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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

#201

Post by bryanlarsen »

cogman10 wrote: post #84
vonneumannstan wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

Neither Micron nor GloFo are trying to keep up with state of the art, though. AFAICT that's limited to TSMC, Samsung, Intel and SMIC.

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

#202

Post by dboreham »

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)?

PCBs are relatively easy to make. But there's a whole supply chain of plastic bits and pieces, screws, materials, etc that the MBAs decided decades ago should come from the lowest cost region.

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

#203

Post by dathinab »

ergocoder wrote: post #180
aylmao wrote: post #174

I 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…

> My guess right now is that China will never catch up because [..]

The problem China is big enough to catch up just by it depending on itself + some cheap mass consumer market outlets to even further scale production.

Like they have 1408 Million people ~3times the US and their education system tries (at least of paper) to give everyone a chance to reach silence excellence iff (and only iff) they are noticeable above average (but also due to the form of their education system for people which certain kinds of approaches to thinking which is a major handicap they gave themself accidentally). Like either way with that population size, priority on catching up on chip production, willingness to steal science (through it's not like the US doesn't have a habit for that, too) it's just a matter of time until they have some truly genius people put into the right kind of position with the right kind of resources which will close the gap step by step.

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

#204

Post by gond »

ryao wrote: post #200
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’s chances of being a foundry for others are close to 0. It does not matter how good their process technology is. The problem is that Intel was an IP thief in the 80s and 90s; being a foundry requires trusting Intel with the exact IP Intel was known for stealing and nobody wants to take the risk.

Never heard of that one. Could you provide sources for the argument?

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

#205

Post by reaperducer »

zht wrote: post #149
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.

the MSG company also makes film for CPU manufacturing?

Large Asian companies tend to have their fingers in lots of different pies.

I haven't been to Asia in a while, but at one time, Hyundai made both computer chips and bulldozers.

Mitsubishi once made computer chips, and had a bank, and an art museum.

There are companies that own both department stores and subway systems.

America used to have a fair amount of this, but it was more common during the Industrial Revolution. Companies that owned both railroads and summer resorts. Oil wells and banks.

Even as recently as the 1990's there were companies that owned both pipelines and fiber optic networks. Toasters and television networks.

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

#206

Post by ajross »

wbl wrote: post #196
ajross wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even in VLIW, DRAM fetches are slow, instructions have variable latency and write-before-retire register collisions require renaming. Itanium would have gotten there at some point. OO isn't an optional feature for high performance systems and that was clear even in the 90's.

If you have that what's the VLIW getting you?

Fewer transistors and pipeline stages required for the decode unit, which is a real but moderate advantage. And it turned out the window was very narrow and the relative win got smaller and smaller over time. And other externalities where VLIW loses moderately, like total instruction size (i.e. icache footprint) turned out to be more important.

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

#207

Post by drcongo »

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.

As a data point of one, and one that really doesn't know much about chip fabs, I tend to see the "Intel Inside" sticker as a warning. I have no idea how they ever win back consumer trust.

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

#208

Post by matwood »

cjbgkagh wrote: post #76
epistasis wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

And to put some numbers on it, there are ~100k steel jobs in the US. So we have kneecapped a ton of other industries impacting millions all to maybe save 100k jobs.

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

#209

Post by mbreese »

FuriouslyAdrift wrote: post #107
hajile wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

They just farmed out the compute section of Nova Lake to TSMC which is a sad statement (probably a good business decision, though).

Has it been confirmed that the compute section is exclusively TSMC? My limited searching turned up nothing definitive and wasn't clear about if there would be a mix of 18A and TSMC N2 in all processors or if this was a contingency plan for increased volume or if this was a fallback in case 18A falls through.

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

#210

Post by honkycat »

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 needs to course correct.

I live in the area and know a LOT of intel fab workers.

The issue is not the workers: Intel has been captured by corporate raiders and toxic management.

They aren't interested in making chips or an innovative company. They just want to squeeze the juice out of the company until it is dry.

That is why it is so bad.

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