Yes I understand. My question to ponder was if Intel in hindsight should have skipped Rocket and just kept those 14nm foundries cranking out Comet parts until 10ESF was ready for the November 4 Alder Lake release? Doesn't seem like Rocket Lake was well received, actually Intel got a lot of heat from it, perhaps more than they would have received if they'd just stayed with Comet Lake until Alder. The tradeoff being not having to fund the backport and spent that money on more "forward-looking" endeavors.
My bad, I skipped some steps explaining the logic and that is my fault in explaining.
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Ian in a different video argued (April 1st, not an April fools joke or clickbait, that
”Rocket Lake is a Success for Intel 🚀💯”)
For many of the goals was keeping engineering teams busy and better learn the techniques to backport and use multiple processes for a design to better implement the dual TSMC but also Intel fabs future, yet also different foundries geometries even if it’s a single company technology.
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Did Rocket Lake sales by itself justify the expense? Ian says he does not know but we can argue this till the ”cows come home”, his point is Intel had multiple goals and the practice backporting and using multiple proces geometries, and even different company foundries is Intels new goal it is going to keep on doing. Judging it based off prior arguments of how Intel did business and judge success no longer applies for Intel is shifting strategies.
For several reasons which the April video does not full explain, one is the licensing its cores to 3rd parties like having a TSMC fab core with other IP attached that is not Intel, but also you may want to do something crazy like have a core on Intel 4 / 7 and possibly a third geometry simultaneously to maximize fab utilization with the same gen of core.
How Intel did business for 2 decades prior is no longer how Intel thinks it is going to do business in the future. In my own words here (not Ian’s)
Intel is getting weird. An understandable form of weird but not similar to Intel’s past tradition and culture and you have to look outside of how other companies design chips and not prior Intel’s methods.