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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

#251

Post by FuriouslyAdrift »

cesarb wrote: post #234
FuriouslyAdrift wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

modern x86 chips (for a long time really) are hybrid CISC/RISC at the hardware level. It's at the microcode that the ISA lives and that's changeable.

> It's at the microcode that the ISA lives and that's changeable. No, it's not. In modern high-speed CPUs, many instructions are decoded directly, without going through the microcode engine. In fact, on several modern Intel CPUs, only one of the instruction decoders can run microcode ("complex") instructions, while all the other decoders can only run non-microcode ("simple") instructions. It would be more precise to…

It was my understanding that even direct coded instructions are still translated by the microcode into the actual signals to allow for errata patching since the P6 architecture and to maintain a common ISA target within a family of processors with diffferent physical characteristics.

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

#252

Post by cptskippy »

lukevp wrote: post #56
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 is more than just fabs. AMD spun off digital foundry forever ago and just uses TSMC, no reason Intel couldn’t do the same. At this point their fabs are a liability. They have a new leader who’s from a semiconductor manufacturing background so I have some faith they’ll give up on the pursuit of next gen fabs and focus instead on their IP. There’s a huge opportunity in their GPU segment. They’ve gone from a joke…

> ... I have some faith they’ll give up on the pursuit of next gen fabs and focus instead on their IP.

The problem with Intel is that they are so short sighted and they change direction and focus very quickly. Intel will adopt these seemingly great ideas that require 10-20 year strategies, invest heavily in them, and then abandon them 5 years later. They always measure initiatives against their core CPU line and if they don't show similar profitability in the short term then they defund and eventually cut the programs entirely.

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

#253

Post by wbl »

etempleton wrote: post #188
ksec wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Price/performance, not node is what matters.

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

#254

Post by benreesman »

Spivak wrote: post #236
benreesman wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intel is a great example of the fact that between stupidity and low-integrity behavior as a default, the people in charge fuck up in ways that the man on the street would get right. Defense is starting to get a blank check with fairly bipartisan support for the first time in at least 30-40 years and it's centered on semiconductor supply chains . There has never been a better time to secure the fucking funding, have A…

tl;dr Intel desperately needs an activist investor.

Only if that activist investor acts with decisiveness, vision, long-term goal orientation, and demonstrates consistently high-integrity behavior.

What has much more commonly produced good outcomes in such situations is robust public-private partnerships like the ones that produced the semiconductor industry in the first place. Run the list of innovations in strategically key technology and what will you find at one remove in every instance? The DoD, NASA, the Labs and ATT more broadly, the university system.

It's always a public/private partnership during periods of explosive value creation when the stakes are high, and it's always a private sector capture orgy during periods of extractive stagnation like the present.

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

#255

Post by giantg2 »

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.

I see them the same as GE, Boeing, etc. They culture from the top down is screwed. It will take years to undo what has been ingrained in the corporate machine. They will likely survive but as a shell of their former self. They'll probably spin off some promising business related to AI or embedded.

I was disappointed with their offerings and went with AMD for my latested build. I don't know too many people who have built PCs recently, but the few I do know who have or are planning to, everyone is planning to use AMD. Similar to the GE example, it seems many people would recommend LG or Samsung appliances over GE.

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

#256

Post by tadfisher »

wbl wrote: post #157
ajross wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If only that could have worked, then we could have avoided the whole Spectre/Meltdown mess and resulting mitigations.

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

#257

Post by DiabloD3 »

FuriouslyAdrift wrote: post #245
DiabloD3 wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. I can give you a non-technical answer, since HN is ostensibly business as well. Intel fired the one CEO that spoke both engineer and business, and Gelsinger could have been their Lisa Su. They fired the only talented CEO they've had for years. This will be fatal. Gelsinger was the scapegoat for 20+ years of inability to compete with foreign companies, no matter how much money was poured into them. They used Amer…

Intel has been in Israel since 1974. Intel Fab 8 was built in 1980 in Jerusalem... There's over 30,000 chip engineers and nearly 200 semiconductor companies there, now.

AIPAC was founded in 1954.

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

#258

Post by FuriouslyAdrift »

cesarb wrote: post #234
FuriouslyAdrift wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

modern x86 chips (for a long time really) are hybrid CISC/RISC at the hardware level. It's at the microcode that the ISA lives and that's changeable.

> It's at the microcode that the ISA lives and that's changeable. No, it's not. In modern high-speed CPUs, many instructions are decoded directly, without going through the microcode engine. In fact, on several modern Intel CPUs, only one of the instruction decoders can run microcode ("complex") instructions, while all the other decoders can only run non-microcode ("simple") instructions. It would be more precise to…

I think I am conflating micro-ops with microcode and your above comment is the correct way of thinking about it.

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

#259

Post by mmmBacon »

zhobbs wrote: post #226
mmmBacon wrote: post #211

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…

The article quotes the CEO saying yield is comparable: >TSMC’s new Arizona plant is already comparable with those in Taiwan when it comes to the measure of yield — the amount of good chips a production run produces per batch — Su told the audience at the forum.

The overhead cost of a fab is fixed. So hard to understand why that would have such a wide variance. It may be true that the facility hasn’t been fully amortized so in principle it’s more expensive to make chips there. I can understand it being more expensive for many reasons. However I wouldn’t expect the cost difference to have a large variance. 5-20% is a very large range if the yields are comparable.

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

#260

Post by phkahler »

cogman10 wrote: post #64
lukevp wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intel is more than just fabs. AMD spun off digital foundry forever ago and just uses TSMC, no reason Intel couldn’t do the same. At this point their fabs are a liability. They have a new leader who’s from a semiconductor manufacturing background so I have some faith they’ll give up on the pursuit of next gen fabs and focus instead on their IP. There’s a huge opportunity in their GPU segment. They’ve gone from a joke…

> no reason Intel couldn’t do the same. Intel is doing the same. IDK if they are working on new fabs at this point, but the last few generations of chips from intel have used TSMC. My expectation is that Intel might still run fabs, but they'll be mostly contracting them out to people who want cheap ASICs and 10 year old fab tech.

>> Intel might still run fabs, but they'll be mostly contracting them out to people who want cheap ASICs and 10 year old fab tech.

Intel fabs have never had to be as cost effective as others. They were selling top end chips for top dollar for decades. I bet there are 10 other companies that can make 45nm chips cheaper than Intel can on their old equipment. I could be wrong.

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