Using raw median income is pointless when comparing work life quality. GDP PPP is simply a better measure though imperfect.
AMD sold their fabs for a variety of reasons including loss of design leadership to Intel Core designs, huge debt load from overpaying (at the time) for ATI, loss of node leadership, financial strain that almost led to full bankruptcy, trend towards fab cost needing multiple customers to profit, and a focus on chip design.
Further more, your point about chip nodes racing towards the bottom does not support why Intel chose to keep its fabs and won until they got stuck on 14nm.
It’s weird how you describe advanced chip manufacturing as a commodity when there is only one company in the world capable of producing 3nm chips at scale and make a profit. Furthermore, TSMC is worth more than AMD, Intel, and ARM combined. Up until recently, it was the most valuable company in the semiconductor industry before the Nvidia run.
The logical conclusion is that advanced chip design takes a tremendous amount of skill and is not a commodity. Arguably, chip design is more of a commodity in 2024 since many vendors are capable of producing fast CPUs, GPUs, NPUs, SoCs, network chips, etc.
AMD sold their fabs for a variety of reasons including loss of design leadership to Intel Core designs, huge debt load from overpaying (at the time) for ATI, loss of node leadership, financial strain that almost led to full bankruptcy, trend towards fab cost needing multiple customers to profit, and a focus on chip design.
Further more, your point about chip nodes racing towards the bottom does not support why Intel chose to keep its fabs and won until they got stuck on 14nm.
It’s weird how you describe advanced chip manufacturing as a commodity when there is only one company in the world capable of producing 3nm chips at scale and make a profit. Furthermore, TSMC is worth more than AMD, Intel, and ARM combined. Up until recently, it was the most valuable company in the semiconductor industry before the Nvidia run.
The logical conclusion is that advanced chip design takes a tremendous amount of skill and is not a commodity. Arguably, chip design is more of a commodity in 2024 since many vendors are capable of producing fast CPUs, GPUs, NPUs, SoCs, network chips, etc.