31–40 of 294 posts
I remember reading that making chips requires a lot of water, something that Arizona is running out of, will this be a problem?
I remember reading that making chips requires a lot of water, something that Arizona is running out of, will this be a problem?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The iPhone SoC was made by Samsung in Austin for many years, so this has already happened. At the time everyone assumed that Apple wanted to diversify away from Samsung for other reasons which were not necessarily financial.
I bet the Samsung SoC's were a lot cheaper though as less sophisticated. Samsung -> TSMC got them away from a competitor, possibly cheaper (US -> Taiwan) and onto better roadmap. This is quite different and possibly a further sign of Apple spending to diversify supply chains.
Well that seems significant. Article says the chips in the 2nd fabs will be better than the first. And will meet all domestic US demand. Not sure what all that includes. I wonder how domestic the full supply chain is. If the US is relying on China for rare earth metals or something.
They will use EUV for the first factory (2024). And High-NA EUV (next gen from ASML) for the second factory in 2026.
4nm,3nm are just marketing terms, and means nothing, since they stopped naming nodes according to their actual size since 16nm.
I'm interested in the financial aspect of this. Assuming US Fabs are more expensive than in Taiwan that then must mean lower margins or higher prices. I wonder if Apple for example has said that they are prepared to pay a premium to ensure diversity of supply?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It’s good news geopolitically I actually think the opposite. It will be good for global supply chains but not geopolitics, because it reduces the reliance on Taiwan thus opening it up for assimilation.
Even if it were bad for Taiwan, geopolitics is about more than Taiwan. But I’m not sure this is bad for Taiwan: today, China can wipe out TSMC overnight. With these fabs there will be Taiwanese revenue streams coming from mainland US, which streams can support Taiwan government and military. Walk me through why it’s bad for Taiwan to be more economically diversified?
I remember reading that making chips requires a lot of water, something that Arizona is running out of, will this be a problem?
If I was conspiratorial, I’d say this serves as a excuse for building more pipelines for getting more water from other states.
edit: I think I might be wrong, looks like China has done significant waterworks across their country.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The US has no such fear about Taiwan. Taiwan has a fear that they will be invaded by China if they do not have industry that is too important to China to be interrupted by war.
Are you saying China is more likely to invade Taiwan if the destruction of TSMC’s Taiwanese fabs could be mitigated by buying the same products from TSMC’s US-based fabs?
I'm interested in the financial aspect of this. Assuming US Fabs are more expensive than in Taiwan that then must mean lower margins or higher prices. I wonder if Apple for example has said that they are prepared to pay a premium to ensure diversity of supply?
The iPhone SoC was made by Samsung in Austin for many years, so this has already happened. At the time everyone assumed that Apple wanted to diversify away from Samsung for other reasons which were not necessarily financial.
When Apple was dual sourcing chips from both Samsung and TSMC, the Samsung version of the A9 had a ~10% reduction in battery life compared to the TSMC version, although the performance was nearly identical otherwise.
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/iphone-6s-a9-samsung-vs-ts...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
TSMC has had a license to print money for a while now given how huge ASML’s backlog is.
Is ASML even going to be able to meet the demand created by all these fabs opening up across the US (and rest of the world)? The stories I've heard about what it takes to build a single machine would suggest to me that scaling up would be a huge feat and I could only imagine take years to accomplish. Then again, perhaps TSMC and their peers had predicted this kind of growth and already placed their orders long ago?