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

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

#141

Post by alexjplant » Thu, Jul 24, 2025, 4:04 PM UTC

Arainach wrote: post #122

rich_sasha wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not into hardware but I remember when AMD was sneered at, and all real CPUs were Intel. Then Ryzen happened. My meta conclusion is that its super hard to tell when someone is done, and it can change quickly. Or not. Sometimes it if looks like terminal decline, it simply is terminal decline.

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.

The last time I built a PC was around a decade ago but I always bought AMD simply because they were cheaper for equivalent performance in the middle. Getting an adequate CPU for hundreds of dollars cheaper than the higher-end Intel chips meant that I could afford the second-highest-end GPU that NVidia had at the time. This made a lot more sense for gaming workloads as $300 towards the GPU had a much bigger effect on frame rate than $300 towards the CPU.

These days iGPUs run pretty much any game I care to play so it doesn't matter.

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

#142

Post by scruple » Thu, Jul 24, 2025, 4:07 PM UTC

vonneumannstan wrote: post #115

cogman10 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They aren't. Samsung comes in a close second in terms of tech. GloFo is also still floating around though lagging pretty bad AFAIK. Micron has it's own fabs that they are actively developing (in fact, they are building new facilities right now). What TSMC is is cutting edge. That's why everyone that needs top performance uses them.

Only one in their class then.

They are now but they weren't always. I don't know much about hardware these days, I gleefully walked away from embedded development over a decade ago, but what I believe is that you don't really want to forecast to hard on any single player too far into the future.

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

#143

Post by mywittyname » Thu, Jul 24, 2025, 4:10 PM UTC

lukevp wrote: post #56

timmg wrote: 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.

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…

> At this point their fabs are a liability.

Intel outsourcing their core product line is also a massive liability. It's just a different kind of liability.

I personally think the world's reliance on TSMC indicates that fabs are critically important infrastructure. And operating a world class one provides a company with a ton of leverage with governments and other businesses.

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

#144

Post by mywittyname » Thu, Jul 24, 2025, 4:12 PM UTC

antonkochubey wrote: post #136

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

>There are dozens if not hundreds of fabless semiconductor companies. How many of them develop high performance x64-64 cores?

Right now, it makes no sense to do so because they couldn't compete with Intel.

But if Intel joins the fabless club, all of the sudden the playing field gets much more level.

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

#145

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jul 24, 2025, 4:13 PM UTC

cm2012 wrote: post #15

RUnconcerned wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shipping the chips back to Taiwan to be packaged so they can then be shipped back to the United States for sale is a positive? What are you talking about?

Ocean shipping is very very cheap. Less cost in money and energy to ship a chip across the ocean than for you to drive to best buy to buy the phone its in.

[deleted]

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

#146

Post by runako » Thu, Jul 24, 2025, 4:14 PM UTC

linuxftw wrote: post #123

dagmx wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These plants have nothing to do with tariffs though? They were in development prior to any tariffs and were partially funded by the CHIPS act. If anything, that’s the opposite of tariffs…

My point is, the cost of goods being produced in the US is not dramatically higher, as outlined in the article. Even very basic tariffs would level the playing field and bring economic benefits domestically, without a major impact to the consumer.

Context is important here: a 20% increase in price to consumer is not going to be perceived as "not dramatically higher". Focusing on tech for a moment, we are discussing this in the context of a good that normally decreases in price annually suddenly getting more expensive.

For the sake of argument, if all goods increase in price by 20%, Americans are going to have the experience of being worse off than they were before.

This is the largest tax hike on Americans in modern times (possibly ever?). While it may take a while for people to understand the impact of policy, people generally do not like large tax hikes. I don't think it's a stretch to think people will not like this tax increase, either.

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

#147

Post by benreesman » Thu, Jul 24, 2025, 4:15 PM UTC

vFunct wrote: post #46

echelon wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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"

Seniconductor manufacturing was effectively centrally planned via SEMATEC and before that via de facto stewardship by things like the the Labs and later Intel as a vehicle for national policy.

This neat little dichotomy between "free market capitalism" and "centrally planned socialism" is a cute story but also complete fiction. In "capitalist" countries the government basically always runs R&D during any period of time when the stakes are high, and in "communist" countries there are always markets, and they are always sanctioned to some degree.

All of the foundational progress for American leadership in high technology was centrally planned and administered, all of it one way or another: through ATT, through NASA, through the DoD, through the universities. Value creation occurs under the watchful eye of the DoD.

Once in a while we go on an orgy of extractive wealth transfer like now, instead of creative innovation like usually, and the top industry guys always fuck it up. And on cue, yeah this is going great.

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

#148

Post by ajross » Thu, Jul 24, 2025, 4:16 PM UTC

riehwvfbk wrote: post #94

tester756 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ISA is irrelevant It's like saying that programming language syntax/keywords are better than the other. Everything is about compiler, lib, runtime, etc. https://chipsandcheese.com/p/arm-or-x86-isa-doesnt-matter Also some people say that RISC-V is the way to go

And yet Itanium flopped.

But not because of its ISA. I mean, to first approximation everything is a "flop" in semiconductor architectures (or really in tech in general). The population of genuinely successful products is a tiny fraction of the stuff people tried to sell.

In this particular case: ia64 leaned hard into wide VLIW in an era where growing transistor budgets made it possible to decode and issue traditional instructions in parallel[1]. The Itaniums really were fine CPUs, they just weren't particularly advantageous relative to the P6 cores against which they were competing, so no one bought them.

[1] In some sense, VLIW won as a matter of pipeline architecture, it only lost as a design point in ISA specs. Your Macbook is issuing 10 arm64 instructions every cycle, and it doesn't need to futz with the instruction format to do it.

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

#149

Post by zht » Thu, Jul 24, 2025, 4:19 PM UTC

FuriouslyAdrift wrote: post #121

seangrogg wrote: post #22

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)?

Ajinomoto (Japanese company) is nearly the sole manufacturer of build up film need for CPU manufacturing (for about 30 years). There's all kinds of stuff like this in supply chains. Low profit, high barrier to entry critical items.

the MSG company also makes film for CPU manufacturing?

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

#150

Post by klooney » Thu, Jul 24, 2025, 4:21 PM UTC

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #103

timmg wrote: 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.

Intel made mistakes. TSMC can make mistakes. TSMC is also in geopolitically risky Taiwan. I'm not counting out Intel yet. They're also very unpopular online so it's tough to find solid unbiased info about them. Like is the stink about 18A true or do people just want to hate on Intel?

Yeah, TSMC reliance may look crazy by 2030