I see what she did here. That's just for silicone, not for the ready to use product. I expect the final US-made CPU available for sale cost to jump significantly higher than 20%
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
#1825-20% more expensive? That's way cheaper than I expected. That's pretty good, especially for 4nm.
Even 5% more expensive means 80% of people buy the taiwan version for $475 instead of $500. 20% more expensive and 99.9% of people buy the $500 one instead of the $600 one. Never make the mistake of falling for people's virtue signalling and pay attention instead to how they actually apply those virtues (spoiler: saving money is the #1 acted upon virtue, being far stronger than any other).
This is the manufacturing cost, not the retail MSRP.
_Never_ make the mistake of assuming a market is perfectly efficient and any corporate savings along the way will be passed along to the consumer.
When Apple or Google comes along and buys out next year's total TMSC output, that 80% of people will just have to buy whatever is on the shelf at the time.
Re: AMD CEO sees chips from TSMC's US plant costing 5%-20% more
#183What 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.
they seem very cooked
I think they have a lot of potential in the dedicated GPU space, but that is a consumer market so profit margins are smaller and they have potential in the low-to-mid-end market so even less margin. It's really sad as the competition there would help consumers.
the sad thing is, it was predictable. Wintel and other monopoly-like deals/situations had removed the need to compete/stay on edge from Intel. They then noticed it too late and made mistakes when trying to course correct/having to much innovation dept to effectively course correct screwed them up big
At the same time AMD again and again re-invented and optimized their development flow and experimented with alternative approaches and did not shy away from cooperating with TSMC and implicitly through that Nivdea and other (sometimes also Intel). Intel on the other hand AFIK got stuck on a approach where they had a edge over AMD but which was seem to have turned out to be somewhat of a dead end.
what is interesting is how TSMC has so far avoided the same kind of trap
- by having competing customers and having deep research co-operations with all the customers they brought competition and innovation back into a monopoly in a round about way like position
- having limited capacity of the newest tech which their competing customers bit for bring in monetary insensitive to innovate
- and them being somewhat of a life line for their country put a lot of pressure onto them to not break their own innovation machine for greed (e.g. by intentionally not expanding the availability of the latest node even when they technically could)
Re: AMD CEO sees chips from TSMC's US plant costing 5%-20% more
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 tha…
My son-in-law works for a domestic truck manufacturer (semis, not pickups). Orders are down because nobody knows how much the order will cost, because of tariff uncertainty.
Yes, nothing kills business activity more than uncertainty. High prices can be planned for and dealt with. Constantly fluctuating ones with no upper bound cannot.
Re: AMD CEO sees chips from TSMC's US plant costing 5%-20% more
#185What 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 h…
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Re: AMD CEO sees chips from TSMC's US plant costing 5%-20% more
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
American defensive posture can center around Hawaii and mainland USA will be just fine.
Sure if we just compelety ignore our treaty partners in Japan, Philipines, India, Korea and US territories in Guam, Samoa, Marianas... or bases like Diego Garcia.
But what have they done for Trump lately?
Re: AMD CEO sees chips from TSMC's US plant costing 5%-20% more
#187What 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's fab issues are overstated in my opinion. They were stuck on 14nm for a very long time because they bit off too much with 10nm. People act like that means ALL research in nodes smaller than 10nm must have stopped, but that's simply not true as research into tech and materials needed for smaller nodes happens in parallel. It's also noteworthy that GAAFET being a complete redesign of major parts of the manufactu…
I think their problem is less about material knowledge to shrink nodes but about development tooling to make chip design more efficient, scalable and allows experimenting with more new approaches/allows larger shifts without planing years ahead for it.
TSMC by collaborating with many different customers with different needs had a lot of insensitive to not just create powerful tooling for one kind of CPU design approach but also being very flexible to allow other approaches for other needs. And AMD has repeatedly interrelated on their whole tool chain and dev. processes for many years while Intel was somewhat complacent with what they had.
And a bunch of the recent issues with CPUs internally dying sound a lot like miss-design issues which tooling should have coughed (instead of looking like fundamental tech/production issues).
Re: AMD CEO sees chips from TSMC's US plant costing 5%-20% more
#188What 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 h…
They don’t really need to be better than TSMC, they need to be one node behind and roughly competitive on price / performance.
The first year of TSMCs latest process goes to Apple. And the second few years are booked completely full. There is room for Intel if they can just get in the ballpark of TSMC.
Re: AMD CEO sees chips from TSMC's US plant costing 5%-20% more
#189> “I think the economics of it are we have to consider the resiliency of the supply chain, I think we learned that during the pandemic — the idea that you think about your supply chains not just by the lowest cost, but also about reliability, about resiliency, and all those things. I think that’s how we’re thinking about U.S. manufacturing,” [AMD CEO Lia Su] said to Bloomberg’s Ed Ludlow.
This almost sounds verbatim what U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent told Bloomberg yesterday, so take the headline phrase “worth it” in that context.
Re: AMD CEO sees chips from TSMC's US plant costing 5%-20% more
#190Earlier 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.
A big part of AMD's turnaround was going fabless. I think the big fear here is that if Intel does the same, there won't be much competition left in the fab space. Is Samsung still competitive with TSMC?
> A big part of AMD's turnaround was going fabless.
Part of it, sure, but they were still fabless and in the ditch before Zen. Unless you're referring to going with TSMC instead of GloFo as going fabless.