David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…No way. Yeah, they were second sourcing it. AMD was the second source on the 186 and the 286. I think, maybe before that, too. They have a major contract in place with AMD to be the second source for the 286. As you said, they're working with the 386. They knew and Andy knew that the 386 was going to be something special. While the only other iterations on the x86 processor have been increased speed and more transistor density, the 386 processor was going to be the first 32-bit processor. Everything before that was 16-bit. This was going to be a major, major, step-change in the power and functionality of the brains of the personal computer. They're getting out of the memory business. They have this huge strategic decision to make about what to focus on. Andy knows he's got this special product. They come up with what ends up being the brilliant strategic decision. Obvious and in hindsight, to say, "No, we're not going to second source this. We're going to be the primary and sole source. You want a 386 processor? You've got to buy. You want a 32-bit x86 compatible architecture processor? There's only one place to get that and that is directly from Intel." It's amazing what happens. You even looked to how this translates all the way to today. I want to pause for a moment, David, and come back. It's crazy what happens because I did enough research on this part and I'm curious. You think about today, there are basically two types of chip companies. There's fabless and there are companies that have their own fabs like Intel. When I say like Intel, I pretty much mean Intel. You've got the TSMCs of the world, Samsung who's designing. This time, all these ARM-based chips that are designed by these fabless companies and then built in a separate chip fab in a commodity way that is decoupled—separate designers from the manufacturer—Intel to this day, still manufactures 100% of their designs themselves.…

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