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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

#331

Post by rossjudson »

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.

Intel needs a full-time board that gives a shit about whether the company succeeds. You could populate that board with nearly any combination of capable founder types and you'd get far better results.

The current board is a pack of cargo-culting epitaph writers.

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

#332

Post by johngalt »

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 has been cooked for years. Observable back in 2017, but more visible today.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14588429

The top of the market will go GPU and the bottom will go ARM, and the middle will be an ever shrinking x86 market share. The few places that will need heavy CPU resources will be the same people who can apply pressure to Intel's margins.

The process of chip making will look very similar in the future, but the brand of the CPU will matter less every year. Intel's not "dead in five years", but Intel will definitely cross the point of no return in that timeframe. Shifting a big company's focus is more difficult than growing another company who already has the right focus.

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

#333

Post by wbl »

codedokode wrote: post #281
wbl wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But you already pay that price anyway.

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

#334

Post by jbm »

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.

Apparently this happening was well telegraphed by people in the industry.

A friend used to send me articles regularly from Semiaccurate in the mid 2010s. I thought it was "alternative truth" but it turns out to have been more, uh, accurate than I thought.

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

#335

Post by rossjudson »

ksec wrote: post #156
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.

>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…

Was Intel's board and management great? Like, when did it change?

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

#336

Post by dreamcompiler »

Spooky23 wrote: post #312
benreesman wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

Bad news. We’re exploding NSF, NASA and many parts of DoD. Universities are uncertain as those acts are digested. That era of American history has passed. Innovation gives way to consolidation and cronyism. Think Mussolini’s Italy.

Remember what finally happened to Mussolini?

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

#337

Post by benreesman »

lenerdenator wrote: post #330
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…

> It's a failure of the will to do the right thing for both the shareholders and the country. They've been doing the exact right thing for the shareholders: squeezing the living shit out of an asset (x86/64) for decades while cutting anything interesting or competitive to the bone to give shareholders more money. Money spent on something that could really have been competitive is money not sent to the retirement fund…

It's not actually good for the shareholders unless you have a divisor which is effort. Intel is a semiconductor company, investors that want to invest in treasuries or Exxon or whatever is considered extreme low-beta (ha, maybe not Exxon anymore, maybe Visa) have every opportunity to do so.

The most expensive, highest-margin, technically advanced and risky business in the world is for investors who want that in their portfolio. If they wanted to milk a dying industry on the way down they would go buy Disney stock.

It is very clearly in the interests of long-term investors in Intel to maintain a commanding position in fabrication: it's been the secret sauce of the company since the very beginning, it's never been more in demand.

This idea that companies are obligated to do what will deliver some little bump in the stock price in 90-180 days is everything from not how the rules work to just a lazy meme for people who don't want to earn their princely salaries.

Don't make excuses for weakness at the top.

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

#338

Post by bgnn »

reliabilityguy wrote: post #5
arcanus wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The manufacturing cost is emphatically not only 1% of the total development cost. Particularly for GPUs, the high bandwidth memory and manufacturing costs are a significant portion of the product price.

> The manufacturing cost is emphatically not only 1% of the total development cost. I have no idea what is the manufacturing cost of a 800 mm^2 die is, but I am sure it is lower than the development cost. > Particularly for GPUs, the high bandwidth memory and manufacturing costs are a significant portion of the product price. HBM is not manufactured by the GPU vendor, it is an off-the-shelf component that AMD buys li…

800mm^2 die would roughly cost 300-350 usd axcoeding to [1]. That's the Taiwan price and dor N4. This doesn't include the memory or the package. The silicon cost for N3 is close to 2x.

[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/spitballing-...

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

#339

Post by nomel »

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…

> Intel's fab issues are overstated in my opinion.

The fact that they can't use their own fab for 30% of their products [1], all of which are those that require power efficiency and compute performance [2], suggests it is not overstated.

[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/intel-will-keep-u...

[2] https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/intel-is-using-tsmc-4nm-f...

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

#340

Post by benreesman »

Spooky23 wrote: post #312
benreesman wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

Bad news. We’re exploding NSF, NASA and many parts of DoD. Universities are uncertain as those acts are digested. That era of American history has passed. Innovation gives way to consolidation and cronyism. Think Mussolini’s Italy.

We've had crime season gilded ages before. We've had trusts and corruption before. I agree that on present course and heading we are not going to make it out of this one in anything like the position we're accustomed to, but it's not impossible and frankly it wouldn't even take that much.

Forums like HN full of senior technologists and future founders are disproportionately high impact. If the tone around here shifted a little to stop excusing what YC has become and start embracing how it all started?

Shit like that adds up. geohotz had that post a few weeks ago about this late capitalism internet shit, he was pretty deep in with the Effective Altruists and he got it together. I said at the time and I'll say again, you get a few more people like that to sober up? pmarca and lex and people? Maybe even pg?

Real change happens that way.

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