What happened to this thread?
That being said, the combined company will not see the same growth as AMD alone.
Depends on what kind of growth. AMD's 5 year outlook was talking about achieving ~25% annual growth which I think is perfectly feasible even including Xilinx.
It seems like it will be a while before Intel could possibly make AMD no longer capacity constrained, so one would imagine this is what AMD should be doing, but I have yet to hear anything along these lines?
Intel making AMD no longer capacity constrained? Am I missing something?
Anyway as long as demand outpaces supply for newer nodes there is no way around capacity constraints. Even GloFo appears to be capacity constrained at the moment.
Wouldn't those profits be better spent guaranteeing capacity from TSMC for 6, 5 or even 3nm instead?
That's what's essentially happening I think. AMD's outlooks have been pretty much spot on in the last years since it had to order capacity way in advance, and that sets the frame within which AMD can perform in the future well in advance.
One has to wonder if Intel huge purchase of wafers from tsmc in 2021 is to muscle out amd.
TSMC's CapEx shows TSMC is massively expanding as well. It's not so much about one customer outmuscling another but customers registering their demand and TSMC investing accordingly. So Intel's involvement just ensures more investment into increasing capacity, not some fantasy of one customer robbing another customer's capacity. And AMD, being a long time (graphics and semi custom chips at TSMC go way farther back than Zen 2) and now big time customer, shouldn't be in danger of losing anything.
“Sorry consumers, that wafer supply is going to customers with contracts.”
Yeah, about that...we just signed a new 4 year contract with a major OEM to deliver Intel systems because AMD can’t deliver volume...
I support AMD and all, but they won’t win like this. This contract was worth more than $100 million...
This is why Intel in my opinion is not in danger as long as it keeps its foundries. AMD covers the cutting edge technology. Intel is capable of offering the commodity quantity.
There are more mythical unpurchased wafers if AMD was able to design their products on multiple nodes. As an example, consider that 6nm EUV is in production now with compatible design rules.
Sorry to be blunt, but this is an inane suggestion. All newer nodes are capacity constrained already at the moment, even stuff at GloFo which nobody would call cutting edge anymore. And they are all constrained since demand outpaces planned supply in all areas. All those companies planned with less supply being sufficient and ordered and invested accordingly. For that to get fixed takes multiple years since it both involves investing in capacity increase as well as better capacity planning for the future. In my opinion it's only Apple that even gets close to predicting the actual demand for its products well, and Apple got a decade of knowledge to look back at for that.
Secondly, what's the point of buying Xilinx anyway?
I strongly suggest you to read the relevant articles and threads on that topic. In short, Xlinix inclusion expands AMD's TAM, most significantly datacenters with a focus on AI, ML and flexible specializations, automotive and so on. Xilinx and AMD already cooperate, and patents already show the possibility of including FPGA units in CPUs to offer custom acceleration in essentially real time. Xilinx is essentially the key for AMD to significantly expand beyond the confines of what's possible with just a combo of CPU and GPU.