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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

#281

Post by codedokode »

wbl wrote: post #196
ajross wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even in VLIW, DRAM fetches are slow, instructions have variable latency and write-before-retire register collisions require renaming. Itanium would have gotten there at some point. OO isn't an optional feature for high performance systems and that was clear even in the 90's.

If you have that what's the VLIW getting you?

Out-of-order architectures are inhumanly complex, especially figuring out the dependencies. For example, can we reorder these two instructions or must execute them sequentially?

    ld r1, [r2 + 10]
    st [r3 + 4], r4
And then consider things like speculative execution.

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

#282

Post by BeetleB »

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…

> They have a new leader who’s from a semiconductor manufacturing background

That's the precious leader. The new CEO is not from a semiconductor manufacturing background. His main claim to success is leading a company that built EDA tools.

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

#283

Post by MBCook »

hypeatei wrote: post #53
qzw wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe not, but if the entire country doesn’t have the ability to manufacture it, then it’s still going to be a strategic weakness when push comes to shove. The entire exercise of doing more chip manufacturing in the U.S. is about maintaining national competitiveness and independence. It’s certainly not about cost. So I think it’s a good point that investments should made to be able to onshore the entire stack rather…

Or we could strengthen alliances with our neighbors and potentially shift some of that burden to them. Trying to move everything here is not feasible. We simply do not have the human capital or willingness to manufacture every low level widget in the world. What this administration is doing is not a recipe for success: trade wars with everyone , immigration crackdowns, and unpredictable tariff policy. EDIT: Oh and hi…

I agree.

But Taiwan or the rest of Asia is still a problem given the tensions in the area. If China did something it could seriously effect supply even if it wasn’t an attack on whichever country was supplying us.

We need friends making things in Canada or the rest of the Americas or Europe or Africa or some other place that isn’t China or directly under their thumb.

Even without action by man. The wrong tsunami or whatever could effectively wipe enough out everyone would be screwed.

We need geographical diversity too. The existing alliances we’re burning to the ground don’t solve that.

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

#284

Post by MBCook »

actionfromafar wrote: post #32
chazeon wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Boards are low tech and low profit, does American company and workers even want to do it?

The tariffs are apparently going to bring back t-shirt and sneaker production to the US so it can be great again, so why not boards, too.

Ask Smoot and Hawley how well that went.

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

#285

Post by vkazanov »

leptons wrote: post #217
etempleton wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

Sounds weird.

I have 2 intel/dell laptops and thinkpad/amd 14s laptop. Both Dells (a workstation-class 22 core cpu and a more power-efficient one) suck massively when compared to amd ai-something-something-ryzen.

What's worse, intel drivers are a mess on linux right now. Dell xps 13 plus is the worst laptop I had in a decade, and that's after owning every Linux-preinstalled Dell XPS 13 ever released.

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

#287

Post by MBCook »

mattnewton wrote: post #220
dagmx wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

You’re assuming rationality.

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

#288

Post by ethan_smith »

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 5-20% range likely reflects TSMC's yield learning curve in Arizona, with costs trending toward the lower end as the fab matures and defect densities approach those of Taiwan's established facilities.

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

#289

Post by codedokode »

ajross wrote: post #248
cesarb wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Fewer transistors and pipeline stages required for the decode unit, which is a real but moderate advantage. Isn't having fixed-size naturally-aligned instructions (like on 64-bit ARM) enough to get that advantage?

ARM is easier than x86, but not really. VLIW instructions also encode the superscalar pipeline assignments (or a reasonable proxy for them) and are required to be constructed without instruction interdependencies (within the single bundle, anyway), which traditional ISAs need to spend hardware to figure out. Really VLIW is a fine idea. It's just not that great an idea, and in practice it wasn't enough to save ia64. B…

The problem with ia64 was that if you had 1000 legacy applications for x86, written by third-party contractors, for many of which you don't even have the source, then ia64 must be 100x better than standard CPUs to justify rewriting the apps.

And by the way that's why open source makes such migrations much cheaper.

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

#290

Post by 0x457 »

uluyol wrote: post #223
0x457 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A big part of AMD's turnaround was going fabless. Part of it, sure, but they were still fabless and in the ditch before Zen. Unless you're referring to going with TSMC instead of GloFo as going fabless.

They had contracts which forced them to buy Global Foundries even lasting into Zen 2 (I believe they used it with the IO die).

Yes, but that contract was a result of going fabless and spinning off GloFo into its own entity longer before Zen. AMD went fabless in 2009 during K8 lifecycle. Since then, we had an entire dynasty of failed bulldozer CPUs. I fail to see how going fabless helped them?

What helped them is putting the right people in charge of Zen design and intel fumbling 10nm due to their own hubris.

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