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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

#481

Post by CodeWriter23 »

wtallis wrote: post #262
CodeWriter23 wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple is the company that just over 10 years ago made a strategic move to remove Intel from their supply chain by purchasing a semiconductor firm and licensing ARM. Managing 'painful' transitions is a core competency of theirs.

Which acquisition are you referring to? Apple bought PA Semi in 2008 and Intrinsity in 2010.

PA, Intrinsity wasn't front of mind for me. My point is, Apple has proven they can buy their way into vertical integration, let's look at the history.

68K -> PowerPC, practically seamless

Mac OS 9 -> BSD / OS X with excellent backward compatibility

PowerPC -> x86

x86 -> ARM

Each major transition, biting off orders of magnitude more complexity of integration. Looking at this continuum, the next logical vertical integration step for Apple is fabrication. The only question in my mind, does Tim have the guts to take that risk.

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

#482

Post by TurdF3rguson »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #464
TurdF3rguson wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 worldw…

Those returned trees don't get sent back to the supplier, they get deducted from a pre-negotiated spoil allowance which is something separate. The supplier returns will be things like badly stacked palettes.

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

#483

Post by idonotknowwhy »

webstrand wrote: post #49
achr2 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They didn't tweak their prompt styling request enough... The ChatGPT world is depressing.

Doesn't seem like LLM generated text to me. Even prior to ChatGPT some journalists preferred to write in a novel-style with extraneous fluff like that.

Agreed. Not a single "this isn't just X, it's Y" in the entire article. Actually quite refreshing to read something written by a human for once.

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

#484

Post by storus »

clusterhacks wrote: post #308
storus wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Very cool - thanks for the info. That you are writing AI agents for a living is fascinating to hear. We aren't even really looking at how to use agents internally yet. I think local agents are incredibly off the radar at my org despite some really good additions as supplement resources for internal apps. What's deployment look like for your agents? You're clearly exploring a lot of different approaches . . .

My commercial agents are just wrappers on top of GPT/Claude/Gemini so the standard deployment ways on Azure/AWS/GCP apply with integrations to whatever systems customers have like JIRA, Confluence etc. Some need to automate away some folks with repetitive work, some need to improve time to delivery with their people swamped by incoming work, hoping to accelerate cognitively-demanding tasks etc.

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

#485

Post by steve1977 »

Zafira wrote: post #278
CodeWriter23 wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple is the company that just over 10 years ago made a strategic move to remove Intel from their supply chain by purchasing a semiconductor firm and licensing ARM. Managing 'painful' transitions is a core competency of theirs.

I think you’re correct that they’re good at just ripping the band-aid off, but the details seem off. AFAIK, Apple has always had a license with ARM and a very unique one since they were one of the initial investors when it was spun out from Acorn. In fact, my understanding is that Apple is the one that insisted they call themselves Advanced RISC Machines Ltd. because they did not want Acorn (a competitor) in the name…

Correct, from the ARM Wikipedia entry:

The new Apple–ARM work would eventually evolve into the ARM6, first released in early 1992. Apple used the ARM6-based ARM610 as the basis for their Apple Newton PDA.

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

#486

Post by amanaplanacanal »

IncreasePosts wrote: post #273
tim-tday wrote: post #69

Sneak preview of the TSMC shortage that will sweep the world in 2027 when China takes Taiwan and the TSMC scuttles their chip fabs on the island. I don’t know the hedge to position against this but I’m pretty sure China will make good on its promise.

I'm about 100% positive America would consider that an act of war and respond accordingly.

It feels like America is already planning to gin up its own wars in its own hemisphere.

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

#487

Post by assaddayinh »

anoojb wrote: post #138
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…

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…

[dead]

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

#488

Post by caycep »

entropi wrote: post #449
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…

I mean sure it is fun to pick one company and hate it, but this is not the point being argued here. But the point here is that a few companies are outbidding everyone else, hoarding shittons of compute and putting it into their data centers, to rent to people. This is effectively taking compute ownership away from consumers and centralizing compute i.e. un-democratising. Apple outcompeting other companies to put thei…

I kind of wonder what happens when/if the bubble bursts - will there be some glut of used inventory like after the first Dotcom bubble when remnants of fiber buildout from Qwest and the like were being sold off pennies on the dollar? or will there be a long term corporate despotism of compute from an oligopoly of companies?

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

#489

Post by lII1lIlI11ll »

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…

> 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 be embarrassed if his peers heard their tastes.

Just out of curiosity, was it something despicable like them liking Marvel movies? Or more akin to disagreeing whether Eyes Wide Shut could be considered a good Kubrick movie?

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

#490

Post by engineer_22 »

ai-x wrote: post #119
engineer_22 wrote: post #50

I find that my cell phone which is 4 generations old and my desktop computer which is 2 generations old are totally adequate for everything I need to do, and I do not need faster processing

You are anecdote, not data. Data is saying demand >>>>> supply.

I'm not anecdote, I'm man.
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