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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

#151

Post by ginko »

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.

Ajinomoto the MSG company?

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

#152

Post by hampelm »

ginko wrote: post #151
FuriouslyAdrift wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ajinomoto the MSG company?

Apparently so! https://www.ajinomoto.com/innovation/our_innovation/buildupf...

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

#153

Post by jrimbault »

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.

Wild to learn this is the same company selling MSG (mono sodium glutamate) and build up film

- https://www.ajinomoto.com/innovation/our_innovation/buildupf...

- https://www.ajinomoto.com/brands/aji-no-moto

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

#154

Post by tensor »

jajuuka wrote: post #134
nottorp wrote: post #37

So are they going to try and spread this extra cost to customers worldwide? I'm fine with chips made in Taiwan.

Yeah this reads like an attempt to push the "made in America" narrative the admin wants. "Things will cost more but it's made in the US" And this is good because...why? It's not about broadening the supply chain to the consumers benefit. It's about avoiding the disaserous tariff strategy which the company isn't even paying in the first place.

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.

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

#155

Post by wbl »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #57
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.

The inability to make SOTA silicon chips domestically would be catastrophic in a event of a war in the east. TSMC is making fabs in the US, but they are not SOTA fabs. Those are kept in Taiwan.

Texas Instruments would like to say hi. You don't need SOTA chips for weapons, but exotic capabilities to process data and interact with the radio and infared world.

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

#156

Post by ksec »

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.

>What I really want to know, from someone who does know: Is Intel cooked?

I dont know if I count, but at least I wrote about TSMC before most if anyone knew much about TSMC. Which is when Apple brought them to spotlight.

It depends on how you define or count as being able to compete with TSMC?

If Intel technically leapfrog TSMC and their 18nm is better than TSMC 20nm this year but;

It is 30 - 40% more expensive.

It has lower Gross margin, or even negative margin.

It has much lower volume and capacity.

It is slower in ramping up capacity for future capacity planning.

It has limited IP range for its foundry.

It has less packaging options.

It does not have other high speed, low power or analog node options.

At what point does it count as competing? Because right now there isn't a single metric that Intel Foundry is winning. And they are feeling exactly the same as Global Foundry or AMD when Intel Foundry advancement is getting all the oxygens.

And even if they did, with a magic wand got them to compete with TSMC on every single one of the item above, in medium to long term there isn't a single chance Intel could compete with their current board and management.

TSMC leadership and management team is Nvidia's level great. I cant think of any other tech company that could rival them. Their only risk is China.

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

#157

Post by wbl »

ajross wrote: post #148
riehwvfbk wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

VLIW came with an implication that static scheduling would win out. The deeply OoO chips you see now have a very different architecture to support that: Itanium was much more a DSP like thing.

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

#158

Post by tensor »

DSingularity wrote: post #101
sebstefan wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tariffs don't work to bring manufacturing back home if they change every 2 weeks and are sure to disappear in 4 years You need to have reasonable certainty that your factory is going to be profitable on a 20+ year horizon to commit into building a production line. I don't understand how MAGAs don't get that.

You think a CPU factory won’t be profitable for 20 years? MAGA movement won’t listen to you here if we can’t even agree on basic facts.

A CPU factory may (because of high margins), but, for example, a car factory may not. A factory isn't just the labour, it also requires inputs, and tariffs that change weekly means that you can't rely on being able to source the inputs reliably. When your margins are smaller, random input costs can easily sink you.

If you want to bring back manufacturing you need to consider the entire supply chain, and make sure that inputs for whatever factory you are bringing in are secure and will be equal or cheaper in 20 years. These things need to be predictable.

Also, let's not pretend the MAGA movement listens to anything other than the propaganda.

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

#159

Post by tester756 »

_zoltan_ wrote: post #92
tester756 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Why is the government bailing them out then? There wasn't any bailout on them, what do you mean?

??? google://Intel chips act billions

How can you call it "Intel bailout" if it benefited many semico companies?

>The CHIPS Act primarily benefits semiconductor manufacturers and related industries by providing substantial funding for domestic chip production and research. Companies like Intel, TSMC, Samsung, and Micron have received significant grants and loans to expand or establish new manufacturing facilities in the United States.

>The act authorizes roughly $280 billion in new funding to boost domestic research and manufacturing of semiconductors in the United States, for which it appropriates $52.7 billion

>The act includes $39 billion in subsidies for chip manufacturing on U.S. soil along with 25% investment tax credits for costs of manufacturing equipment, and $13 billion for semiconductor research and workforce training, with the dual aim of strengthening American supply chain resilience and countering China

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

#160

Post by iforgotpassword »

cptaj wrote: post #139
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.

That has happened like 4 times with AMD already since I've been buying PCs

Yup, though it's been never such a good run for them by far. Granted things were moving much faster back then overall, but amd has been dominating for 7 years now.
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