> in lieu of building better stuff from the ground up
To be fair, even if you have the best CPU and GPU designers, it's not as if you can call up TSMC and have them do a run of your shiny new processor on their latest (or even older) process. You can't fab them at home either.
That is correct. In my previous comment, for the sake of brevity, I deleted what I had written about Intel also being able to "call TSMC and have them doing a run of it's latest design", but it felt like that would have been belaboring the point that Intel isn't a rinky-dink chip operation, despite losing their commanding lead.
To be fair, even if you have the best CPU and GPU designers, it's not as if you can call up TSMC and have them do a run of your shiny new processor on their latest (or even older) process. You can't fab them at home either.