Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple is fighting for TSMC capacity as Nvidia takes center stage

culpium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

371–380 of 501 posts

Re: Apple is fighting for TSMC capacity as Nvidia takes center stage

#371

Post by MangoCoffee »

bigyabai wrote: post #292
hinkley wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple loaned TSMC money in order to build manufacturing capacity back around the M1 era. They’ve done that for a number of suppliers and the “interest payments” were priority access to capacity. Everyone was complaining about how Apple got ARM chips while others had to wait in line. That said, they did that for a sapphire glass supplier for the Apple Watch and when their machines had QC problems they dropped them lik…

> And who tf do you think they’re going to drop TSMC for right now? Don't look now: https://www.macrumors.com/2025/11/28/intel-rumored-to-supply...

If Apple cares about their chip IPs, it will be very hard to trust Intel given Intel's past behavior with others like AMD.

Re: Apple is fighting for TSMC capacity as Nvidia takes center stage

#372

Post by [deleted] »

npunt wrote: post #354
MangoCoffee wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. This is false. Samsung competes with Apple on smartphones. Apple even filed a lawsuit agains…

wait til you find out who supplies iPhone screens.

[deleted]

Re: Apple is fighting for TSMC capacity as Nvidia takes center stage

#373

Post by j16sdiz »

MangoCoffee wrote: post #365
npunt wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wait til you find out who supplies iPhone screens.

Does Apple spend R&D on iPhone screens like they do Apple Silicon? What's that got to do with what we're talking about regarding iPhone's core IP (Apple's own chip, the most important IP from Apple)?

Apple owns a few patients on micro LED display. Those look like R&D to my untrained eye.

https://www.ledinside.com/node/31822

Re: Apple is fighting for TSMC capacity as Nvidia takes center stage

#374

Post by gamblor956 »

boplicity wrote: post #285
anoojb wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So let's say TMSC reciprocated Apple's consistency as a customer by giving them preferential treatment for capacity. It's good business after all. However, everyone knows that good faith reciprocity at that scale is not rewarded. Apple is ruthless. There are probably thousands of untold stories of how hard Apple has hammered it's suppliers over the years. While Apple has good consumer brand loyalty, they arguably tre…

Suppliers really hate working with Costco. They're slow to pay, allow for only small margins, and often need too high of a percentage of a businesses revenue, all of which is not friendly towards suppliers.

Not true at all. Costco uses the industry-standard Net 60 for supplier payment.

Companies have to be fairly large to be Costco suppliers. What suppliers lose in margin they more than make up for in scale. It's better to sell 10 million at 5% margin than 1 million at 10% margin.

And they don't require a % of supplier's business revenue as that would be illegal in the U.S. Most of the products found at Costco are generally found at other retailers, just in smaller packages or as different SKUs.

Re: Apple is fighting for TSMC capacity as Nvidia takes center stage

#375

Post by ak217 »

Fiveplus wrote: post #6

Calling 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…

That's a really hilarious take given Nvidia's history with TSMC.

Re: Apple is fighting for TSMC capacity as Nvidia takes center stage

#376

Post by bigyabai »

radium3d wrote: post #342

This all is just spotlighting the weakness of NVIDIA, AMD, Apple, Microsoft, etc. They all avoided manufacturing in-house for so long and now they're fighting for fab time. Intel on the other hand is interesting...

Intel still hasn't proven that they've got the whole EUVL thing figured out. The best Intel chips you can buy right now use TSMC chiplets on the die.

Re: Apple is fighting for TSMC capacity as Nvidia takes center stage

#377

Post by mitjam »

utopiah wrote: post #253
mitjam wrote: post #139

As a heavy user of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google AI APIs, I’m increasingly tempted to buy a Mac Studio (M3 Ultra or M4 Pro) as a contingency in case the economics of hosted inference change significantly.

Don't buy anything physical, benchmark the models you could run on your potential hardware on (neo) cloud provider like HuggingFace. Only if you believe the quality is up to your expectation then do it. The test itself should take you $100 and few hours top.

This is certainly the best approach.

Re: Apple is fighting for TSMC capacity as Nvidia takes center stage

#378

Post by mitjam »

storus wrote: post #194
mitjam wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I also considered the RTX 6000 Pro Max-Q, but it’s quite expensive and probably only makes sense if I can use it for other workloads as well. Interestingly, its price hasn’t gone up since last summer, here in Germany.

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.

That‘s exactly my fear.

Re: Apple is fighting for TSMC capacity as Nvidia takes center stage

#379

Post by bigyabai »

MangoCoffee wrote: post #371
bigyabai wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And who tf do you think they’re going to drop TSMC for right now? Don't look now: https://www.macrumors.com/2025/11/28/intel-rumored-to-supply...

If Apple cares about their chip IPs, it will be very hard to trust Intel given Intel's past behavior with others like AMD.

If Apple cares about their Softbank investment, the best possible outcome is that Intel copies their IP wholesale. Arm's white whale is Intel buying an architectural license, which they have zero incentive to do unless someone gives them an off-the-shelf core design that doesn't suck.

The modern Cortex and Infiniverse designs are so pathetic that RISC-V might mature by the time ARM is the industry standard. And the smaller ARM IP hasn't been profitable since China mass-produced the clones. Courting Intel into buying an architectural license with a free IP bonus is a legitimately smart move for ARM's longevity, from Apple's POV.

Re: Apple is fighting for TSMC capacity as Nvidia takes center stage

#380

Post by mitjam »

storus wrote: post #274
clusterhacks wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 stac…

Building AI agents for a living is what I hope to become able to do, too, I consider myself still in learning phase. I have talked with some potential customers (small orgs, freelancers) and learned that local inference would unlock opportunities that have otherwise hard to tackle compliance barriers.
Post reply on HN