The missing bit is "TSMC makes better chips than Intel" and thus they have higher demand.

Yes, but then there should be a higher level of urgency?

Urgency with what? You asked why TSMC has higher demand then Intel...

No, you have to read more of the thread to understand why I asked it.

> TSMC have red hot demand, it’s not hard to understand their urgency in setting up new fabs, wherever they may be. Intel don’t have the same incentive (...)

The issue is even if Intel builds these fabs it's not a guarantee they get the customers.

This is Intel's real problem.

They are also a competitor to many of their potential customers.

So, Intel needs to advance their foundry tech and they still may not get customers.

They set up a 3nm fab in the US in less than two years. That seems pretty urgent on TSMCs part...

TSMC makes nvidia GPUs and iPhone chips among other things, intel doesn't

There was some discussion awhile back about Intel potentially fabbing ARM chips (or any other custom non-x86 chip) as a viable business in the future. I don’t know how serious they were but it sounded plausible when you think about how important it is to have an American leading edge fab, independent of the market future of the x86 ISA.

Basically what would it take for Intel to still have Apple as a customer even if Apple made their own ARM designs…

You might be missing that you cannot just "port" across fabs.

Why not? You might have to redo lots of phys work but essentially all of the RTL will be the same and that's the vast majority of the work.

Intel doesn't have demand because they only make Intel chips, and they haven't been doing too well lately.

They feed into each other especially for anything that isn't a vanilla gate. Got a deeply ported SRAM with bypasses? That might fail synthesis if it is too choked by wire rules for the size of the cells so now it's banking time.

Right, you might get a different PPA...

I think realistically you wouldn't port the exact same design between manufacturers. That would be a waste of money unless one manufacturer is really rinsing you.

More likely you'd switch manufacturers when you planned to switch process nodes anyway, in which case the increase in workload probably wouldn't be too bad.

I honestly don't believe that e.g. Apple couldn't relatively easily base their designs on a different underlying technology.

They do it all the time when they change nodes.

Drop another billion is sort of the name of the game here.

This. And the extra time and Human Resources required for redoing the design along with testing.

It is not that it cant be done. It is not reasonable or cost effective to do it without some clear incentive.