Intel had a monopoly-ish setup but through lack of vision and leadership laziness lost it
This is a tangential issue that has been discussed ad infinitum on this forum.
TSMC is effectively cost plus with prepay for advanced fab capacity and no competition.
I disagree. My understanding is that TSMC works with agreed upon pricing contracts. DoD cost plus contracts essentially determine a company's gross margin ahead of time, and then the contractor submits expenses which are reimbursed.
I agree defense and commercial aren't 100% comparable but I don't think that having a large PMO for a large enterprise also means they can't be successful. It's more nuanced than that but in short the Intel (leadership) culture has been poor for a long time.
For those who aren't aware, program management groups arise when projects get so complex you need someone (or often multiple people) aggregating the program progress measurement information and status because no one manager, except a senior executive who is viewed as not being hands-on, has the global project view. It also
assumes the development teams work in "silos" that don't interact effectively, so the program managers are also the keepers of the overall program progress information database. Of course with anything that involves a lot of people and expense in commercial and government projects, program management has become a major area of study, and that leads to formal methodologies, like Agile (the most popular). And once a subject begets formal methodologies, you have people who become experts in implementing the methodologies, and in my experience more often than not they aren't engineering or product development experts, they're mostly experts in the methodology.
Agile includes specific meeting structures, the most well-known called SCRUMs, which supposedly need people specially trained to run, called SCRUM Masters. I remember when these types of meetings became fashionable and they were often called "stand-up meetings", because they were supposed to be so short you didn't need to sit during them. That was a long time ago.
There are thousands of articles about Agile on the internet, and if you suffer from insomnia many of them can help you.
And, as you might imagine with thousands of highly compensated people performing a structured methodology, there are expensive software tools available for assisting the process. I've had success with Atlassian products, but there are others. (Note: articles about Agile tend to be focused on software, because as you might imagine there are vastly more software projects than chip projects in the world, but the concepts apply equally to software and hardware, and systems for that matter.)
So what's not to like? Why am I so cranky about it?
Agile does include some good objectives and concepts, like project-level formal databases and inter-generational learning. It's the implementation that I find annoying. I don't know what Nvidia does specifically, but many companies implement a separate management reporting hierarchy for program managers separate from the engineering and test organizations, supposedly to maintain the independence and integrity of the status information. (Like the Offices of Inspector General do for rule following in in US government agencies.) These program management reporting structures IMO actually work against inter-group information sharing and cooperation, and foster groups being silos rather than breaking down barriers. Also, program management groups become significant expense centers, and engineering managers become too inwardly focused, because the big picture is someone else's responsibility. One advantage of working for startups is that generally everybody is hands-on and has the big picture, so this bureaucracy isn't needed.
