Intel was forced to license to AMD for government contracts. There's a super-complex story there I won't get into.

There were a few clone vendors aside from AMD. None were ever a serious threat, and AMD itself didn't become more than a bottom-feeder until after maybe 15 years. But their existence did drive a lot of adoption.

And yes, I did oversimplify. MS-DOS, IBM not being able to prevent clones, and so on, all really played together here as part of the same story.

That's why Intel realized that fab technology was the true differentiator.

The only way to outcompete in a sea of clones is to secure exclusive access to a valuable resource they can't.

Intel with fabs. Dell with lean supply chains. The surviving hard drive and memory companies with scale.

I think IBM and Sun show what happens when you try to fight a stand-up brawl in a commodity space.

>That's why Intel realized that fab technology was the true differentiator.

But now the situation is completely reversed. Intel has faced all kinds of problems, costs, and delays due ultimately to the fact that they made a bad choice on their chip architecture but were forced to make it work because they invested so much in the fab.

What TSMC is fabbing for nvidia is working out really well, and if it was not nvidia could walk away without being stuck with billions of dollars of fab facilities they have to own forever.

edit: reversed is the wrong choice of words. It IS all about the fab, but Intel could not/did not accept that maybe someone else had the key differentiator now.

I think it's the other way around. The architecture was being limited by their fabs ability to yeild large chips and in the absence of any CPU perf pressure from AMD the natural push would lean more towards increacong graphics performance in order to push more pixels. As in I think Intel probably had the same yeild issues as everyone else ~10-32 nm but only Intel had the high margins small chip volume to make it profitable to ramp until Apple and TSMC happened.

The architecture is definitely far ahead of anyone else. When you look at Intel chips still being competitive despite manufacturing being a generation behind and with 1/6th the cache per core.

I'm an AMD shareholder and my biggest fear is Intel figuring out their manufacturing.

Maybe not recently, but in the years that cemented Intel dominance, there were many clones on the market.

Yeah, but never in an amount that was actually meaningful, only by a couple of non branded PC OEMs.

I think the parent only means that if Intel somehow shut down, decided to radically pivot or to close everything, because it is somewhat open, you still had alternatives and neither your code, your product, or your company would face insurmontable hardship or die because of it.