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AMD CEO sees chips from TSMC's US plant costing 5%-20% more

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Re: AMD CEO sees chips from TSMC's US plant costing 5%-20% more

#71
post #43
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tldr; yes they are kind of cooked

Why is the government bailing them out then? Is that just good money thrown after bad? Regardless, it seems like the company leadership should be gutted (the same could be said of Boeing) and the company given over to a new technically-grounded leadership team.

Throwing good money after bad sounds like something governments are prone to do. Dysfunctions tend to grow as those who benefited from corruption have more money now to spend on more corruption.

Since Intel has been mismanaged for so long I don’t know how many good lower level employees they managed to retain, I doubt much would be left if they properly cleaned house.

Re: AMD CEO sees chips from TSMC's US plant costing 5%-20% more

#72
post #43
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tldr; yes they are kind of cooked

Why is the government bailing them out then? Is that just good money thrown after bad? Regardless, it seems like the company leadership should be gutted (the same could be said of Boeing) and the company given over to a new technically-grounded leadership team.

>Why is the government bailing them out then?

There wasn't any bailout on them, what do you mean?

Re: AMD CEO sees chips from TSMC's US plant costing 5%-20% more

#73
post #26

A 5-20% markup on CPUs isn't the worst thing, but those still need a mobo to socket into and as far as I'm aware we still don't have much capability on the availability of boards. Are there any companies that are spinning up board production, or even just broader consumer electronics in general (arduinos, pis, general controllers and the like)?

Boards are low tech and low profit, does American company and workers even want to do it?

Worse - to manufacture usable boards, you need everything from the CPU socket and northbridge chip down to the dust-mote-sized discrete components that are mounted on it. Plus RAM, and ...

'Most all of which falls square into your "low tech and low profit", from a right-thinking* American company's PoV.

Not to say that a saintly American company could do much better, if it tried to swim uphill against America's vastly-higher cost of living (vs. the countries where most of that stuff's manufactured). And other problems beyond its control.

*profit-obsessed, generally

Re: AMD CEO sees chips from TSMC's US plant costing 5%-20% more

#75
post #43
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tldr; yes they are kind of cooked

Why is the government bailing them out then? Is that just good money thrown after bad? Regardless, it seems like the company leadership should be gutted (the same could be said of Boeing) and the company given over to a new technically-grounded leadership team.

They actually haven’t meet the requirements to get CHIPS funding, and they kinda got screwed with a military deal reducing the amount CHIPS allocated for them if they do.

That being said the government will likely not allow them to fail completely out of the foundry business for geopolitical reasons

Re: AMD CEO sees chips from TSMC's US plant costing 5%-20% more

#76
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised the US just doesn't fund a new fab company or consortium, like Japan did with Rapidus. But I guess "too much socialism"

I don't think the current Republican leadership has any opposition at all to handing over lots of government money to large business to do things! The problem is that they are far too incompetent and have zero clue about tech, and only understand real estate, that simplest of business that can be executed with mere lizard-brain intelligence. Tech is also about small startups disrupting large giants, which is complete…

It irks me that the current administration points to the steel industry doing well as an example of bringing jobs back to the US. Like great you’ve made an uncompetitive industry more profitable at the expense of every downstream user of that material. Doing the very opposite of what should be done. We’re getting to the point, and have passed it in a few industries, where it’s more expensive to buy raw inputs in the US than refined outputs from China. That is a level of insanity that cannot last.

Re: AMD CEO sees chips from TSMC's US plant costing 5%-20% more

#77
post #34

What I really want to know, from someone who does know: Is Intel cooked? Like, will they be able to manufacture chips that compete with TSMC? They used to be a crown-jewel of US tech. But it seems like every time I read the news, they are announcing a delay or shutting down some product.

> used to be a crown-jewel of US tech I feel like x86 itself is kinda legacy tech. So while AMD has made advancements, they're somewhat in the same boat as Intel. It seems like NVIDIA and Micron are the real "crown jewels" of US tech

> I feel like x86 itself is kinda legacy tech.

The impact of ISA is overrated, it's much more important that the ISA continues to grow and adapt as CPUs get larger.

Re: AMD CEO sees chips from TSMC's US plant costing 5%-20% more

#79
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intel is more than just fabs. AMD spun off digital foundry forever ago and just uses TSMC, no reason Intel couldn’t do the same. At this point their fabs are a liability. They have a new leader who’s from a semiconductor manufacturing background so I have some faith they’ll give up on the pursuit of next gen fabs and focus instead on their IP. There’s a huge opportunity in their GPU segment. They’ve gone from a joke…

> no reason Intel couldn’t do the same. Intel is doing the same. IDK if they are working on new fabs at this point, but the last few generations of chips from intel have used TSMC. My expectation is that Intel might still run fabs, but they'll be mostly contracting them out to people who want cheap ASICs and 10 year old fab tech.

How does this scale? TSMC can't literally be the only fab in the world...

Re: AMD CEO sees chips from TSMC's US plant costing 5%-20% more

#80

This is why tariffs matter. Despite the US having much higher wages, and likely property and infrastructure costs, manufacturing is only 5-20% more for these high tech products. Corporations outsourced not because they couldn't compete, but because why leave 10% on the table when we can reward the executives with that cash instead of the labor?

Blaming tariffs when it was the greed of Wall Street, private equity, hedge funds, "corporate raiders" that ultimately shipped manufacturing overseas. All of this under decades of psuedo-economic theory called neoclassical economics. Then this is taken further under neoliberal economic policy — "reagonomics" and "trickle down economics".

These greedy fucks in the 1970s sold out current generations so they could min/max profit for themselves and billionaire buddies. All of this at the expense of decimating: local manufacturing industries, environment, public safety nets, and sustainable living.

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