Pat was seemed to understand the criticality of fabrication process lead in today's day and age. Hence his push and decision to invest in IFS, plus to win over the government funding to sustain the effort.

In short, a bad or subpar chip design/architecture can be masked by having the chip fabricated on a leading edge node but not the inverse. Hence everyone is vying for capacity on TSMC's newest nodes - especially Apple in trying to secure all capacity for themselves.