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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

#261

Post by lotyrin »

dathinab wrote: post #187
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…

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 approa…

From what I could gather while I was inside (2010-ish, but not directly involved with chip product lines) there was just incredible hubris company wide. "Intel Architecture is the best because we made it and we're the best" essentially.

They were wasting a ton of time and effort eagerly trying to convince Apple to put IA into phones despite obvious failures to deliver power-effective chips (Atom being the result of these efforts from what I understand). They were spending a lot of time and money trying to start up like a junk ware app-store thing for PCs that they could use OEM relationships to peddle, as if the PC ecosystem belonged to them the way that Android did to Google or Apple's ecosystem to Apple, not realizing that if anyone has that power it's Microsoft (but they also don't).

It was pretty shocking coming from a hacker/cyberpunk culture where everybody had been dunking on Intel designs for over a decade. (I personally had been waiting for an ARM laptop since around 2000.) A lot of leadership I got to interact with were business/people-people types that truly seemed to believe that the best product boiled down entirely to social perception of status and has zero basis in reality. Basically the company seemed to be high on the Intel Architecture's accidental monopoly over personal computing thanks to PC-WinTel becoming so dominant (and Apple's later capitulation) and seemed to believe that it was all because of their "genius" Intel Inside marketing campaigns (which were pure social status signaling, but with an effect of avoiding price competition with lower-cost IA rivals AMD,Citrix,VIA and holding power over OEMs rather than being responsible for the market situation around IA in the first place).

Maybe something in the Hillsboro/Beaverton area's water? Both they and Nike seem to entirely consist of a diet of their own farts.

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

#262

Post by phkahler »

FuriouslyAdrift wrote: post #233
j_walter wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That will 100% never happen. Nvidia is big, but not even close to a majority of TSMC revenue or loading. Apple, Intel, Qualcomm, etc... In this case...TSMC is holding all the cards, not Nvidia

Apple was TSMCs biggest customer (25%) and nVidia is 2nd (12-15%). The bigger thing being that between the two, they lock up most of the bleeding edge process capacity and leave everyone else fighting over older processes.

But leading edge these days is like 15 to 20 percent performance or density. It's not a huge lead any more.

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

#263

Post by giantg2 »

hajile wrote: post #89
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 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'm not very knowledgeable on all those technical points. How does this explain what I see as a consumer? I built a PC last year and went with AMD while historically I've gone with Intel. For a similarly performing CPU it seemed that AMD was cheaper and more power efficient.

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

#264

Post by phkahler »

dathinab wrote: post #183
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.

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…

>> I think they have a lot of potential in the dedicated GPU space

I think dedicated GPUs will be dead soon. AMD will beat nVidia with APUs that compete with midrange DGPU in performance with lower system cost. With AI using GPUs we want the shared memory of the APU rather than splitting RAM into two mutually exclusive areas - witness boards starting to use soldered ram in 64 and 128GB configurations. nVidia can't compete without x86 cores and Intel just cant compete for now.

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

#265

Post by FuriouslyAdrift »

DiabloD3 wrote: post #257
FuriouslyAdrift wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Intel came to Israel mostly because Dov Frohman (one of Intels first employees who had worked with all the founders at Fairchild and also the inventor of EPROMs) pushed to establish an Intel dev center there when he moved back home.

At the time, EPROM tech was Intels most profitble product until the 8088 and 8087, which were designed in Israel at the dev center (along with many of their chip designs).

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

#266

Post by swores »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #212
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…

> 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.

How long ago did nm numbers stop being descriptions of size of chip and start being purely marketing names? About a decade?

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

#267

Post by phkahler »

IncreasePosts wrote: post #244
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.

Their market cap is $100B. A bunch of smart people who study this don't think it is fully cooked

>> Their market cap is $100B. A bunch of smart people who study this don't think it is fully cooked

nVidia market cap is 4T or about 40x Intels. Im not sure who those smart people are.

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

#268

Post by ggreer »

ginko wrote: post #197
renewiltord wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where could it be? The places with abundant energy are where these things establish. US is about at the lower limit. Korea, Taiwan, Japan. China has SMIC and Huawei. But Europe doesn’t have enough energy to run air conditioning. They’d struggle to add more industry. India has power shortages. Africa isn’t reliable. Australia? South America too unstable.

>But Europe doesn’t have enough energy to run air conditioning. That's just silly.

It's not that dire, but energy costs in the EU are quite high compared to the US. US retail prices for electricity average 13 cents per kWh.[1] The EU's average is around 28 cents per kWh.[2] The only EU countries with advanced fabs are Germany and Ireland. In Germany, retail electricity is 35 cents per kWh. Ireland is almost as bad at 31 cents per kWh. Industrial plants tend to pay lower rates and can supplement their grid consumption with things like on site solar, but that's also true in the US.

1. https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...

2. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/d...

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

#269

Post by phkahler »

nobodyandproud wrote: post #230
honkycat wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Does that mean Intel needs to go private?

Hahaha that would nail the coffin shut!

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

#270

Post by happyopossum »

lossolo wrote: post #125
octopoc wrote: post #10

The 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…

> I wonder if they’re trying to get China “addicted” to western AI chips to hurt Chinese chip manufacturing development? This has nothing to do with that. It was part of the deal made with China recently in Geneva. The U.S. needs what China has (rare metals), and China needs what the U.S. has (SOTA chips).

> (rare metals in a place where nobody cares how they're harvested as opposed to the ones in North America that can't be mined due to ecological concerns)

There - that's a little more accurate.

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