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Apple is fighting for TSMC capacity as Nvidia takes center stage

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

#381

Post by marcus_holmes »

lovich wrote: post #362
marcus_holmes wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Find a small company with a founder who loves their team and wants them to be happy. They exist, I assure you. They're not even rare. I spent most of my career working in companies with Small companies won't pay FAANG salaries, but they also won't make you feel like a meaningless cog in a vast unsympathetic, unproductive, machine.

> I spent most of my career working in companies with I’ve worked for 3 companies like that. It was really great if your views aligned with the founder. If they didn’t, you got fucked. I really enjoyed when a bunch of juniors were fired the day before Christmas because the founder heard them discussing the latest movies they watched and decided that they had bad opinions and shouldn’t work at his company since he’d b…

I've had a couple of experiences like yours, yeah, it can be a matter of finding the right founder.

I'm sorry you don't find it actionable. Please continue doing whatever you're doing now that is working for you.

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

#382

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

apercu wrote: post #144
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…

"Apple is smart. If the AI capex cycle flattens in late '27 as models hit diminishing returns, does Apple regain pricing power simply by being the only customer that can guarantee wafer commits five years out?" That's the take I would pursue if I were Apple. A quiet threat of "We buy wafers on consumer demand curves. You’re selling them on venture capital and hype"

Except AMD would be happy to take up any excess unused capacity that TSMC has to compete with Intel and nVidia.

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

#383

Post by chaos_emergent »

misswaterfairy wrote: post #349
roughly wrote: post #92

This article repeatedly cites revenue growth numbers as an indicator of Nvidia and Apple’s relative health, which is a very particular way of looking at things. By way of another one, Apple had $416Bn in revenue, which was a 6% increase from the prior year, or about $25Bn, or about all of Nvidia’s revenue in 2023. Apple’s had slow growth in the last 4 years following a big bump during the early pandemic; their 5 year…

> Nvidia has indeed grown like a monster in the last couple years - 35Bn increase from 23-24 and 70Bn increase from 24-25. Worringly for Nvidia, Apple is producing products people want and are provenly useful, thus a vast majority of its value is solid, so revenue streams for fabs Apple uses is solid. Nvidia on the other hand, is producing tangible things of value, GPUs, but which are now largely used in unproven tec…

Calling AI an unproven market is a wild statement. My mother and every employed person around me is using AI backed by Nvidia GPUs in some way or the other on a daily basis.

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

#384

Post by mekpro »

I think the opposite. Having NVIDIA investing in TSMC's bleeding-edge process node should benefit Apple rather than disadvantage.

It means that Apple doesn't have to be sole investor in latest node development which is more harder to justify, especially in the year where smartphone upgrade cycle is slowdown. Having NVIDIA (and AI boom) in the picture should help Apple reduce CAPEX for their semi-conductor investment.

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

#385

Post by nasreddin »

bigyabai wrote: post #344
hu3 wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

non Apple consumers were already used to this clown fiesta since AMD processors had late access to SoTA nodes for the very same reason. And possibly other types of hardware also had price bumped or used outdated chips because Apple has to build their iPhone/mac n+1. That's why you see some folks actually mocking Apple about the situation. They were already affected. If anything this might force a market-wide fix in t…

Plus... Apple kinda wastes it. Not to be judgy, but we don't need 2nm chips to hardware-accelerate Netflix and Pornhub. The iPhone is locked-down, there's no worry that it will be a poor gaming platform or disrupt valuable workflows. A new iPhone chip means nothing anymore. Between the $99/year sideloading, Liquid Glass and fighting fruitlessly against CUDA, I think Apple needs a break to reflect on why their softwar…

TSMC is a for profit business. Why would they care about the moral virtue purity of the applications running on their chips? Seriously illogical statement

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

#386

Post by misswaterfairy »

chaos_emergent wrote: post #383
misswaterfairy wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nvidia has indeed grown like a monster in the last couple years - 35Bn increase from 23-24 and 70Bn increase from 24-25. Worringly for Nvidia, Apple is producing products people want and are provenly useful, thus a vast majority of its value is solid, so revenue streams for fabs Apple uses is solid. Nvidia on the other hand, is producing tangible things of value, GPUs, but which are now largely used in unproven tec…

Calling AI an unproven market is a wild statement. My mother and every employed person around me is using AI backed by Nvidia GPUs in some way or the other on a daily basis.

Unproven in the sense that it'll become 'super intelligent', et al.

For a statistical word salad generator that is _generally_ coherent, sure it's proven.

But for other claims, such as replacing all customer service roles[1], to the lament of customers[2], and now that a number of companies are re-hiring staff they sacked because 'AI would make them redundant'[3] still make me strongly assert that Generative AI isn't the trillion dollar industry it is trying to market itself as.

Sure it has a few tricks, and helps in a number of cases, therefore is useful in those cases, but it isn't an 'earth-shattering mass-human-redundancy' technology, that colossally stupid amounts of circular investments are being poured into it which, I argue, makes fabs mostly, if not solely, dedicating themselves to AI are now in a precarious position when the AI bubble collapses.

[1] https://www.cxtoday.com/contact-center/openai-ceo-sam-altman...

[2] https://www.thestreet.com/technology/salesforce-ai-faces-bac...

[3] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/companies-quietly-rehiring-wo...

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

#387

Post by bigyabai »

nasreddin wrote: post #385
bigyabai wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plus... Apple kinda wastes it. Not to be judgy, but we don't need 2nm chips to hardware-accelerate Netflix and Pornhub. The iPhone is locked-down, there's no worry that it will be a poor gaming platform or disrupt valuable workflows. A new iPhone chip means nothing anymore. Between the $99/year sideloading, Liquid Glass and fighting fruitlessly against CUDA, I think Apple needs a break to reflect on why their softwar…

TSMC is a for profit business. Why would they care about the moral virtue purity of the applications running on their chips? Seriously illogical statement

Oh, they definitely don't. I'm just pointing out that Apple can afford to forfeit the latest nodes without sacrificing anything important, whereas Nvidia cannot.

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

#388

Post by lovich »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #381
lovich wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I spent most of my career working in companies with I’ve worked for 3 companies like that. It was really great if your views aligned with the founder. If they didn’t, you got fucked. I really enjoyed when a bunch of juniors were fired the day before Christmas because the founder heard them discussing the latest movies they watched and decided that they had bad opinions and shouldn’t work at his company since he’d b…

I've had a couple of experiences like yours, yeah, it can be a matter of finding the right founder. I'm sorry you don't find it actionable. Please continue doing whatever you're doing now that is working for you.

>Please continue doing whatever you're doing now that is working for you

Lol.

It doesn't work out because I don't have leverage, and tried to stand up for what I believe in. I also don't believe it would work for you unless you had views that aligned with the current oligarchical leadership that the entire US industry is operating under.

If you only have a good time when you found the "right" founder, because they will and are capable of harming your career or income when you disagree with them, and the law does effectively nothing to protect you from their ego driven tantrums, then you are a serf at best.

I'd agree with you if it was relatively common that employees who had differences of opinions with founders of companies, weren't forced out, but that is not my experience.

I do not find contentment out of accepting that some assholes are my Betters because they have more money than me.

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

#389

Post by philistine »

mr_toad wrote: post #339
philistine wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Apple vowed never to use their chips I thought that was mainly due to bad thermals. I always got the impression that (like Intel) Nvidia only cared about performance, and damn the power consumption.

Nvidia refused to honour a gentleman's agreement that they were on the hook for recall issues with their GPUs. Steve Jobs didn't like that. One bit.

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

#390

Post by philistine »

chippiewill wrote: post #316
philistine wrote: post #265

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. There are rumours that Intel might have won some business from them in 2 years. I could total…

I thought Intel was too far behind on their process nodes?

I did say in two years. Intel can still fail the validation along the way.
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