@Maldron I strongly believe it was a mistake for AMD to spin off GlobalFoundries into its own company. You decouple the chip design team from the fab R&D team, and it is much harder to get them to work together. Additionally you are outsourcing your Q&A, and open yourself up to IP theft. (Continued)
@Maldron on the other hand, for smaller players it makes sense to go "fabless". Running your own fab with state of the art tech is not cheap (Fab42 for example cost Intel at least $5B to build and at least $5B more to put the equipment in, not to mention the ongoing cost).
@Maldron if you don't own your own fab, you have less control over your own destiny.
Imagine how AMD will feel when they can't get their next Ryzen line out the door because Apple decided to buy up all of TSMC's and GlobalFoundries' capacity first.
@Maldron Apple ditching Intel for their own ARM chips in their Mac line? Give them a couple years and they will open their own R&D fab, and by decades end they will drop TSMC and Foxconn as suppliers.