IDM and IFS model is a broken strategy that will suck blood and life out of Intel and distract management till it fails. The next few years will see talent exodus and those that stay terrible morale, what a $hitshow.
Intel’s problem is far larger than money for both IDM and IFS. Saving a few billions in dividends, cutting salaries symbolizing frugality, nor a few thousand layoffs won’t either.
Factories at the leading edge cost easily 20B or more and need to be huge volume and full to recoup the investment over decades or more. Also the volumes and business must have huge diversity as the RD burn is billions / quarter needs decades to recoup. The x86 IDM is a model from the 90s.
A decade ago the costs as well as scale needed was smaller and Intel had scale and leaderships. Missing the mobile and giving up on it and multiple half hearted and failed IFS when they tried were huge strategic missed and they are now beyond recovery.
Today Intel competes with TSMC which is really a collaboration and ecosystem of EDA, IP, tools and customers that drawf anything that Intel can save a few billions nor the CHIPs act can nurture to become really competitive or have scale.
Apple, Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm, MediaTek and so many others all are part of the ecosystems and customers that feed TSMC to have scale and efficiencies that Intel can’t possibly match with grants no matter how large to become relevant and competitive.
Doesn’t anyone that really care about Intel and is paranoid confront the ELT with constructive confrontation