talent.

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pizzly 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I hope this is not the reason. I think x86 is a deadend technology. ARM's energy superiority makes it a better choice. x86 only still being used due to legacy/backwards compatibility but thats changing. Apple moved completely away from x86. Theres more and more ARM based windows computers being sold. Theres no x86 chips in phones.

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craftkiller 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Why would the ISA matter to the government? I could see this being about Intel's physical manufacturing capabilities, but the ISA should be pretty irrelevant. Recompile what code you can, run the rest via qemu-user-static.

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JustExAWS 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

While there are other good reasons to save Intel, if it went under, someone could still buy the license. I can’t imagine why anyone would want a license to x86 in 2025. It’s not like all of the companies designing custom chips are going to be falling over themselves to design use the x86 ISA.

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nebula8804 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

A dead Intel could open the door to have more then three license holders. Isn't Intel the reason there are only three license holders?

	▲	hajile 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		The major patents on all the most important parts of x86 expired years ago now. Nobody wants to take on a legacy ISA with tons of footguns everywhere when newer ISAs have learned a lot of lessons from x86 about how to do things better.

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kaladin-jasnah 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

What about Hygon?

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fishgoesblub 3 days ago | parent [-]

I haven't heard of them until this comment, but reading through Wikipedia, and a techpowerup article, I'm not seeing that they actually own a license to manufacture x86 cpus freely. It seems like they were able to due to it being a partnership with AMD. I could easily be wrong though.

	▲	kaladin-jasnah 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		From my vague understanding I thought that Hygon is able to build atop Zen 1 IP that AMD gave Hygon, although they can't get anything newer because of restrictions on doing business with China. Hygon still seems to be making x86 CPUs: https://www.techpowerup.com/336529/hygon-prepares-128-core-5....