The article doesn’t say why the chips have a cost difference. The wafer cost of advanced nodes is ~$30k per wafer. Is the wafer cost different or is the yield different and hence the reason for the variance of 5-20%? All else being equal (same die size/design on same process) I suspect that a large part of the cost difference is yielded cost due to maturity of operations at the Arizona fab. Taiwan has had many years to optimize operations. You see this for any product initially when it moves to a new production site.
AMD CEO sees chips from TSMC's US plant costing 5%-20% more
211–220 of 761 posts
Re: AMD CEO sees chips from TSMC's US plant costing 5%-20% more
#212What 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…
> If Intel technically leapfrog TSMC and their 18nm is better than TSMC 20nm this year but;
Think you mean 1.8nm, aka 18A. We're way past 18nm and 20nm.
Re: AMD CEO sees chips from TSMC's US plant costing 5%-20% more
#213This is a crazy article. Its title is gonzo . She was clearly spitballing. All of Bloomberg is dumber by reading this title
Re: AMD CEO sees chips from TSMC's US plant costing 5%-20% more
#214What 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.
> Is Intel cooked?
IMHO the whole user-visible p-core/e-core thing on desktop CPUs is one of the worst decisions in the history of microprocessors. My gaming machines need to do double-duty as as build boxes, so they're just utterly unusable for me.
Re: AMD CEO sees chips from TSMC's US plant costing 5%-20% more
#215What 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.
I definitely get the vibe that they are rotten to the core from the same financialization strategies that have destroyed Boeing, TI, etc.
Yep, bingo.
They don't want to be competitive they want to bleed the company dry.
Re: AMD CEO sees chips from TSMC's US plant costing 5%-20% more
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
They just farmed out the compute section of Nova Lake to TSMC which is a sad statement (probably a good business decision, though).
They just farmed out the compute section of Nova Lake to TSMC which is a sad statement Apple farms out its displays to Samsung, a competitor. It's just how business is done.
I'm not even sure you could say Samsung is a competitor to Apple anymore in the phone space, at least in the US - I doubt there's much switching going on where people are frequently enough making a decision to change ecosystems, at least for existing customers.
Samsung's competition is Huawei, Xiaomi, Oppo, etc.
Re: AMD CEO sees chips from TSMC's US plant costing 5%-20% more
#217Earlier 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.
Everyone thought AMD was done. Intel is going through a difficult transition, but if they can make 18a /14a work and keep improving their GPU line we could be having the same conversation about AMD in 10 years.
I used to be a die-hard Intel customer, and recommended to everyone that asked me what to but, to buy Intel. That has changed. Now it's price/performance that matters more than brand. Intel also had a few missteps that made the brand lose a bit of its luster.
My most recent computer is AMD Ryzen based, but we just bought an Intel-based Dell for my partner because the price/performance was better than comparable AMD machines at the time, possibly due to a sale. But the Intel chip is a lot faster than my laptop, so now I'm a little bit jealous of the Intel machine.
Re: AMD CEO sees chips from TSMC's US plant costing 5%-20% more
#218A 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)?
Boards are low tech and low profit, does American company and workers even want to do it?
If there is a reason to want to in-house the fabrication of chips then it seems silly to not extend that to at least the boards that house them, otherwise we wind up still being reliant on an international supply chain which seems to defeat the purpose.
Even if it was just motherboards in particular and not others, that seems like a necessary step in securing the supply chain and if we only do that for national defense the benefits of competition likely won't extend to consumers that are still exposed to trade taxation.
Re: AMD CEO sees chips from TSMC's US plant costing 5%-20% more
#219The article doesn’t say, but I assume these are SOTA AI chips? If so, it’s a huge deal that American can build them. Another interesting point: > AMD and larger rival Nvidia Corp. recently gained a reprieve on restrictions imposed on shipments of some types of artificial intelligence accelerators to China. It’s still not clear how many licenses will be granted — or how long the companies will be allowed to ship the c…
They can make advanced chips in Arizona, but the bleeding edge is in Taiwan. Arizona can make TSMC’s 4nm process, but in Taiwan they’re doing 3nm and ramping up 2nm.
Progress on the 2nm facility (P3) in Arizona is apparently ahead of schedule, slated to be operational in 2027
Re: AMD CEO sees chips from TSMC's US plant costing 5%-20% more
#220The article doesn’t say, but I assume these are SOTA AI chips? If so, it’s a huge deal that American can build them. Another interesting point: > AMD and larger rival Nvidia Corp. recently gained a reprieve on restrictions imposed on shipments of some types of artificial intelligence accelerators to China. It’s still not clear how many licenses will be granted — or how long the companies will be allowed to ship the c…
That is their goal because they saw their restrictions had just made China accelerate domestic development instead.
Exactly what most AI researchers would have predicted, if you force like 30% of the worlds top ai researchers to use something other than CUDA, they’ll work on improving the tools for something other than CUDA.
It’s wild the same administrations would argue for restricting access to the US market for tariffs to strengthen domestic production, would not believe that severely restricting exports to the Chinese market would strengthen their domestic production