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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

#421

Post by jpgvm »

happyopossum wrote: post #270
lossolo wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wonder if they’re trying to get China “addicted” to western AI chips to hurt Chinese chip manufacturing development? This has nothing to do with that. It was part of the deal made with China recently in Geneva. The U.S. needs what China has (rare metals), and China needs what the U.S. has (SOTA chips).

> (rare metals in a place where nobody cares how they're harvested as opposed to the ones in North America that can't be mined due to ecological concerns) There - that's a little more accurate.

It's really not just ecological concerns and tbh the mining really isn't that big of a deal. It's entirely the processing that is the problem, ecologically sure but mostly technically. Without the Chinese machines that do the processing because yes, you guessed it they are the only country in the world that makes most of them, you end up more than 20-30% less efficient. At that point on the world market you just aren't competitive at all.

This is all assuming you can get past the NIMBYs to build the plants in the first place.

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

#422

Post by ulfw »

avhception wrote: post #357
internet2000 wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I am absolutely not going to pay a 20% premium on the market. I’m sorry but I won’t. If this is really crucial to national security then the government can subsidize the premium. And I know I’m not alone, price speaks louder.

This is not about national security. This is about being more than a simple consumer. If all your society does is consume, eventually, the money runs out. We need to have know-how, talent and all that stuff to create some value. We're bleeding all these things by the minute, and I don't want to be around when the critical point is reached.

What a ridiculous argument. So then every single country, every single city, every street should build their own chips, their own iPhones, right? Because wouldn't want to be "a simple consumer" only!

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

#423

Post by johanyc »

Gee101 wrote: post #364
kulahan wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes, Taiwán - that famously stable nation with no existential threats to its very existence. I don’t think this is an “if” situation, but rather a “when”. There is no question in my mind - it’s simply too attractive to China. It may not come through all out war, but they will eventually claim what they feel is theirs. They operate on much more manageable time scales.

What is interesting is if the world is not that reliant on Taiwan chips anymore would China really care that much about Taiwan?

They would. The main reason has always been the location. It’s right at the doorstep of China. It’s the same reason when Russia tried to install missile in Cuba, Americans dont like that. Cuba “crisis” is actually a US centric term. Also on east coast of Taiwan, theres a deep waters, submarines can enter pacific ocean much more stealthily.

Everything else is just bonus to them. Semiconductors, supporting nationalism, you name it.

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

#424

Post by lenerdenator »

kortilla wrote: post #373
lenerdenator wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

That’s a bullshit meme. One glance at the stock history shows that they haven’t been doing anything for shareholders for over a decade.

That's because they're in a death spiral caused by gutting.

At a certain point, you hollow yourself out, and you can't recover. Top-level talent doesn't want to work at a place that doesn't have a real shot. So things just... peter out.

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

#425

Post by fc417fc802 »

crote wrote: post #398
idiotsecant wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Enjoy not buying any chips next time there is a supply chain hiccup. If COVID didn't teach you this lesson, I don't think you're teachable. If you're making a product one of the considerations you make is how robust your supply chain is. If you fail to make that consideration you will get eaten by the organizations that do, on a long enough timescale.

Two issues there. First, high-end chips have essentially a single global market. Compared to the value of the product, transport cost is negligible. If a TSMC Taiwan factory has an oopsie, all its customers are going to be buying from your local US plant - so you are still ending up having to deal with the effects of a significantly higher demand. AMD unable to ship? Expect Intel to go out of stock rather quickly as…

Manufacturing of the trivial items can be brought online in a reasonable timeframe. The lead time on a modern process node on the other hand is measured in years, and that's when you already know what you're doing. China still hasn't achieved state of the art even after everything they've invested over the past 20 years or so.

> You'll be paying a huge premium just so a politician can get a couple of favorable headlines

You're paying a premium to reduce the cross section of risk that your local economy is exposed to. The cost savings of globalization do not come without their own downsides.

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

#426

Post by pishpash »

benreesman wrote: post #337
lenerdenator wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Who are the marginal traders who determine prices though? Long-term holders don't trade. By the time they assert their view it's too late.

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

#427

Post by fc417fc802 »

kulahan wrote: post #359
EA-3167 wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The government doesn't pay for things, we do through our taxes that they spend. So... instead of paying a markup on just your own consumption, you want to be taxed to pay for the subsidy on EVERYONE'S consumption?

Surely we could just move a subsidy around. Do we really need ALL of those corn fields? It’s not even a particularly nutritious crop.

It's calorie dense and exceedingly easy to store for long periods, providing us with an extremely high degree of food security. That said I agree with the sentiment that farm subsidies could probably use some improvement.

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

#428

Post by leptons »

vkazanov wrote: post #285
leptons wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Sounds weird"???

Not really sure what you mean by that.

Both our Intel and AMD computers are doing great. Nothing "weird" about it.

No problems at all. YMMV.

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

#429

Post by DiabloD3 »

isthatafact wrote: post #358
DiabloD3 wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. I can give you a non-technical answer, since HN is ostensibly business as well. Intel fired the one CEO that spoke both engineer and business, and Gelsinger could have been their Lisa Su. They fired the only talented CEO they've had for years. This will be fatal. Gelsinger was the scapegoat for 20+ years of inability to compete with foreign companies, no matter how much money was poured into them. They used Amer…

I am no expert in Intel, but in my view, Gelsinger lost the faith of many by being unrealistically optimistic. Of course a CEO needs to be optimistic, but he promised (in 2021) zettaflop systems by 2027 (the worst example I remember). Did anyone believe that could happen? His over-optimism gave the whole "5 nodes in 4 years" supposed path to leadership a weird flavor, like it must be somehow a bit of a con even if it…

I mean, if I thought I had a plan to be the guy who saves Intel from it's own mistakes, I'd be optimistic too.

Also, I looked into the claim when he had said it, apparently he was being intentionally misleading about it, and the press tried to ask what he meant: he was speaking tensor performance on future enterprise Arc card products at datacenter scale, ie, AI bait.

In early 2021, Nvidia's compute flagship was the A100, 19.5 FP32 MAD TFLOPs, but the misleading number they quote in marketing is the tensor performance of 312 TFLOPs of FP16 accumulates. That would be about 3.2 million of these at tensor perf.

Skipping H series, in late Nov of last year, their new flagship is the B200. 124 FP32 MAD TFLOPs, 2250 tensor FP16 accumulate TFLOPs. That is now 445k cards to reach zettascale if using tensor cores. You won't be fitting ~1400 GPU-laden machines in a single datacenter, but the number is becoming more manageable.

They improved, in 3.5 years, 7.2x.

Lets say Nvidia does this again. 3.5 years, again, would put you in early 2028, and they manage another 7.2x win: that could be 62k cards across 7.7k. That absolutely is doable in a single datacenter.

The problem is, and this is where the prediction actually falls apart, not that its impossible: We don't know what future Arc cards look like, nor enterprise ones. Battlemage is an improvement over Alchemist, so the tech *is moving forwards at, but either Celestial or Druid was supposed to introduce the enterprise compute card variants, but that seems to be dead, and no indication either of those lines will even see the light of day now. The new CEO seems to be hard set on making Xe for iGPU only.

I can't find any hard numbers on Intel's tensor units, but apparently they're actually competitive. I can find the normal FP32 MAD numbers, and it ends up that Intel is 13.5w per TFLOP and Nvidia is 8 and both companies have equal efficiency in transistor usage. Assuming Intel made a B200 competitor, and assuming the higher power usage is due to voltage (Intel B series voltage is similar to Series 40's voltages, which is a lot higher than equivalent enterprise/pro series cards), Intel could be making a card that's somewhere in the ballpark as 2/3 as good for the same power usage.

So, in the end, yes, I don't agree with his claims of future Zettascale at Intel by 2027. I don't think he was wrong for the industry as a whole, however. If he would have said, say, 2030, I don't think we would be discussing this, that certainly would have been doable if he was at the helm and they kept doubling down on Arc every gen and everything went according to plan.

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

#430

Post by panopticon »

usefulcat wrote: post #396
ffsm8 wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not even centered on the US. I personally think the Internet just desensitized us all. Reasons for that are easy to come up, imo chief among them being web2.0 (social media) and the ever increasing degree with which people exaggerate everything just to get a reaction. Under that context, what's a little skirt chasing compared to what people usually say about the politicians? And how are you gonna remember he did…

30 years ago in the US, there were a handful of major TV news outlets, and most people got their news from one of those and/or a newspaper, of which there were also a limited number. The thing about those sources is that for the most part, it wasn't really economically viable to alienate half the population by leaning hard right or left. Any reduction in audience would likely translate to a commensurate reduction in…

The cracks in the media were already visible 30 years ago. Conservative talk radio was taking off, people were beginning to call CNN "Clinton News Network", and Fox News was right around the corner. There was clearly an appetite—and a market—for partisan news. This was further fueled by the growth of national radio and TV networks that were less beholden to capturing local audiences.

I think the internet just supercharged a change that was already well underway.

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