The balance likely comes down to volume. Specifically, total global chip sales.
If Intel builds Intel (I believe their contract fabing is a rounding error?), then they're directly tied to Intel chip sales.
This sets up a potential death spiral. Intel misses a process node deadline, Intel's products are uncompetitive, Intel sales decrease, less demand for Intel fab, less money for Intel fab improvement.
Intel can temporarily paper over this by shifting money from other areas of the company, but it's not a good path to be on.
Conversely, as you might expect, if Intel sales are increasing then the opposite, virtuous cycle holds.
So essentially, Intel's fortune is tied to the Intel_sales : (global_sales / number_of_leading_edge_non-Intel_fabs) ratio.
And with regards to that, two huge things happened in the marketplace recently: (1) mobile chip sales explosion, (2) GlobalFoundries exiting leading process race.
If Intel hadn't been screwed by a process engineering miss, longer term trends would still have hit them hard.
This is the case with every foundry, though. It’s the reason GloFo isn’t competitive anymore, for example. What’s more interesting is the physics reason that they tripped up the last generation - what did TSMC do right that Intel did wrong? What bets were made? Which ones paid off?
I believe the issue was that Intel was leaning harder on EUV trying to make it and burying the competition instead of a more cautious approach by TSMC. Zen 3 is finally using some EUV layers whereas I believe Intel already wanted to use EUV heavily in their "10"nm process.
If Intel builds Intel (I believe their contract fabing is a rounding error?), then they're directly tied to Intel chip sales.
This sets up a potential death spiral. Intel misses a process node deadline, Intel's products are uncompetitive, Intel sales decrease, less demand for Intel fab, less money for Intel fab improvement.
Intel can temporarily paper over this by shifting money from other areas of the company, but it's not a good path to be on.
Conversely, as you might expect, if Intel sales are increasing then the opposite, virtuous cycle holds.
So essentially, Intel's fortune is tied to the Intel_sales : (global_sales / number_of_leading_edge_non-Intel_fabs) ratio.
And with regards to that, two huge things happened in the marketplace recently: (1) mobile chip sales explosion, (2) GlobalFoundries exiting leading process race.
If Intel hadn't been screwed by a process engineering miss, longer term trends would still have hit them hard.