I think Intel having in-house manufacturing was one of the big causes of them getting "Too fat and slow to respond" - from the outside much of their fall from grace was due to massively delayed production improvements rather than designs and IP. As far as I can see, the architectures were pretty much done and ready to go, just the expected targeted process missed it's mark.
With Nvidia and other GPU competitors being IP-focused, effectively outsourcing all this "manufacturing stuff" (to the same 3rd party much of the time), that's one less thing for them to keep up with, and one less think that'll hurt if they do start "falling asleep". I can't see this happening to Nvidia in quite the same way right now. My point was that not having manufacturing makes advantages of consolidation larger, not smaller.
I wonder what would have happened if Intel realized it's manufacturing wasn't hitting targets and "quickly" added TSMC as an option, would AMD even have had a chance with ryzen? There was clearly a time when AMD had superior manufacturing processes through them, if Intel's designs of the time were on the same process would they have managed to grab the headlines?
And no, I Strongly disagree that NVidia running unchecked over the entire market being "Good for consumers", and not sure if the capital expenditure of getting over this moat is really much smaller than things like resource acquisition or infrastructure, they have $billions in current software ecosystems and hardware designs. Those $billions probably could buy you a fair bit of infrastructure investment on the scale you mentioned. Look how much Intel is burning right now just to get a toe into the market and not laughed out the door - and they're still clearly behind their competitors right now. Their chips aren't anywhere near competitive from a performance-per-area point of view, and their software is rather poor for the vast majority of use cases.
With Nvidia and other GPU competitors being IP-focused, effectively outsourcing all this "manufacturing stuff" (to the same 3rd party much of the time), that's one less thing for them to keep up with, and one less think that'll hurt if they do start "falling asleep". I can't see this happening to Nvidia in quite the same way right now. My point was that not having manufacturing makes advantages of consolidation larger, not smaller.
I wonder what would have happened if Intel realized it's manufacturing wasn't hitting targets and "quickly" added TSMC as an option, would AMD even have had a chance with ryzen? There was clearly a time when AMD had superior manufacturing processes through them, if Intel's designs of the time were on the same process would they have managed to grab the headlines?
And no, I Strongly disagree that NVidia running unchecked over the entire market being "Good for consumers", and not sure if the capital expenditure of getting over this moat is really much smaller than things like resource acquisition or infrastructure, they have $billions in current software ecosystems and hardware designs. Those $billions probably could buy you a fair bit of infrastructure investment on the scale you mentioned. Look how much Intel is burning right now just to get a toe into the market and not laughed out the door - and they're still clearly behind their competitors right now. Their chips aren't anywhere near competitive from a performance-per-area point of view, and their software is rather poor for the vast majority of use cases.