get driver performance up to par then worry about that. in games where they’ve fixed drivers the performance is fantastic for the price. in other games they’re slow or unplayable.

though I suppose the next design may need less time on drivers since apparently the current design has memory handling issues resolved by software.

uhh Apple straight up buys entire runs of TSMC nodes. AMD, Nvidia and Intel combined wouldn’t have enough money for that strategy to work.

global foundries has the IP for modern nodes but they didn’t want to do it because they didn’t know how to make it profitable, and now they’re a public company that needs to be profitable.

they may get back in the game in a decade or so but I don’t see how they make enough money to compete again other than building a lot of products that don’t need modern nodes, which will take a while to bring in enough money.

intel used to only rebrand their large node updates.

now that TSMC has popularized branding every single node change they make (N5, N5P, N5HPC, N4, N4P, N4X are all variants of N5) and intel is trying to build a foundry business, they’re branding updates to their nodes too instead of just adding pluses. So in the past intel 3 would be intel 4+, intel 18a would be intel 20a+ etc.

They’re also burning through cash to get them out sooner due to how delayed intel 10nm was. According to their fab director they got a “blank check” to get their fabs back on competitive pace.

companies like Apple and AMD have useful gpus in their SoCs, something that Intel is still catching up on. On desktop it’s not that big of a deal but for portables it is a good way to save on power+cost while still delivering adequate performance.

Also they’re going to be paying to develop these GPU IP blocks anyway, may as well use the IP as much as possible against the competition. Amortize that R&D cost. Arrow Lake will have the GPU segregated from the CPU chiplet also so it’s less likely there will be defects even if they up the GPU size, whereas something like the 13700k is already pretty big on its own even with the small igpu so it would be relatively expensive to slap a good iGPU on there.

assuming its real, for the last decade or so TSMC has been better about low power (serving mostly mobile devices) while intel has been better at high power. Last few years TSMC has been better all around but I’d assume 20/18 are targeting high power first, low power down the road if everything works out like GAAFET+Powervia.