All these press releases remind me of GM's statements of about 6 to 7 years ago. Ford echoed them and so did the others. Who will bail out the companies with the aged and old management this time?
Unfortunately, this seems to happen to all companies, management renewal is a painful thing. Just ask AMD.

This reminds you of GM in 2006? Really? Why? What do you mean 'bail out'? Intel 2013 is not GM/Ford 2007. They are making money hand over fist - at 58-60% gross margins. GM never even came close to that number in the last 30 years. You can make any argument you want about AMD - but at no point in the last 6-7 years has AMD's business and financial model even approached that of Intel. Don't make the mistake of putting these two semi companies in the same box - they are worlds apart in financial metrics.

Congratulations to Intel, Dainippon, Sumco and MI. Fantastic progress so far - and we hope there will be even more progress to show at the Fall IDF this year. Getting CD uniformity down to 1.2nm 3-sigma across a 450mm wafer is very good indeed.

If Intel is going to make 450mm wafers with broken edges, I suspect their wafer cost will no decrease at all.

Being first as we've seen many times over with Intel, doesn't mean being the best or necessarily even good, as Ivy Bridge and tri-gate proved.

This is an important step... a patterned wafer is fundamental to the equipment manufactuers--they must have a patterned wafer to work with in development the rest of the (many) tools required. Since EUV and/or quad-patterned (optical) lithography isn't 450mm ready and won't be for some time, nano-imprint is saving the day.

But make no mistake, there's still a long haul ahead to get to a real integrated circuit, let alone to achieve high volume manufacturing. This is also a big win for Molecular Imprints. An article on the impact of this announcement can be found at the industry's website tracking 450mm developments:
http://450mm.com/?p=1235