Comment by theFco
4 days ago
As I understand it, Intel's strength was in manufacturing their own design in their exclusive (and most advanced) process. So the advantage was being vertically integrated. State of the art processes are too expensive these days. x86 CPUs alone cannot sustain them. Specially, when AMD builds their CPU also with state of the art processes. So by becoming a foundry, Intel may be able to have state of the art fabs and use it in their own designs of x86 CPUs, GPUs, etc.
The use of standard cells for a process somewhat opens it for outside users.
The 80386 was the first use of standard cells for x86, which also introduced "automatic place and route" via a graduate student project named "Timberwolf."
https://www.righto.com/2023/10/intel-386-die-versions.html