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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

#431
post #290
post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The point is that AMD didn't really go fabless in 2009. They didn't own the fab anymore but were still tied to it, so they were not free to exercise the number one advantage of being fabless until much later.

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

#432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taiwan also believes they are (part of) China

Or more accurately, the Taiwanese government also believes that mainland China and Taiwan should be unified (ie. a One-China Interpretation). But that this One-China should be under the rule of the Taiwanese government and not the CCP, which they considered an illegitimate government, up until the 1992 Consensus. After the 1992 Consensus [1], the Taiwanese government still considered the Mainland its territory (again…

Almost no one in Taiwan still believes that though. But China has made it clear that they will invade if the Taiwanese government changes their official stance to be that they’re an independent country.

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

#433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Much more complicated than that though market price action dynamics do play a role in corrupt corporate governance at some remove.

Different market participants will be trading on different signals, sentiments, or theses, and this will influence everything from the order types they use to the hold time of the instruments in question.

But one of many things they all have in common is that they know that what other people think about the future affects the price right now: an intuitive proof of this is that if some major announcement is made about e.g. trade policy, and the market deems it credible, you will see instruments transact up or down in price immediately.

In any effort to go deeper, one must be wary that this goes from market microstructure to Ito calculus to voodoo real fast, a closed form solution would be an infinite money machine! But a reasonable jumping off point might be the notion of a Keynsian Beauty contest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest

The TLDR is that hold times across like 13 orders of magnitude (rumor has it a cutting edge FPGA fielded by someone like Optiver or HRT or Virtu can pull a whole ladder in 20-50ns glass-to-glass, so whatever Buffet does divided by that) the market still in some sense reflects expectations about the future: it's "priced in" in trading parlance.

"Too late" has some ways you can use it meaningfully in finance, but it's not in the sense I take you to mean above.

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

#434
post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At this point their fabs are a liability. Intel outsourcing their core product line is also a massive liability. It's just a different kind of liability. I personally think the world's reliance on TSMC indicates that fabs are critically important infrastructure. And operating a world class one provides a company with a ton of leverage with governments and other businesses.

I think it also shows that fabs who only have one customer (ie, Intel) aren't as competitive because they can't provide as much scale and are more sensitive to that customer's success. Intel's fab would be doing much better if it spun it out a while ago and was making Intel, Nvidia, and Apple chips right now.

If Intel's fabs has been spun out and operating at arms length from Intel's chip design side, then Intel's fabs would be dead. The guaranteed volume from manufacturing Intel's CPUs is all that's been keeping their fab side going. If they had to depend on customers who were actually sane and free to take their business elsewhere, Intel's fabs would have long since chased off all their customers with unfulfilled promises that next time they'll have a working process.

What Intel process from the last decade would have been enticing to Nvidia or Apple?

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

#435

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Wild to learn this is the same company selling MSG (mono sodium glutamate) and build up film - https://www.ajinomoto.com/innovation/our_innovation/buildupf... - https://www.ajinomoto.com/brands/aji-no-moto

Not really shocking considering how Japan likes conglomerates. Hyundai makes cars and military weapons and probably thousands of other things that aren’t even related to each other, don’t know if they still make computers.

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

#436
post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Is it ridiculous to expect an economy, such as the US, to produce things of value?

The author of the post you are responding to has a valid point. Consumption alone isn't sustainable.

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

#437

If that is the cost of keeping the value within the western economies, we should pay. Plain and simple. I'd even argue it's cheap.

If something happens to Taiwan, we won't regret being able to produce these chips domestically. If AI keeps growing like it does, it might even trigger a conflict.

Ironically my only opposition to US chips is that we’re less liable to protect Taiwan if China invades

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

#438

If that is the cost of keeping the value within the western economies, we should pay. Plain and simple. I'd even argue it's cheap.

This is not an easy inference. For this inference to be true , you have to know how much of the expense goes to salaries . Also, you have to give credit to tsmc to be world class which enables them to control prices, it may not translate across industries

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

#439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We’re at least 4 years away from that, as it would require a round of STEM college students to go EE instead of computer science.

Agreed, though its realistically much more than four. We have to make going to college a good idea again. That's not a cultural shift that'll happen overnight.
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