I'm not sure I understand what you're trying to say about Macs and/or servers, but I can appreciate an obscure Red Dwarf reference all the same. Kudos for that, now I have the urge to go watch it.
Even the "first in flight" is tenuous, considering they had nothing to do with aviation coming of age. The Wright brothers just decided to try their plane there, the research and designs and everything else having been done in Ohio.
They're "first in flight" in the same way that Japan was the "first in nuclear energy."
ower efficiency? OK, all missing in action. Per some of the articles, power consumption is down nearly 20W between the two generations.
So, the big unwritten subtext here is: Intel's 22nm node has got problems. Big problems. Trigate not working out so well? Far too early to tell. The fact that they introduced a brand new, immensely complex process into manufacturing and it is working so well actually says a lot of good about how the trigate process is fairing. It will, of course, need some tuning and massaging. But it is already performing as well as/slightly better than the previous generation on its first release, at lower power (at least per Anand).
IVB is also farking small, which as the process matures, should mean more parts and lower prices.
Only 5 GB? Anyone else a little surprised by that?
My gmail accounts have more space than that, and people have been writing browser extensions and apps for a while to leverage that as cloud storage. 5 GB is at the high end of current free offerings (it matches SugarSync and Box), but by no means revolutionary. You'd think Google, with their resources, would be offering a bit more, especially with their late entry into the game. I guess they can push the tie-ins to other services - like being able to send attachments in Gmail straight to your Google cloud storage. But other than that, what's the incentive, especially if already using another service?
Dropbox has encryption, but Dropbox has all the keys. If you're worried about your privacy from the party offering the service, you can't give Dropbox a pass.
I think Ars ran an article about a service recently which uses better encryption. Or you can just encrypt your own files before uploading, or use TrueCrypt.
It's interesting to me how someone joking around is considered a 'troll' to you. That's flat out dishonest of you. I said either a troll or a bad joke. In other words, I found the joke so bad I couldn't be sure if they were really trying to make a joke or actually trolling, or both.
You are what is wrong with/. these days. 'Troll' is the new 'I disagree with you'. Wrong. I'm not saying they might be trolling because I disagree. I said it because the entire premise of the joke is factually without basis. There can be no disagreement about that. That's precisely what made it humorless, or at least to me, and combined with the fact that articles about Google are often ripe for trolls, it's also what pushed it into grey area of might-be-trolling.
Did he REALLY evoke an emotional response from you by saying what he said? Did it truly upset you to the point where you were incensed and bitter over his words? If so, then maybe he is, indeed, a troll. So someone is only a troll if they succeed in eliciting an emotional response? Not simply for trying? The entire basis for someone being called a troll is subjective to each and every individual reader? If you believe that, you have no right to judge anyone's use of the word, as you cannot know their circumstances and perception and how what they read made them feel. Interesting how, according to you, if I was irrationally affected by the comment, I would be completely justified.
Otherwise, shut up. So, let me get this straight. You ignore the meaning of my post and any parts which don't fit the topic you want to rant about; twist the meaning of what I wrote into a strawman about misusing "troll" as "disagree;" assert that myself and presumably a nebulous faceless group of people are thereby destroying/.; and tell me that if I'm not irrationally upset by something someone says, I shouldn't post. And you think I'm what's wrong with/.?
To the GP: sorry if I came off a bit callous, as these ACs and mods seem to think. I'll put a smiley at the end next time so I don't seem so serious.
Same thing, really. As a general rule, politicians are going to spend (1+x)*y where x > 0 and y is tax revenue. If you increase taxes by z, you're almost guaranteed to increase spending by somewhere close to (1+x)*z.
Fabricating the level of density without leaking is very hard.
It's impossible. There is always leakage. Yes, as you scale, the leakage does grow, both empirically and as a signal/noise problem. But there are ways to minimize this. This has been foreseen for some time, and a lot of research goes into ways to mitigate it. Despite all the improvements made sub-surface - that is, how the semiconductor itself is altered - to allow scaling and improve efficiency, and how the tools and methods to make the devices have improved... the industry really hasn't had any radical changes in many years. It has been all planar designs that date back to the 70's. Sure, the materials have improved, and it's not entirely silicon any more... but still planar, and subject to some fundamental limits of the planar design and the substrate choice. That's why Intel is pushing into 3d designs. Do some reading on FINFETs, and the benefits of them, especially with respect to leakage and control. And that can still be silicon based, and doesn't push at all into heterogeneous semiconductor systems.
Fabs are very ex[pensive to built. Add to the the consumer need for faster clocks has tapered off, it's not worth the expense of massive retooling.
Oh, really? Why are the industry giants doing it, then? Smaller die - this improves speed and potential clock, can improve power efficiency, means more die/wafer or more advanced designs. Ability to do different etches, deposit different films, etc., to improve device characteristics.
Clockspeed isn't everything anyway, or we'd still be using the Pentium 4 chips that were pushing 4 GHz from the manufacturer, and not the 2 GHz-range Core 2/iX chips. Smart design can trump clockspeed. (I use Intel as an example here because they had the more recent significant architecture change which illustrates this point very well.) We could, y'know, go back to making Pentiums... with current manufacturing technology, we might make them, what, 1/8 the size? Could probably clock them at several GHz.
When they can get the metal well below 1 part per billion in the fabs, and create a process to minimize wafer breakage for wafer being cut so precisely, then we may see a doubling of clock speed 2 more times. Then that will be it.
What makes you think metal contaminants and wafer breakage are the limiting factors to clockspeed scaling? And from where do you get a "doubling of clock speed 2 more times" from? What are you considering the base clockspeed that you are multiplying? Seems like you're pulling it out of your ass. Think about it. We're doing 3 GHz+ already. Doubling that puts us in the 6-8 GHz range. Doubling again puts us in the 12-16 GHz range. That's what people above are claiming as the fundamental limit in a synchronous chip by the limit of the propagation of a signal in a metal. The speed of light in metal is in no way the limiting factor in clockspeed. That would be the case for a single wire in isolation. There are other effects, namely capacitive coupling, in a chip where you are wiring up billions of transistors, which are much more limiting. And we're tallking wires of non-negligible resistance here - if you want to put a bunch of small transistors close together, you need to be able to make really thin metal wires to connect to make the right connections. Assuming metal is the only interconnect, of course, and completely ignoring all the research into optical interconnects...
I did not just say "NUH UH YOU" - I explained what was wrong with your post, which is more than what you did for the AC. What's more, I didn't try to co-opt your misstep to match my world view, nor insult a (loosely defined) group that I perceive you to be associated with (even though I'd have much more evidence to make that association then you did with the AC).
And your reply is that I'm the childish one, and try (if you can call it that) to invoke emotion... so that, what, I might concede for guilt to my mother?
You're ridiculous.
Oh, and so you can't claim I'm ignoring your argument again (not that I see the relevance): what is your argument? I checked your post again, and all I see is you shouting about logical fallacies and then making ad hominems. Ignoring the ad hominems, shouting "STRAWMAN SIGHTED" is not an argument, unless you proceed to explain how, where, and why - it's too nebulous to be debatable. Shouting "STRAWMAN SIGHTED" is not even base contradiction, as it does not show that you disagree with the conclusion, just the means to the conclusion that the poster took.
Criticism of the current administration can be made regardless of your political persuasion.
See, this is why I can't take the you seriously, because fucking drama queens like you don't understand why having multiple logical fallacies in one screed is bad.
Actually, that's ambiguous, due to the idiotic convention that a calorie and a Calorie are a factor of 1000 different, and the GP used Calorie as the first word of a sentence, which would be capitalized regardless. 1 Cal = 1 kcal = 1000 cal
Yeah, but if you make an effort to consistently consider the broader view with an even hand, and don't take every opportunity to assert your moral/ethical/intellectual/ideological "truth" at the expense of others, well, you just don't get that same sense of self righteousness that you're entitled to.
That is, unless you can extract self righteousness from the position of being more even handed and trying to remove personal bias. But that doesn't come with the snarky one-liners that make it so fun. Sound the beige alert, all I know is that my gut says maybe. Yawn.
Probably a few points of confusion here. One being what it is that you are referring to. Voice recognition, not the Google Voice app, I assume?
First: looking back, I didn't digest the GP's post well enough. I have no idea if installing Google Voice prompts you to use the personalized voice recognition. I'm not sure why it would, either. Someone else would have to clarify this point, as I have not installed Google Voice or set up a number with them.
However, voice-related parts of the OS - voice search, voice commands, etc. - does have the option to use personalized recognition. I'm not sure whether this installs anything or not, and whether it does may be different from Android 2.x to 3.x to 4.x. I just enabled it on my ICS phone, and it doesn't install anything, just notifies be that enabling it causes my voice data to be stored and associated with my account (which should be obvious).
Third, I wonder if what the GP is confusing with the personalized voice recognition is actually the Text-To-Speech (TTS) package, which if I remember correctly only a neutered version exists by default in the OS, but can be "upgraded" for free if the user finds it useful or an app suggests it (Vlingo come to mind). This, of course, would have nothing to do with recognition of your voice, but could make some sense for Google Voice.
What would be interesting is if Google partnered with the more traditional actuaries - i.e., insurance companies.
They are usually way ahead of everyone else when it comes to statistical patterns and risk predictions. Imagine what they could do with a whole new arena of data to analyze.
Also, when you install Google Voice, it asks you whether you want to turn on Personalized Voice Recognition,
With you so far...
so that Google can pick your voice out of a mess of voices.
[citation needed]
I personally have seen nothing that indicates this is why Google asks you to do this, and no evidence of it. Do you have any evidence?
It could be that this might also be somewhat useful in that regard, but the most obvious and most likely use is that it will make your voice transcription more accurate. It will learn your quirks and how to deal with you accent.
My Asian and Indian coworkers can't use Siri, and most have stopped trying out of frustration. It can't understand their accent, and doesn't seem to get any better over time. That is the most obvious reason why Google would want to do this.
If it's such common knowledge, surely it will be easy for you to provide a credible link. You could have provided several in the time it took you to write a snarky, arrogant reply. But you didn't.
No, I will not accept your appeal to your ethos and authority as a valid argument.
Because the truth is - I don't ask because I'm wholly ignorant on the subject. I actually pay pretty close attention to this kind of thing. I know there are privacy concerns with Chrome, but I also know that the things that were concerning have been removed, and that you can opt-out of most everything else. Anecdotally, I know I have never seen anything suspicious show up in a packet sniffer, or any unusual connections in my Privoxy logs.
Wikipedia has a decent, and decently sourced, summary (and yes, it's Wiki, and yes, I'm cringing suggesting anyone look for information there). However, Wiki, being the fount of "common knowledge" that it is, and haunted by all kinds of spooks, it's a good rebuttal to your "common knowledge" claim. Not that "common knowledge" means anything anyway.
Yeah, that truth, that's not why people were modding your post. I think you know that.
And people are probably modding it troll because most of us haven't seen any legitimate proof of these claims. Most of us see a fair amount to the contrary.
By all means, if you know something and can show it or have some links with substantiated evidence - please post them, so people can make the choice to switch if they desire.
Otherwise, all you're doing is raising the noise floor. And moderators are seeking to lower it.
When you control the design and the manufacture, you have intimate knowledge of both. You can better design for the manufacturing process, and alter the manufacturing process to suit the design. This just isn't possible to the same extent when you work through a foundry. And not only that, there's overwhelming evidence that Intel's process know-how is better than TSMCs. TI don't think it's any coincidence that the prolific microprocessors have all been made by the companies that designed them: Intel, IBM, AMD. Foundries are great for simple things, for low-budget things, for cookie cutter things like ARM SoCs. But they have never competed well with the big dogs. And no, Intel and TSMC will not be competing directly on process technology. Intel products will compete with AMD products; TSMC will compete with other foundries to keep AMD's business. AMD is up a creek if the foundries can't keep up with Intel, and historically they haven't. Most of the foundries' business is based on thin, thin margins, a few pennies per part, for small cookie cutter SoCs and that kind of thing - things that are more or less commoditized. They can't afford to be buying the equipment and doing all the work needed to convert to new tools and processes and make it work. Do you have any idea how much modern semiconductor manufacturing tools cost? Millions of dollars each, some tens of millions. And you need several to run any amount of wafers in a reasonable time. Modern fabs are several billion dollar investments. It's not cost-effective for the foundries. To do it, you have to be making more margin on your parts.
I guess I should realize who I'm talking to - you say "their time tested strategy of cutting off AMD's air supply," so I assume you're an AMD fanboy who just isn't going to hear bad things about them or their decisions. And it's ironic, because it's not like Intel ever sabotaged AMD's manufacturing. The things that Intel supposedly did occurred at the OEMs. AMD using TSMC won't make a lick of difference in that regard. Not that, from what I can tell, there's good evidence Intel did anything so bad anyway. If it was half as bad as the fanboys would have you believe, governments around the world would be doing more than a few million dollars in a fine (to the government, even), and AMD wouldn't be settling for a couple hundred million or whatever that amount was.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure I understand what you're trying to say about Macs and/or servers, but I can appreciate an obscure Red Dwarf reference all the same. Kudos for that, now I have the urge to go watch it.
Even the "first in flight" is tenuous, considering they had nothing to do with aviation coming of age. The Wright brothers just decided to try their plane there, the research and designs and everything else having been done in Ohio.
They're "first in flight" in the same way that Japan was the "first in nuclear energy."
ower efficiency? OK, all missing in action.
Per some of the articles, power consumption is down nearly 20W between the two generations.
So, the big unwritten subtext here is: Intel's 22nm node has got problems. Big problems. Trigate not working out so well?
Far too early to tell. The fact that they introduced a brand new, immensely complex process into manufacturing and it is working so well actually says a lot of good about how the trigate process is fairing. It will, of course, need some tuning and massaging. But it is already performing as well as/slightly better than the previous generation on its first release, at lower power (at least per Anand).
IVB is also farking small, which as the process matures, should mean more parts and lower prices.
If google had been smarter they would have made Java an option, not mandatory.
To be fair, there is the NDK, which allows C/C++, and I've heard rumbling about Mono-esque C# implementations.
Never having used them, though, I couldn't say how complete they are. I imagine there is some Java glue involved for UI, etc.
You're right, I forgot about that (and I even have an account).
I never did use it though, even when I was running Windows and used a third party app to make the SkyDrive service look like a network drive.
Have they added any features? Any native clients that do automatic syncing or anything?
This is that Ars article.
Only 5 GB? Anyone else a little surprised by that?
My gmail accounts have more space than that, and people have been writing browser extensions and apps for a while to leverage that as cloud storage. 5 GB is at the high end of current free offerings (it matches SugarSync and Box), but by no means revolutionary. You'd think Google, with their resources, would be offering a bit more, especially with their late entry into the game. I guess they can push the tie-ins to other services - like being able to send attachments in Gmail straight to your Google cloud storage. But other than that, what's the incentive, especially if already using another service?
Dropbox has encryption, but Dropbox has all the keys. If you're worried about your privacy from the party offering the service, you can't give Dropbox a pass.
I think Ars ran an article about a service recently which uses better encryption. Or you can just encrypt your own files before uploading, or use TrueCrypt.
It's interesting to me how someone joking around is considered a 'troll' to you.
That's flat out dishonest of you. I said either a troll or a bad joke. In other words, I found the joke so bad I couldn't be sure if they were really trying to make a joke or actually trolling, or both.
You are what is wrong with /. these days. 'Troll' is the new 'I disagree with you'.
Wrong. I'm not saying they might be trolling because I disagree. I said it because the entire premise of the joke is factually without basis. There can be no disagreement about that. That's precisely what made it humorless, or at least to me, and combined with the fact that articles about Google are often ripe for trolls, it's also what pushed it into grey area of might-be-trolling.
Did he REALLY evoke an emotional response from you by saying what he said? Did it truly upset you to the point where you were incensed and bitter over his words? If so, then maybe he is, indeed, a troll.
So someone is only a troll if they succeed in eliciting an emotional response? Not simply for trying? The entire basis for someone being called a troll is subjective to each and every individual reader? If you believe that, you have no right to judge anyone's use of the word, as you cannot know their circumstances and perception and how what they read made them feel. Interesting how, according to you, if I was irrationally affected by the comment, I would be completely justified.
Otherwise, shut up. /.; and tell me that if I'm not irrationally upset by something someone says, I shouldn't post. And you think I'm what's wrong with /.?
So, let me get this straight. You ignore the meaning of my post and any parts which don't fit the topic you want to rant about; twist the meaning of what I wrote into a strawman about misusing "troll" as "disagree;" assert that myself and presumably a nebulous faceless group of people are thereby destroying
To the GP: sorry if I came off a bit callous, as these ACs and mods seem to think. I'll put a smiley at the end next time so I don't seem so serious.
You mean those ads which are displayed on all browsers and are in no way tied or targeted to Chrome?
Either you're a troll or that was a bad joke.
Same thing, really. As a general rule, politicians are going to spend (1+x)*y where x > 0 and y is tax revenue. If you increase taxes by z, you're almost guaranteed to increase spending by somewhere close to (1+x)*z.
Fabricating the level of density without leaking is very hard.
It's impossible. There is always leakage. Yes, as you scale, the leakage does grow, both empirically and as a signal/noise problem. But there are ways to minimize this. This has been foreseen for some time, and a lot of research goes into ways to mitigate it. Despite all the improvements made sub-surface - that is, how the semiconductor itself is altered - to allow scaling and improve efficiency, and how the tools and methods to make the devices have improved... the industry really hasn't had any radical changes in many years. It has been all planar designs that date back to the 70's. Sure, the materials have improved, and it's not entirely silicon any more... but still planar, and subject to some fundamental limits of the planar design and the substrate choice. That's why Intel is pushing into 3d designs. Do some reading on FINFETs, and the benefits of them, especially with respect to leakage and control. And that can still be silicon based, and doesn't push at all into heterogeneous semiconductor systems.
Fabs are very ex[pensive to built.
Add to the the consumer need for faster clocks has tapered off, it's not worth the expense of massive retooling.
Oh, really? Why are the industry giants doing it, then? Smaller die - this improves speed and potential clock, can improve power efficiency, means more die/wafer or more advanced designs. Ability to do different etches, deposit different films, etc., to improve device characteristics.
Clockspeed isn't everything anyway, or we'd still be using the Pentium 4 chips that were pushing 4 GHz from the manufacturer, and not the 2 GHz-range Core 2/iX chips. Smart design can trump clockspeed. (I use Intel as an example here because they had the more recent significant architecture change which illustrates this point very well.) We could, y'know, go back to making Pentiums... with current manufacturing technology, we might make them, what, 1/8 the size? Could probably clock them at several GHz.
When they can get the metal well below 1 part per billion in the fabs, and create a process to minimize wafer breakage for wafer being cut so precisely, then we may see a doubling of clock speed 2 more times. Then that will be it.
What makes you think metal contaminants and wafer breakage are the limiting factors to clockspeed scaling? And from where do you get a "doubling of clock speed 2 more times" from? What are you considering the base clockspeed that you are multiplying? Seems like you're pulling it out of your ass. Think about it. We're doing 3 GHz+ already. Doubling that puts us in the 6-8 GHz range. Doubling again puts us in the 12-16 GHz range. That's what people above are claiming as the fundamental limit in a synchronous chip by the limit of the propagation of a signal in a metal. The speed of light in metal is in no way the limiting factor in clockspeed. That would be the case for a single wire in isolation. There are other effects, namely capacitive coupling, in a chip where you are wiring up billions of transistors, which are much more limiting. And we're tallking wires of non-negligible resistance here - if you want to put a bunch of small transistors close together, you need to be able to make really thin metal wires to connect to make the right connections. Assuming metal is the only interconnect, of course, and completely ignoring all the research into optical interconnects...
Answer: the world will end before April 2014, and mass migration from XP is a harbinger for the end of the world, so it's all irrelevant.
Wow.
I did not just say "NUH UH YOU" - I explained what was wrong with your post, which is more than what you did for the AC. What's more, I didn't try to co-opt your misstep to match my world view, nor insult a (loosely defined) group that I perceive you to be associated with (even though I'd have much more evidence to make that association then you did with the AC).
And your reply is that I'm the childish one, and try (if you can call it that) to invoke emotion... so that, what, I might concede for guilt to my mother?
You're ridiculous.
Oh, and so you can't claim I'm ignoring your argument again (not that I see the relevance): what is your argument? I checked your post again, and all I see is you shouting about logical fallacies and then making ad hominems. Ignoring the ad hominems, shouting "STRAWMAN SIGHTED" is not an argument, unless you proceed to explain how, where, and why - it's too nebulous to be debatable. Shouting "STRAWMAN SIGHTED" is not even base contradiction, as it does not show that you disagree with the conclusion, just the means to the conclusion that the poster took.
STRAWMAN SIGHTED.
Criticism of the current administration can be made regardless of your political persuasion.
See, this is why I can't take the you seriously, because fucking drama queens like you don't understand why having multiple logical fallacies in one screed is bad.
Know thyself.
Actually, that's ambiguous, due to the idiotic convention that a calorie and a Calorie are a factor of 1000 different, and the GP used Calorie as the first word of a sentence, which would be capitalized regardless. 1 Cal = 1 kcal = 1000 cal
Yeah, but if you make an effort to consistently consider the broader view with an even hand, and don't take every opportunity to assert your moral/ethical/intellectual/ideological "truth" at the expense of others, well, you just don't get that same sense of self righteousness that you're entitled to.
That is, unless you can extract self righteousness from the position of being more even handed and trying to remove personal bias. But that doesn't come with the snarky one-liners that make it so fun. Sound the beige alert, all I know is that my gut says maybe. Yawn.
Probably a few points of confusion here. One being what it is that you are referring to. Voice recognition, not the Google Voice app, I assume?
First: looking back, I didn't digest the GP's post well enough. I have no idea if installing Google Voice prompts you to use the personalized voice recognition. I'm not sure why it would, either. Someone else would have to clarify this point, as I have not installed Google Voice or set up a number with them.
However, voice-related parts of the OS - voice search, voice commands, etc. - does have the option to use personalized recognition. I'm not sure whether this installs anything or not, and whether it does may be different from Android 2.x to 3.x to 4.x. I just enabled it on my ICS phone, and it doesn't install anything, just notifies be that enabling it causes my voice data to be stored and associated with my account (which should be obvious).
Third, I wonder if what the GP is confusing with the personalized voice recognition is actually the Text-To-Speech (TTS) package, which if I remember correctly only a neutered version exists by default in the OS, but can be "upgraded" for free if the user finds it useful or an app suggests it (Vlingo come to mind). This, of course, would have nothing to do with recognition of your voice, but could make some sense for Google Voice.
What would be interesting is if Google partnered with the more traditional actuaries - i.e., insurance companies.
They are usually way ahead of everyone else when it comes to statistical patterns and risk predictions. Imagine what they could do with a whole new arena of data to analyze.
Also, when you install Google Voice, it asks you whether you want to turn on Personalized Voice Recognition,
With you so far...
so that Google can pick your voice out of a mess of voices.
[citation needed]
I personally have seen nothing that indicates this is why Google asks you to do this, and no evidence of it. Do you have any evidence?
It could be that this might also be somewhat useful in that regard, but the most obvious and most likely use is that it will make your voice transcription more accurate. It will learn your quirks and how to deal with you accent.
My Asian and Indian coworkers can't use Siri, and most have stopped trying out of frustration. It can't understand their accent, and doesn't seem to get any better over time. That is the most obvious reason why Google would want to do this.
Nor do people do that for Facebook. I'm not sure what your point is.
If it's such common knowledge, surely it will be easy for you to provide a credible link. You could have provided several in the time it took you to write a snarky, arrogant reply. But you didn't.
No, I will not accept your appeal to your ethos and authority as a valid argument.
Because the truth is - I don't ask because I'm wholly ignorant on the subject. I actually pay pretty close attention to this kind of thing. I know there are privacy concerns with Chrome, but I also know that the things that were concerning have been removed, and that you can opt-out of most everything else. Anecdotally, I know I have never seen anything suspicious show up in a packet sniffer, or any unusual connections in my Privoxy logs.
Wikipedia has a decent, and decently sourced, summary (and yes, it's Wiki, and yes, I'm cringing suggesting anyone look for information there). However, Wiki, being the fount of "common knowledge" that it is, and haunted by all kinds of spooks, it's a good rebuttal to your "common knowledge" claim. Not that "common knowledge" means anything anyway.
Yeah, that truth, that's not why people were modding your post. I think you know that.
And people are probably modding it troll because most of us haven't seen any legitimate proof of these claims. Most of us see a fair amount to the contrary.
By all means, if you know something and can show it or have some links with substantiated evidence - please post them, so people can make the choice to switch if they desire.
Otherwise, all you're doing is raising the noise floor. And moderators are seeking to lower it.
No, you misunderstood. Maybe I wasn't clear.
When you control the design and the manufacture, you have intimate knowledge of both. You can better design for the manufacturing process, and alter the manufacturing process to suit the design. This just isn't possible to the same extent when you work through a foundry. And not only that, there's overwhelming evidence that Intel's process know-how is better than TSMCs. TI don't think it's any coincidence that the prolific microprocessors have all been made by the companies that designed them: Intel, IBM, AMD. Foundries are great for simple things, for low-budget things, for cookie cutter things like ARM SoCs. But they have never competed well with the big dogs. And no, Intel and TSMC will not be competing directly on process technology. Intel products will compete with AMD products; TSMC will compete with other foundries to keep AMD's business. AMD is up a creek if the foundries can't keep up with Intel, and historically they haven't. Most of the foundries' business is based on thin, thin margins, a few pennies per part, for small cookie cutter SoCs and that kind of thing - things that are more or less commoditized. They can't afford to be buying the equipment and doing all the work needed to convert to new tools and processes and make it work. Do you have any idea how much modern semiconductor manufacturing tools cost? Millions of dollars each, some tens of millions. And you need several to run any amount of wafers in a reasonable time. Modern fabs are several billion dollar investments. It's not cost-effective for the foundries. To do it, you have to be making more margin on your parts.
I guess I should realize who I'm talking to - you say "their time tested strategy of cutting off AMD's air supply," so I assume you're an AMD fanboy who just isn't going to hear bad things about them or their decisions. And it's ironic, because it's not like Intel ever sabotaged AMD's manufacturing. The things that Intel supposedly did occurred at the OEMs. AMD using TSMC won't make a lick of difference in that regard. Not that, from what I can tell, there's good evidence Intel did anything so bad anyway. If it was half as bad as the fanboys would have you believe, governments around the world would be doing more than a few million dollars in a fine (to the government, even), and AMD wouldn't be settling for a couple hundred million or whatever that amount was.
Quick look at IBMs website says they do have foundry services.
Also, don't forget that IBM heads a consortium of companies working on process technology together... which, last I knew, included both TSMC and GF.