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Apple will soon receive 'made in America' chips from TSMC's Arizona fab

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Re: Apple will soon receive 'made in America' chips from TSMC's Arizona fab

#241

Post by caspper69 »

pjc50 wrote: post #182
bee_rider wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also a lot of US STEM grads have their skills wasted in unproductive fields, like the ad business.

If it's so unproductive why does it pay so well?

These companies hire all of these exemplary graduates and pay them so well because (1) they are flush with cash because businesses are essentially held hostage to adtech; and (2) so that they won't go out into the world and build systems that make them irrelevant, as smart people are wont to do from time to time. Someone on your payroll doesn't have the time nor the inclination to knock you from your pedestal.

Why else would Google need 182,000 employees? Or how about Facebook with 67,000? Microsoft clocks in at a whopping 228,000, and Apple at 161,000.

These are staggering numbers of employees. So many, in fact, that it would be an exercise in futility to try and manage so many for the number of products they offer, especially Google and Meta.

It's cheaper to make busywork than risk the cash cow.

Re: Apple will soon receive 'made in America' chips from TSMC's Arizona fab

#242

Post by Tade0 »

cbozeman wrote: post #217
LittleTimothy wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think about this quite often. What I'd really like to study at some point is: How much more does the receptionist at JP Morgan's head quarters make than the receptionist at Walmart's headquarters? Because fundamentally I think there is an effect where the people in proximity to lots of money earn more. Obviously the Walmart receptionist and the JP Morgan receptionist are doing basically the same job. But the JP Mor…

It's not the proximity to money, it's the real estate tied to doing that job. If you want to be the receptionist at Goldman Sachs at their headquarters at 200 West Street, New York, NY 10282, then you're looking at paying $616,250 for a 556 sq. ft. studio apartment. And that's just the housing. If you want to live within 30 minutes of work, you can get that number down to $400,000, but that's also a studio apartment.…

Sure, but real estate is expensive in those places for a reason - it being typically because a sufficient number of people with lots of money want to buy it.

Re: Apple will soon receive 'made in America' chips from TSMC's Arizona fab

#243

Post by pdabbadabba »

coconut08 wrote: post #57
ttul wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that there may be a 25% chance that China invades Taiwan by 2030, having the ability to package SOTA chips in the US by 2027 seems "soon enough".

where did you get that number from

I'm not sure where GP's 25% comes from. But there have been various assessments that China intends to "reunify" with Taiwan by 2030. [1] Xi Xinping has also instructed the PLA to be prepared to invade by 2027. [2]

If you then ask yourself whether China would rather invade during the Trump administration (with its tendencies towards isolationism and "deal making") or roll the dice on a subsequent U.S. administration, you might find yourself thinking that the odds actually seem considerably higher than 25% that this could happen in the next four years.

To the extent that this narrative comes via the U.S. intelligence/defense community, one has to assume that it may biased towards exaggerating the threat. I for one hope that is the case, since I do not want to see a U.S.-China conflict any time soon. At the same time, I unfortunately don't think it's likely to be completely baseless.

[1] https://media.defense.gov/2023/Apr/24/2003205865/-1/-1/1/07-...

[2] See, e.g., https://cimsec.org/the-maritime-convoys-of-2027-supporting-t...; https://thehill.com/policy/defense/4547637-china-potential-t...

Re: Apple will soon receive 'made in America' chips from TSMC's Arizona fab

#244

Post by stevenwoo »

someperson wrote: post #156
tobiasdorge wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does anyone know the general path to get involved in this? Perhaps its romantic, but this seems important, it seems hard, and it seems like something I can be proud of working on (as opposed to maximizing ad clicks). I'm just a SWE w/ a Comp sci degree, so what's the entry-point here?

EDA software?

It might be possible but domain knowledge might give some candidates a leg up on the competition, going in blind just seems suboptimal, though most of the relevant EE undergraduate classes were in sophomore and junior level for me in the late 1980's and I only got to use EDA software when working a couple of semesters for AMD as a junior.

Re: Apple will soon receive 'made in America' chips from TSMC's Arizona fab

#245

Post by enragedcacti »

MisterTea wrote: post #229
enragedcacti wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The chips still need to fly back to Taiwan to be packaged as packaging partner Amkor's facility in Arizona won't be ready until 2027*. I'm not sure the cause of the delta but it could be in part because Fab 21 got back on schedule rather impressively following earlier delays. * updated to reflect newer article that Amkor's facility is delayed beyond late-2025

I was about to say, surly at some point in the near future the USA will introduce this capability. Shame they did not match each other in completion time.

Yeah definitely unfortunate. That said, I'm guessing the overall cost of overseas packaging is really tiny, otherwise Intel would've made a great customer since they are already packaging TSMC N6, N5, and N3 in New Mexico for their Arrow Lake CPUs.

Re: Apple will soon receive 'made in America' chips from TSMC's Arizona fab

#246

Post by pcdoodle »

tobiasdorge wrote: post #151
digdigdag wrote: post #35

- Over 50% of the workers flew in from Taiwan to work on this plant and make these chips. - The chips still need to fly back to Taiwan to be packaged as there are no facilities here with such a capability. Made in america is a hard sell. But at least showing the glaring STEM field gap in the U.S. is a start to finally addressing the brain drain.

Does anyone know the general path to get involved in this? Perhaps its romantic, but this seems important, it seems hard, and it seems like something I can be proud of working on (as opposed to maximizing ad clicks). I'm just a SWE w/ a Comp sci degree, so what's the entry-point here?

I'm not too sure but I would assume there's going to be faster turn prototype chips in the USA now? Is packaging needed to prove a prototype? Can we start buying IP blocks and make our own ICs? I'd love a MCU with built in IMU and wide range LDO, not sure if that's possible all on the same node.

There's going to be some niches opening as a result of this IMO.

Re: Apple will soon receive 'made in America' chips from TSMC's Arizona fab

#247

Post by whateveracct »

rhubarbtree wrote: post #222
programmertote wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 'brain drain' (as you refer to it) stems from intelligent/motivated grads in the US for the last two decades (at least) pursuing more lucrative fields like finance and adtech (re: Google, Facebook). Or some pursue management route (attending big MBA schools and switching to management roles where they climb corporate ladder). In other words, there are not a lot of college/grad students who want to pursue traditio…

Alternate explanation: electrical engineering is actually really hard and some parts of computer science look comparatively easier. Plus coding is startups is cool, EE is still nerd as in Nerd.

Nah I did EE and then CompE (which was just replacing some later EE classes with hardware design stuff) and EE is not "actually really hard" - although people like to put it on a pedastel.

Re: Apple will soon receive 'made in America' chips from TSMC's Arizona fab

#248

Post by jopsen »

binarymax wrote: post #200
programmertote wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 'brain drain' (as you refer to it) stems from intelligent/motivated grads in the US for the last two decades (at least) pursuing more lucrative fields like finance and adtech (re: Google, Facebook). Or some pursue management route (attending big MBA schools and switching to management roles where they climb corporate ladder). In other words, there are not a lot of college/grad students who want to pursue traditio…

Definitely true, as there weren’t EE jobs here. Now that we’re moving chip manufacturing back, and with programming job market being saturated, perhaps it will shift and EE will pay more due to being more in demand

I suspect the kinds of salaries that's possible in Silicon Valley only happens because:

(A) Skills are fairly transferable. (B) There is a lot of employers competing for workers. (C) An awful lot of value is created along the way.

If you specialize in some tiny part of chip manufacturing, there aren't many places you can transfer your skills.

Even if, in the future, you have multiple chip vendors. They won't all use the same processes, and you might only fit into one role at each of these businesses.

Maybe it's not that simple. But few chip companies have to compete against startups for workers. And that probably won't change.

Not saying the jobs can't be well paid, just that it's not unlikely that it won't be absurd SV level salaries.

Re: Apple will soon receive 'made in America' chips from TSMC's Arizona fab

#249

Post by hintymad »

lysace wrote: post #51
epicureanideal wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> STEM field gap STEM salary gap I suspect the Taiwan workers have on average much lower salaries.

Yes, roughly speaking 1:4 compared to California. Edit: This is not news. This (combined with their higher EE education) is why Taiwan won IBM PC-clone-related manufacturing in the 80s. And why they now have TSMC.

How much does salary contribute to the overall cost of operating TSMC? Perplexity said that the average salary of a TSMC employee is $76K a year, and TSMC had about 80K people. So it cost them around $6B a year on salary. In the meantime, their operational cost was about $46B a year, so that's 13%. TSMC shipped about 16 million 12-in wafers. Each 12-inch wafer can make about 300 to 400 chips. Let's say 200 to stay on the conservative side. That will be 3.2B chips a year. That means the cost per chip on salary will be less than $2 a year. It looks HC cost is not that dominant?

Re: Apple will soon receive 'made in America' chips from TSMC's Arizona fab

#250

Post by bilbo0s »

tester756 wrote: post #179
Cumpiler69 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Thus the cost of labor isn't a significant factor. It is. Semi fabs aren't fire-and-forget. You need highly skilled people to constantly check and tweak all the operations in a feedback loop 24/7 and every hour of downtime due to any issue means millions lost. You hire the right people to minimize that downtime while also keeping the costs in check. It's a delicate balance.

What % of the all fab costs over two decades are the people? Including the cost of building it and modernization

Touché
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