You can get much more then a 5%-20% higher price from the kind of customers which really care about US production (I mean like government, CIA, NSA, which also get stuff like AMD systems with hyper threading disabled or special treatment wrt. management units in a CPU etc. I don't mean people caring for the US, for that target group, from what I have seen over the years, I guess, 5% can work 20% is tricky).
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
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
These things go in cycles and predate Ryzen by a lot. The late-model Pentium 4 chips were overheating power-guzzling garbage compared to the Athlon XP, and the Athlon 64 was a serious competitor to the Core 2 series. Ryzen is the current incarnation of AMD coming into vogue in desktop, but it's not like it took them 40 years to get there.
AMD had been gradually working their way up for a long time - the K6-III was an excellent CPU for the time.
The K6 line was a functional CPU but I wouldn't call them "excellent". The K6-III was basically a K6-2 with integrated cache, much the same way the Pentium III was a Pentium II with integrated cache. Despite the fact that AMD tried to replicate Pentium branding on the K6 line, they very much competed with Celerons in terms of market place and performance.
Indeed that's how they were marketed where I worked (Office Max) and were priced and spec'd comparably to the Celeron based offerings from IBM, HP, and Packard Bell.
Another issue with the K6 line was they were always a generation behind at a time when Intel was rapidly rolling out technologies like MMX and SSE. Intel coordinated with software manufacturers and had launch day examples that presented significant performance gaps between the CPU lines.
The K6 also had a shorter execution pipeline than Pentium so it struggled to hit 400mhz when Intel was approaching 500mhz. That's why the Athlon was such a shock because it arrived at 700mhz and stomped everything.
Looking back at the K6 line now, they likely perform far better then they did at the time because software eventually got around to supporting the hardware.
Re: AMD CEO sees chips from TSMC's US plant costing 5%-20% more
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're the only fab company in the world with the technology to allow Intel, AMD, and Nvidia to compete with each other on the playing field they do.
Right but at some point does Nvidia use their muscle and block TSMC from making chips for anyone else? The demand for GPUs is just increasing too rapidly for this to make sense.
That will 100% never happen. Nvidia is big, but not even close to a majority of TSMC revenue or loading. Apple, Intel, Qualcomm, etc...
In this case...TSMC is holding all the cards, not Nvidia
Re: AMD CEO sees chips from TSMC's US plant costing 5%-20% more
#174I see the point being made here, and yeah 5%-20% extra for what amounts to insurance against geopolitics isn't too bad, but doesn't this all fall apart when China catches up?
That 5%-20% is worth it now because no one else can fabricate competing chips. In a competitive market, 5%-20% can be the difference between having the price edge or not. I understand why the USA wants TSMC to manufacture outside of Taiwan, but perhaps it makes sense to move it not the USA but, say, Mexico?
Chinese car companies seem to be slowly but surely rolling American car companies in international markets with great value at low prices. The move in this market evidently isn't to move manufacturing away from Mexico at a 5%-20% increase in price.
In the chip market there's less immediate competition, but I can only imagine it'll come. Hopefully economies of scale would have removed this extra 5%-20% by the time China catches up?
Re: AMD CEO sees chips from TSMC's US plant costing 5%-20% more
#175Earlier 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…
Owning fabs is the only thing that makes Intel special IMO. There are dozens if not hundreds of fabless semiconductor companies. If everyone chases higher margin and ditches their fabs what kind of industry are we left with? One giant fab company like TSMC? That sounds healthy!
>Owning fabs is the only thing that makes Intel special IMO.
Maybe if you ignore they're the only player with remotely competitive discrete GPU IP for graphics and AI, after the Nvidia and AMD duopoly.
Re: AMD CEO sees chips from TSMC's US plant costing 5%-20% more
#176What 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.
Some of us have been pointing out Intel was in a systematically impossible situation even back when they had that process advantage, now almost a decade ago.
Quite simply imagine being dropped in as CEO of Intel in 2015. Could you have prevented the malaise of today?
Re: AMD CEO sees chips from TSMC's US plant costing 5%-20% more
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
What would be good for the rest of the world is if there were SOTA chips that were not produced by the US nor Taiwan. Frankly, even the ones produced in Taiwan are under US control. The world needs a healthy diversified CPU/GPU chip market. At least there is ARM on the CPU side, but it's not nearly enough.
Where could it be? The places with abundant energy are where these things establish. US is about at the lower limit. Korea, Taiwan, Japan. China has SMIC and Huawei. But Europe doesn’t have enough energy to run air conditioning. They’d struggle to add more industry. India has power shortages. Africa isn’t reliable. Australia? South America too unstable.
That's a good point. I don't think it's a good idea for corporations to come in and set up stable energy sources to then hoard it themselves. Would be similar to Amazon setting up shop in Cartolandia. And long time investment plans like China's Belt and Road Initiative don't necessarily benefit the host country as much as it benefits the builder.
Branching out supply chains and industry is a big problem to solve effectively because it touches so many different pieces.
Re: AMD CEO sees chips from TSMC's US plant costing 5%-20% more
#178Earlier 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.
Because there's a strategic benefit and the cost is practically negligible compared to the cost of this section of the economy going away.
That is the political calculation, not "throw good money after bad" kind of economics 101.
Re: AMD CEO sees chips from TSMC's US plant costing 5%-20% more
#179Capital expenditures are the dominant cost for semi fabs. Labor is actually relatively small. For example, "just" a tester machine, which tests parts before final, cost $5-10M each, and there are usually rows of these machines as far as the eye can see.
Re: AMD CEO sees chips from TSMC's US plant costing 5%-20% more
#180I see the point being made here, and yeah 5%-20% extra for what amounts to insurance against geopolitics isn't too bad, but doesn't this all fall apart when China catches up? That 5%-20% is worth it now because no one else can fabricate competing chips. In a competitive market, 5%-20% can be the difference between having the price edge or not. I understand why the USA wants TSMC to manufacture outside of Taiwan, but…
With China, the issue isn't really the quality of the product. It's the geopolitical issues.
Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and other countries even Philippines and Vietnam don't want to depend too much on China. A lot of island disputes and so on and so forth.
My guess right now is that China will never catch up because Europe, US, Australia, and many other developing countries will avoid depending on China critically. This doesn't mean 0% would buy from China but it'll never become a critical dependency.