The price of creating the fabs for a new node increases exponentially with every node. I remember when there were over 20 top node players. Now there are 3 if you aren't counting Intel out. If AMD had remained in the game there's no way they could have won.
I agree with respect to AMD's situation. I think that was the right decision for them then.
I'm saying that there is a difference between the two situations and there are geopolitical factors at play that mean the answer here is not as simple as splitting Intel into a foundry company and a chip design company, due to what we saw happen to AMD's foundry when they split.
I think it's a bit misleading to say that there are 3 top node players right now. Samsung, TSMC, and Intel, while from a business perspective do compete, from a technical perspective TSMC seems to have a fairly significant lead. Like you said, the price increases dramatically every node. If Intel were to split, why would that new foundry company bother investing a huge amount of money in nodes they can't yet produce at volume? Also, Samsung while close to TSMC in competition at this point, still produces an inferior product. There seems to be solid evidence of this in the power consumption comparison of AMD vs NVIDIA top end cards.[1]
My point being, if Intel were to follow the same road as AMD and split up, we could find ourselves in a situation that while better for Intel's business, would arguably leave the world worse off overall by leaving TSMC as the only viable manufacturer for high end chips.
