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A look inside TSMC

economist.com

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Re: A look inside TSMC

#61

Post by throw0101a »

taspeotis wrote: post #19

The article mentions it obliquely but fewer companies than ever can fab at the “edge.” [1] And Intel has faltered somewhat. I can’t think of how there is going to be a new entrant to the market that competes with the current three’s processes. [1] https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/technology_node#Leading_edge_tr...

> I can’t think of how there is going to be a new entrant to the market that competes with the current three’s processes.

There will probably be a continuing growth of demand for making chips, so I wouldn't be surprised to see some folks get into the market with "old" tech. So it's unlikely any one will jump in right at the bleeding edge, they may work their way up to more modern processes over time.

I could see a niche of 'home grown' fabs in various countries / regions that server local demand that is paranoid about supply chain security.

Depending on how automated you make the fabs, I wonder if it would be possible to sell "limited runs" of chips to people, kind of like book self-publishing but with VHDL/Verilog.

Re: A look inside TSMC

#62

Post by lainga »

taspeotis wrote: post #19

The article mentions it obliquely but fewer companies than ever can fab at the “edge.” [1] And Intel has faltered somewhat. I can’t think of how there is going to be a new entrant to the market that competes with the current three’s processes. [1] https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/technology_node#Leading_edge_tr...

You know what I like to think about sometimes: all of TSMC's facilities, except for one each in Washington and Singapore, are easily in range of mainland A2/AD weapons. Even if Taiwan is unhit, the silicon will be no good if it can't get off the island.

Re: A look inside TSMC

#63

Post by temac »

Fordec wrote: post #52
temac wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Risc V is made to be boring. It does nothing to "challeng[e] existing assumptions about Von Neumann architectures and instruction sets". It is also very unlikely to become the next high perf ISA for tons of reasons, it is more suited for embedded stuff.

Risc V doesn't touch on Von Neumann architectures. That could be addressed by tech like Memristors as an example but to put it lightly, they're not ready yet. But the belief that to be a competitive fab house you have to churn out high performance chips is in itself one of the existing unquestioned assumptions of chip manufacture which may not pan out in the longer term. The idea of the generic CPU may very well beco…

> The idea of the generic CPU may very well become seen as a luxurious, wasteful idea once Moore's law properly runs out of road in a few years. Specialization will breed new ISAs, even boring ones.

This is already the case and I suspect the current general structure will continue mostly unchanged: you will still need your general purpose high perf generic CPU for the mostly the same workloads we use them for today (and that's including to run legacy software), and for now there is kind of only one broad successful approach to design them (for mass produced things, at least). Then in embedded chips you can use basically anything, and you also have way less stable ISA in chips more dedicated to massively parallel compute.

Even with JIT you can not really multiply the basic GP CPU ISA ad infinitum, because for bulk system code JIT is not that viable (even if it is for big apps). Also, this is basically attempting to deport the stable interface problem in another layer, but you can not necessarily remove all the features that made it possible to have a stable ISA, given tons of them are also needed for perfs. And they are since a very long time. So for even just semi-fast general purpose CPUs, I suspect the race is mostly over (hypothesis: higher level computer topology unchanged -- if you switch to e.g. chip stacking, things could change more)

For all the other cases, and you are right they are also massively important, things will continue to evolve in tons of directions.

Re: A look inside TSMC

#64

Post by redis_mlc »

di4na wrote: post #26
nordsieck wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Western companies tend to look at the ROI as a percentage, while Chinese businessmen at the actual profit amount. Warren Buffett is actually pretty famous for optimizing for "free cash flow".

Any CFO worth its money would tell you to optimise for free cash flow. As my ex CFO used to repeat (and we were working for big co tm). "Cash is King". She tought ne a lot. Also RoI is a measure of time. Not money or profit. Time until you get your money back.

No, it's not "Time until you get your money back."

Here's a link: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/returnoninvestment.asp

ROI = Return on Investment. Most people in practice calculate that in excel as a percentage of profit over their capital investment.

Smart business people know there's more important things than a dimensionless number, but hey, Peter Principle and "math is hard." See Black-Scholes and the 2008 recession for how wrong that can go.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black%E2%80%93Scholes_model

I used to do math tutoring for economics students. Boy, that was an eye-opener! I had to explain over and over what independent variables meant, and how that affected for example derivatives. As bad as p-hacking and the social sciences.

Econ Student: "Can I just plug these lists of numbers in the formula and write down the answer?"

Me: "What are the numbers measuring? Are they independent?"

Econ Student: "No idea."

Re: A look inside TSMC

#65

Post by perlgeek »

The article ended right when it promised to get interesting.

It set up the stage with the construction of the fab, the market, the international tension -- and then nothing.

I would've really loved some insight about what the international influences mean for day to day operation, some technical challenges etc.

(Or this would be the perfect setup for a murder mystery. One of the key engineers is found dead, and her ex-boyfriend, US and Chinese spies all could have a hand in it. My fantasy running wild again... :D )

Re: A look inside TSMC

#66

Post by ant6n »

PhantomGremlin wrote: post #20
dotnetcore wrote: post #4

TSMC = 80% foreign investment. its hardly Taiwanese at this point...

TSMC is a Taiwanese company. The people in the C-suite are Taiwanese. The fabs are in Taiwan. The people who operate the fabs are in Taiwan. The people who do the R&D for all the processes live in Taiwan. The people who create the Intellectual Property live in Taiwan. Analogously, many decades ago Mitsubishi Group, a Japanese company, bought Rockefeller Center. Ha ha. Good luck with that. If things didn't work out it…

> It's not like before WWII when the Japanese bought one of the elevated subway lines in NYC and disassembled it for steel and shipped it back home to build battleships.

Is there a source for this story?

Re: A look inside TSMC

#67

Post by PhantomGremlin »

ant6n wrote: post #66
PhantomGremlin wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TSMC is a Taiwanese company. The people in the C-suite are Taiwanese. The fabs are in Taiwan. The people who operate the fabs are in Taiwan. The people who do the R&D for all the processes live in Taiwan. The people who create the Intellectual Property live in Taiwan. Analogously, many decades ago Mitsubishi Group, a Japanese company, bought Rockefeller Center. Ha ha. Good luck with that. If things didn't work out it…

> It's not like before WWII when the Japanese bought one of the elevated subway lines in NYC and disassembled it for steel and shipped it back home to build battleships. Is there a source for this story?

Is there a source for this story?

My 12th grade US history teacher. Circa 1973.

I found a Wikipedia discussion, but it is by no means dispositive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRT_Sixth_Avenue_Line#Allegati...

The NY Times also touched on it: https://www.nytimes.com/1995/06/11/nyregion/fyi-811695.html

Re: A look inside TSMC

#68

Post by dragonwriter »

PhantomGremlin wrote: post #67
ant6n wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not like before WWII when the Japanese bought one of the elevated subway lines in NYC and disassembled it for steel and shipped it back home to build battleships. Is there a source for this story?

Is there a source for this story? My 12th grade US history teacher. Circa 1973. I found a Wikipedia discussion, but it is by no means dispositive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRT_Sixth_Avenue_Line#Allegati... The NY Times also touched on it: https://www.nytimes.com/1995/06/11/nyregion/fyi-811695.html

> I found a Wikipedia discussion, but it is by no means dispositive:

It seems fairly so on the claim that Japan bought the el, dismantled it, and shipped the steel home; it is less dispositive on the question of whether some of the steel either reached Japan or freed up other steel for shipment to Japan when it was dismantled by it's actual civic owners, who had no connection to Japan.

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