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TSMC to make 4nm chips in Arizona for Apple, AMD, Nvidia

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Re: TSMC to make 4nm chips in Arizona for Apple, AMD, Nvidia

#181

Post by philliphaydon »

ajross wrote: post #143
philliphaydon wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where exactly does this “Han” stuff come from because most people in China are not actually han and those in Taiwan are not han.

I'm using what amounts to this definition, under which, yes, Taiwan and China are both majority Han: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_Chinese As stated, ethnicity is complicated and people everywhere want to have fights over these subjects. I won't engage, that's pointless.

Oh so it doesn’t actually have anything to do with blood or descent. Just cultural inheritance from han dynasty.

Re: TSMC to make 4nm chips in Arizona for Apple, AMD, Nvidia

#182

Post by mdp2021 »

huijzer wrote: post #111
formerly_proven wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intel's "10nm+" (non-EUV) processors compete rather fiercely with AMD's "5nm" (EUV) processors. The latter are weirdly not 2x better, not even close, on any metric. Hm.

Anecdotal evidence, but I do know that my 12th gen Intel can burn through 10% of battery in 10 minutes. That is to say that Intel is doing really poorly in power consumption.

> power consumption

It really depends on the model. I see, for example, Kaby Lake Y models with a TDP of 4.5W . Though, in general, yes, many report that Intel is not taking power consumption as a priority (which does not mean that they do not offer niche "ultra/extremely-low power" products).

Re: TSMC to make 4nm chips in Arizona for Apple, AMD, Nvidia

#183

Post by throwaway82028 »

Where in Arizona specifically? Have they even decided? Did the government decide to pay for the factory and enroll their for-profit prisoners to work for $0.10/per hour, and divert the remaining water supply to the factory? Arizona seems like a terrible choice for a chip factory, unless they've selected an area that gets natural water... and there aren't many.

Re: TSMC to make 4nm chips in Arizona for Apple, AMD, Nvidia

#184

Post by DeWilde »

throwaway82028 wrote: post #183

Where in Arizona specifically? Have they even decided? Did the government decide to pay for the factory and enroll their for-profit prisoners to work for $0.10/per hour, and divert the remaining water supply to the factory? Arizona seems like a terrible choice for a chip factory, unless they've selected an area that gets natural water... and there aren't many.

Prison slave labor doesn't seem ideal for building 4nm chips.

Re: TSMC to make 4nm chips in Arizona for Apple, AMD, Nvidia

#185

Post by huijzer »

api wrote: post #180
huijzer wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> or what is the price of a cutting edge fab these days? Intel says they're going for two factories of 20 bln indeed [1], Samsung for 17 bln in Taylor, Texas [2], and Micron claims to go for 100 bln (over time) in Clay, New York [3]. > Why invest 20 billion dollars [...] to create supply without demand? Why do we have to pay about 5 dollars per month for a VPS with only 1 vCPU, 1 GB RAM, and 10 GB storage? I'm certai…

Re your last point: cloud specs are already far beyond that. Cloud companies just pocket the difference. Cloud lets hosting companies benefit from Moore’s law, not you. Look at the machine you can build for one months’ typical AWS cost for a medium size SaaS company. Cloud also charges insanely high rates for bandwidth.

I doubt that. I was not talking about AWS. The price I mentioned is from Hetzner (by heart though, so I might be a bit off) which is pretty cheap. I have also tested multiple budget VPS providers and they all don’t dare to go below aforementioned price even though there is a lot of competition in the VPS market. Sometimes the more budget providers provide more vCPUs but in my tests those usually turn out to be extremely slow.

Re: TSMC to make 4nm chips in Arizona for Apple, AMD, Nvidia

#186

Post by mdp2021 »

stackbutterflow wrote: post #179
neonihil wrote: post #58

Poor Taiwanese people... their security insurance has just been cancelled. I wonder how many days after the first successful batches of chips coming out of the Arizona fab will China invade Taiwan. I do hope not, but realistically: with high-end chips being made on US soil, the US will have very little interest in protecting Taiwan, apart from maybe blocking China from also acquiring the tech.

People really blow out of proportion the importance of TSMC. Taiwan is valuable to the west because of its strategic location. TSMC could disappear tomorrow and the US will still have to defend it. The day Taiwan fall is the day the US loses its dominance.

> out of proportion

As if TSMC were not absolutely critical. Samsung declares "we'd like to be able to match their capabilities" in public statements.

You would need to develop more on the topic "a world without TSMC: solutions and fallbacks".

Re: TSMC to make 4nm chips in Arizona for Apple, AMD, Nvidia

#187

Post by 988747 »

rado wrote: post #96
neonihil wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm afraid there could be a hidden math behind this. As in: cost of a war with China vs. economic cost of China acquiring TSMC tech. As long as a war is cheaper, the US is protecting Taiwan. I'm no expert, but it usually comes down to something like this.

US loves expensive faraway wars

They love wars against small third world countries that are easy to win. War with China is probably the only one that US can actually lose.

Re: TSMC to make 4nm chips in Arizona for Apple, AMD, Nvidia

#188

Post by GrinningFool »

phpisthebest wrote: post #147
d3ckard wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't want to start a fight, but honestly, I only ever hear those types of arguments from people who don't use Apple hardware. People who do, in large majority, do it for two reasons: - build quality; - it mostly just works.

>>- build quality This is part of the marketing delusion, multiple people have done A/B testing to clearly show Apple Build Quality is either on par with the rest of the industry or in many specific examples WORSE, people that claim this often have ZERO experience with non-apple products or are comparing different classes like a budget consumer level Lenovo to the pro line of apple, of course of $500 unit will be of…

> I can also say i have never had an Android phone that I had to hold "correctly" in order for the antenna to work...

It feels like you're trying to revive decade-old flamewars here. FWIW, on my Pixel 5 (and 2 before that), if I reverse my phone (hold normally but with camera at bottom) I get a drop in both cellular and wifi signal strength - more so if I'm in a location with marginal signal to begin with.

Re: TSMC to make 4nm chips in Arizona for Apple, AMD, Nvidia

#189

Post by thorin »

thorin wrote: post #92

If the company is Taiwanese is there not still a concern with dependency on China and leaking of information. I realise it's important to have local manufacturing, but is this still essentially a "Chinese" company considering the disputed territory thing? Excuse my ignorance here about how such things work.

I was thinking about the PRC government having influence on Taiwan, I've no idea what their relationship is. Of course I have nothing against Chinese/Asian individuals, I just don't know what level of control China might seek to exert on Taiwan I guess.

Re: TSMC to make 4nm chips in Arizona for Apple, AMD, Nvidia

#190

Post by 988747 »

sofixa wrote: post #149
atmosx wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US has less "skin in the game" now that the TSMC core tech can be found on US soil - that's what the parent and me are referring to. Taiwan is not able to defend itself without US aid. ps. I'm not in the valley and it's not about "hawkish" views, it is pure power-play.

> Taiwan is not able to defend itself without US aid. If you look at a topographic map of Taiwan, it's not so obvious. Rough terrain coupled with the fact that an amphibious assault is needed to even get to Taiwan, and then the troops there need to be resupplied by sea and air (both of which require infrastructure which can be sabotaged), make Taiwan a very good defensive position. Of course it couldn't last forever…

Taiwan is a small island, it lacks lot of basic natural resources, like oil, iron ore, etc. One simple thing that China could do is to send their navy to cut off all the supply lines: it won't take long before Taiwan is degraded to third world country. Without the US navy to counter Chinese they do not stand a chance.

You're talking about it being hard to resupply Chinese troops over the air, how about resupplying the whole Taiwanese population?

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