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Apple is fighting for TSMC capacity as Nvidia takes center stage
271–280 of 501 posts
Re: Apple is fighting for TSMC capacity as Nvidia takes center stage
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
Counter argument is that is NVIDIA friendly to their supply chain? I have to think that maybe they are with their massive margins because they can be - their end buyer is currently willing to absorb costs at no expense. But I don't know, and that will change as their business changes. Your underlying statement implies that whoever is replacing apple is a better buyer which I don't think is necessarily true.
Nvidia is famously a pain to work with. Apple vowed never to use their chips, Microsoft and Sony can't get them to make any GPU for their consoles. The only complete package integrator that manages to make a relationship work with Nvidia is Nintendo.
> The only complete package integrator that manages to make a relationship work with Nvidia is Nintendo.
And thats probably because Nintendo isn’t adding any pressure to neither TSMC nor Nvidia capacity wise; iirc Nintendo uses something like Maxwell or Pascal on really mature processes for Switch chips/socs.
Re: Apple is fighting for TSMC capacity as Nvidia takes center stage
#273Sneak preview of the TSMC shortage that will sweep the world in 2027 when China takes Taiwan and the TSMC scuttles their chip fabs on the island. I don’t know the hedge to position against this but I’m pretty sure China will make good on its promise.
I'm about 100% positive America would consider that an act of war and respond accordingly.
Re: Apple is fighting for TSMC capacity as Nvidia takes center stage
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have MacStudio with 512GB RAM, 2x DGX Spark and RTX 6000 Pro WS (planing to buy a few of those in Max-Q version next). I am wondering if we ever see local inference so "cheap" as we see it right now given RAM/SSD price trends.
Good grief. I'm here cautiously telling my workplace to buy a couple of dgx sparks for dev/prototyping and you have better hardware in hand than my entire org. What kind of experiments are you doing? Did you try out exo with a dgx doing prefill and the mac doing decode? I'm also totally interested in hearing what you have learned working with all this gear. Did you buy all this stuff out of pocket to work with?
Yeah, Exo was one of the first things to do - MacStudio has a decent throughput at the level of 3080, great for token generation and Sparks have decent compute, either for prefill or for running non-LLM models that need compute (segment anything, stable diffusion etc). RTX 6000 Pro just crushes them all (it's essentially like having 4x3090 in a single GPU). I bought 2 sparks to also play with Nvidia's networking stack and learn their ecosystem though they are a bit of a mixed bag as they don't expose some Blackwell-specific features that make a difference. I bought it all to be able to run local agents (I write AI agents for living) and develop my own ideas fully. Also I was wrapping up grad studies at Stanford so they came handy for some projects there. I bought it all out of pocket but can amortize them in taxes.
Re: Apple is fighting for TSMC capacity as Nvidia takes center stage
#275Calling Nvidia niche feels a bit wild given their status-quo right now, but from a foundry perspective, it seems true. Apple is the anchor tenant that keeps the lights on across 12 different mature and leading-edge fabs. Nvidia is the high-frequency trader hammering the newest node until the arb closes. Stability usually trades at a discount during a boom, but Wei knows the smartphone replacement cycle is the only pr…
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Re: Apple is fighting for TSMC capacity as Nvidia takes center stage
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
At this scale and volume, it's not really about good faith. Changing fabs is non-trivial. If they pushed Apple to a point where they had to find an alternative (which is another story) and Apple did switch, they would have to work extra hard to get them back in the future. Apple wouldn't want to invest twice in changing back and forth. On the other hand, TSMC knows that changing fabs is not really an option and Apple…
Apple has used both Samsung and TSMC for its chips in the past. Until the A7 it was Samsung, A8 was TSMC, and the A9 was dual-sourced by both! Apple is used to switching between suppliers fairly often for a tech company; it's not that it's too hard for them to switch fab, it's that TSMC is the only competitive fab right now. There are rumours that Intel might have won some business from them in 2 years. I could total…
But wasn't the reason they split with Samsung because they copied the iphone in the perspective of Jobs (to which he reacted with thermonuclear threats)?
They did had the expertise building it after all. What would happen, if TSMC now would build a M1 clone? I doubt this is a way anyone wants to go, but it seems a implied threat to me that is calculated in.
Re: Apple is fighting for TSMC capacity as Nvidia takes center stage
#277Calling Nvidia niche feels a bit wild given their status-quo right now, but from a foundry perspective, it seems true. Apple is the anchor tenant that keeps the lights on across 12 different mature and leading-edge fabs. Nvidia is the high-frequency trader hammering the newest node until the arb closes. Stability usually trades at a discount during a boom, but Wei knows the smartphone replacement cycle is the only pr…
AI capex may or may not flatten in the near future (and I don't necessarily see a reason why it would). But smartphone capex already has.
Like smartphones, AI chips also have a replacement cycle. AI chips depreciate quickly -- not because the old ones go bad, but because the new ones are so much better in performance and efficiency than the previous generation. While smartphones aren't making huge leaps every year like they used to, AI chips still are -- meaning there's a stronger incentive to upgrade every cycle for these chips than smartphone processors.
Re: Apple is fighting for TSMC capacity as Nvidia takes center stage
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
At this scale and volume, it's not really about good faith. Changing fabs is non-trivial. If they pushed Apple to a point where they had to find an alternative (which is another story) and Apple did switch, they would have to work extra hard to get them back in the future. Apple wouldn't want to invest twice in changing back and forth. On the other hand, TSMC knows that changing fabs is not really an option and Apple…
Apple is the company that just over 10 years ago made a strategic move to remove Intel from their supply chain by purchasing a semiconductor firm and licensing ARM. Managing 'painful' transitions is a core competency of theirs.
I think you’re correct that they’re good at just ripping the band-aid off, but the details seem off. AFAIK, Apple has always had a license with ARM and a very unique one since they were one of the initial investors when it was spun out from Acorn. In fact, my understanding is that Apple is the one that insisted they call themselves Advanced RISC Machines Ltd. because they did not want Acorn (a competitor) in the name of a company they were investing in.
Re: Apple is fighting for TSMC capacity as Nvidia takes center stage
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
At this scale and volume, it's not really about good faith. Changing fabs is non-trivial. If they pushed Apple to a point where they had to find an alternative (which is another story) and Apple did switch, they would have to work extra hard to get them back in the future. Apple wouldn't want to invest twice in changing back and forth. On the other hand, TSMC knows that changing fabs is not really an option and Apple…
I would imagine they could split their orders between different fabricators; they can put in orders for the most cutting edge chips for the latest Macs and iPhones at TSMC and go elsewhere for less cutting edge chips?
presumably they already do that (since non cutting edge chip fab is likely to be more competitive and less expensive) so, given they are already doing that, this problem refers to the cutting edge allocations which are getting scare as exemplified at least by Nvidia's growth
Re: Apple is fighting for TSMC capacity as Nvidia takes center stage
#280I thought this got sorted out with giant piles of cash several years ago, didn't it?