Apple should use its bajillions and quadrillions of cash-dollars to spin up a new fab. The Chinese reportedly have EUV in testing right? Maybe there are other partners willing to play ball?
Apple is fighting for TSMC capacity as Nvidia takes center stage
461–470 of 501 posts
Re: Apple is fighting for TSMC capacity as Nvidia takes center stage
#462Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 sold defective GPU's that affected every 2007-2008 MacBook Pro. It was a manufacturing defect and every chip was guaranteed to fail. It was a bad look for Apple that cost them millions having to replace logic boards. The defect wasn't corrected for several years leading to some people having multiple logic board replacements. https://blog.greggant.com/posts/2021/10/13/apple-vs-nvidia-w...
They, and everyone at the time, were kind of forced to switch to lead-free solder by RoHS. At that point, there probably hadn't yet been tests showing the results of constant thermal cycling, so the brittling effect was unknown. Apple was particularly affected as an early adopter because of their PR stance on environmental issues.
Refusing to acknowledge anything was wrong was the real problem. But that's just a reminder that companies don't care about you. Brand loyalty is a quagmire.
Re: Apple is fighting for TSMC capacity as Nvidia takes center stage
#463Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not all of Apple‘s chips need to be fabbed at the smallest size, those could certainly go elsewhere. I’m sure they already do. Is there anyone who can match TSMC at this point for the top of the line M or A chips? Even if Intel was ready and Apple wanted to would they be able to supply even 10% of what Apple needs for the yearly iPhone supply?
> Not all of Apple‘s chips need to be fabbed at the smallest size, those could certainly go elsewhere. When I saw that TSMC continues to run old fabs, I immediately thought about this idea. I am sure when Apple is designing various chips for their products, they design for a specific node based on available capacity. Not all chips need to be the smallest node size. Another thing: I am seeing a bunch of comments here…
My understanding, and I’m a layman, is it basically requires making new masks. And that’s not trivial.
I guess you’d be doing that anyway with a brand new chip. But still probably easier to work with the tools/fab you know well.
I suppose you’d have to do it just switching nodes at TSMC. Which is why the A13 (or whatever) probably never moves to smaller nodes.
Sometimes Apple updates the chip in a product that doesn’t seem to need it, like the AppleTV. I wonder if it’s because the old node is going away and it’s easier to just use a newer chip that was designed for the newer node.
Re: Apple is fighting for TSMC capacity as Nvidia takes center stage
#464Earlier quoted context omitted.
About 17 years ago I worked at a company that was clamoring to get products into Costco, when we did I was shocked at the fees they charged us for returns. If they're the gold standard for supplier relations it's a wonder anyone bothers being a supplier.
You were shocked that they didn't absorb the cost of your shipping mistakes?
Why would you assume that Costco returns are due to supplier mistakes?
Costco are legendarily permissive with returns, to extent of things like accepting bare stick-like xmas trees back after xmas, and giving a full refund, but ultimately this is to their advantage in encouraging mindless consumerism (which is also the general American model - no-question-no-fault returns are generally an American thing, not a worldwide one).
Now, a liberal return policy may work out for Costco, and Costco is obviously a high volume hence desirable customer for a supplier, but if Costco is pushing much of the cost of returns back to the supplier, that does change the picture a bit!
Re: Apple is fighting for TSMC capacity as Nvidia takes center stage
#465Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe just locking at a chip, does not enable you to to make such a chip, otherwise china would not be behind. TSMC already makes them in their labs. They could tweak a few things, claim it is novel and just sell to the competition. (Apple would fight back of course with all they have and TSMC reputation would take damage)
Looking at a chip makes it easier, but it is still millions (or billions in the case of a CPU) of dollars for engineers to figure it all out. That doesn't get you to understand what was done or why so 2-3 years latter you can make that chip but they have now moved on to a faster/better version and you are behind. And of course if you try this Apple (or whoever you copy) will have plenty of engineers who can look at y…
It took cerebras less than a billion to get to where they are now, CPUs are not that hard. You would probably be able to reverse engineer them for ~100 million
Re: Apple is fighting for TSMC capacity as Nvidia takes center stage
#466Earlier quoted context omitted.
As of today Intel is very around leading node
yield is more important than leading node.
Yes and no. Sunk cost.
They are always balls deep, if it takes them 2 years to get a TSMC yield, with as much as demand it exists for high-end fabs, they could already easily get financing to already build even more capacity.
Now they have literally the US government as an investor.
One would be naive to believe that they wouldn't get at least a few hundred billion dollars to scale it up given the so many risks involved in most of US tech sector being dependent on Taiwan.
Re: Apple is fighting for TSMC capacity as Nvidia takes center stage
#467Earlier quoted context omitted.
The 9950X3D has a TDP of 170 watts. M5 has an estimated TDP of around 20 watts. The comparison point was for single core performance, which certainly makes the TDP comparison unfair if interpreted together. The numbers are ballpark-correct. No one else is remotely close to Apple. Apple could stop developing chips for four years, and it’s very likely they would still ship the most efficient core architecture, and sit…
Is Snapdragon with the X2 Elite so far behind? I doubt it, particularly not four years.
Can you buy and independently test a Snapdragon X2 Elite? You can go buy M5 today.
Re: Apple is fighting for TSMC capacity as Nvidia takes center stage
#468The real loser in all of this is consumers. Pricing on software and hardware is going to continue to rise and rise.
Yes, but renting a cloud pc will be initially very cheap for consumers - that's got to be good for consum...governments.
Re: Apple is fighting for TSMC capacity as Nvidia takes center stage
#469Earlier quoted context omitted.
If your customers are known to be antagonistic to business partners, the correct answer is to diversify them as much as you can, even at reasonable costs from anything else. That means deprioritizing your largest customer.
At these scales everyone is antagonistic, it comes with the territory.
That's what MBA schools teach you.
That's also a lie, it's only antagonistic when one of the sides is controlled by a psychopathic asshole, and it being antagonistic is a serious drag for the gains of both sides.
Re: Apple is fighting for TSMC capacity as Nvidia takes center stage
#470Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the M5 in the iPad Pro outperforms every chip made by EVERYONE else in the world No, it does not. The core inside the M5 is faster than every other core design in single-threaded burst performance. That is common for small machines with a low core count and no hyperthreading. The chip itself does not outperform every other chip in the world, nor is it 10x more efficient than the 9950X3D. That's not even napkin math…
The 9950X3D has a TDP of 170 watts. M5 has an estimated TDP of around 20 watts. The comparison point was for single core performance, which certainly makes the TDP comparison unfair if interpreted together. The numbers are ballpark-correct. No one else is remotely close to Apple. Apple could stop developing chips for four years, and it’s very likely they would still ship the most efficient core architecture, and sit…
> The numbers are ballpark-correct.
The numbers do not exist in isolation. They are "interpreted together" because statistics are more than just advertisement lines. The TDP comparison is mind-bogglingly stupid and you should really feel ashamed for defending it if you care about statistical integrity.
> you are not mentally ready for what M5 Ultra is going to do to these comparisons in a few months
I hope so. The past Ultra chips have been losing to Nvidia laptops in raster and compute efficiency.