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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

#721

Post by Nevermark »

Biganon wrote: post #559
Nevermark wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you played Asteroids lately? Finite and flat, but unbounded!

Asteroids exists on a torus, therefore it's not flat

That is not true. A topological taurus can be flat or not.

A physical taurus embedded in our 3D universe, i.e. a donut, cannot be flat. Which may be the confusion.

But video game spaces are neither logically embedded or restricted by our 3D space. All its physics, including its spacial topology and geometry, flat or otherwise, were completely up to the game designers.

And the Asteroid game designers chose a flat space.

• Two parallel line segments stay parallel, no matter how long you extend them. Or how many times they wrap around the Asteroid space. (They also never intersect, but can overlap, just as in any flat 2D space.)

• Any number and distance of moves in any two perpendicular directions, are commutative. I.e. you can change the order of the moves, and you will still end up at the same spot.

• The three angles of any triangle in Asteroid space adds up to 180 degrees.

None of which applies to the surface of a donut.

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

#722

Post by maxglute »

SJC_Hacker wrote: post #510
maxglute wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US+co essentially incapable of resupplying TW if PRC motivated to stranglehold blockade. TW is 15 times smaller than UKR, the quality of ISR and amount of munitions PRC can pour onto anywhere in the island and adjacent waters is also orders of magnitude more than RU and resupply via water and air is basically transparent vs myriad of obfuscated land routes UKR has, PRC can trivially locked down TW airstrips and ports…

There isn’t anything could do about the US invading Cuba because no one has much of a blue water navy outside the US itself. Now granted, China is getting there but their navy is still mostly brown water (by design). And in any Taiwan / SCS conflict they would have an advantage because they can use their land assets, especially air force and land based anti ship rockets, on top of their navy. The US land bases in the…

My gist is more no current bluewater Navy, including US is scaled to fight attrition battle in a near parity peer sized adversary's backyard. On paper this applies to current USN vs WestPac. Axis JP+DE during WW2, peak USSR were both ~1/2 of US comprehensive power, i.e. gdp ppp, % of global output, domestic industry output. PRC vs US closer to ~1-2x, with some metrics such as ship or munition building... order of magnitude more. In some gaps, US not even peak JP or USSR in relative terms. Even the month long 90s Iraq curbstomp required generational tech gab (french designers leaked/compromised IADs), 5 carriers and favourable regional basing (vs westpac), unsustainably high tempo sorties... when US militarily hasn't declined to current state in terms of capitalization... and Iraq then is charitably 1/100th the size of PRC. Unless there is unrevealed tech gap that still enables asymmetric curb stomp with a much smaller force - perhaps somehow none of Chinese hardware works, which at this point likely means completely dismantling PRC kill chain, i.e. what PRC intends to do vs US.

TLDR is the potential regional balance is increasingly lop sided in favour of PRC with gap widening, i.e. US+co can't preposition hardware at relevant rate. PRC hinted their cruise missile gigafactory has capacity to exhaust/target entire current US+co hardware inventory + stockpiles with few months production. A few more months enough to comprehensively shatter critical infra of US partners in 1IC. Hence why JP likely won't fight, because ultimately they're just a larger TW, also dependant on energy and calorie imports, and main islands also entirely within umbrella of PRC mainland fires. Mainland China is much better postured to operation Starvation JP than US from Marianas (25% further, and still needed logistics from CONUS) was during WW2. And if JP gives PRC excuse to fight them then PRC will (LBH be somewhat eager) to fight to the last JPnese. If JP doesn't, then they... well survive, maybe even still keep US protection. Most likely they'll only lose Senkaku when regional dynamics reconfigure. IMO current sign of JP not fighting is stronger than JP will fight... i.e. not opening main islands to distributed AGILE basing - US basically said they need JP in TW scenario, but they need to disperse all across JP not just Okinawa and Ryukyu's for survivability and JP action so far (since Trump1) is to not. It doesn't matter what JP politicians say for security theatre, IMO JP not committed until they start heavily militarizing main islands.

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

#723

Post by frollogaston »

ksec wrote: post #636
motorest wrote: post #635

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. No, that is not the cost of keeping "the value" within western economies. It would be the cost of granting the US a leverage against the collective west. The US proved to be a very unreliable and outright hostile partner. At this point, it is not clear whether the US is more hostile to…

US has been a reliable partner post WWII for 95%+ of the time. Making Trump administration representing 100+ years of US history isn't exactly a fair comparison.

Even under Trump, it's been a lot more words than action

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

#724

Post by frollogaston »

neon_me wrote: post #514
avhception wrote: post #342

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.

Cheap? 20% increase in cost of BoM equals at least ~100% increase for customer. Would you pay twice for AMD components? What would market do?

If people won't pay double for AMD components, that's not what the price will be. Cost increases usually eat into margins partially.

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

#725

Post by frollogaston »

michaelsshaw wrote: post #534
avhception wrote: post #342

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.

What special quality do "western" countries have that makes it a moral obligation to purchase from them over others? Why is it a moral good to keep value from the others?

It's not about that; Taiwan is West-aligned anyway. It's for maintaining some level of self-reliance. Also, basic economics says that trade helps the country's overall economy, but that ignores how it's not applied equally. US manufacturing towns have been hollowed out over the years.

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

#726

Post by 1718627440 »

babypuncher wrote: post #162
rich_sasha wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not into hardware but I remember when AMD was sneered at, and all real CPUs were Intel. Then Ryzen happened. My meta conclusion is that its super hard to tell when someone is done, and it can change quickly. Or not. Sometimes it if looks like terminal decline, it simply is terminal decline.

A big part of AMD's turnaround was going fabless. I think the big fear here is that if Intel does the same, there won't be much competition left in the fab space. Is Samsung still competitive with TSMC?

What I don't get is: When AMD fabless is profitable and GlobalFoundries is profitable, why where AMD with the fab not?

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

#727

Post by 1718627440 »

DiabloD3 wrote: post #228
timmg wrote: post #34

What I really want to know, from someone who does know: Is Intel cooked? Like, will they be able to manufacture chips that compete with TSMC? They used to be a crown-jewel of US tech. But it seems like every time I read the news, they are announcing a delay or shutting down some product.

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…

Why needs Intel to split in order to make contracts with other companies? Can't they just do it when they are still a single company?

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

#728

Post by 1718627440 »

codedokode wrote: post #281
wbl wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have that what's the VLIW getting you?

Out-of-order architectures are inhumanly complex, especially figuring out the dependencies. For example, can we reorder these two instructions or must execute them sequentially? ld r1, [r2 + 10] st [r3 + 4], r4 And then consider things like speculative execution.

Honestly to me it seams like optimizing compilers and out-of order CPUs are actually doing the same thing. Can't we get rid of one or the other?

Either have a stupid ISA and do all the work ahead-of-time with way more compute time to optimize or don't optimize and have a higher level ISA, that also hs concepts like pointer provenance.

The current state seams like a local minima with both having ahead-of-time optimization, but the ISA does it's thing anyways and also the compiler throwing much of the information away with OoO analysis being time-critical.

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

#729

Post by 1718627440 »

nobodyandproud wrote: post #235
cm2012 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ocean shipping is very very cheap. Less cost in money and energy to ship a chip across the ocean than for you to drive to best buy to buy the phone its in.

What about freight trains?

From the US to Taiwan? I mean if Elon Musk want's to build a hyperloop through a sea floor spreading zone, then sure why not.

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

#730

Post by babypuncher »

0x457 wrote: post #290
uluyol wrote: 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.

AMD and GloFlo split in 2009 but AMD wasn't able to start actually manufacturing their chips with other foundries until 2019 when GloFlo got downgraded to only providing the IO die for Zen 2. This is because AMD was contractually obligated to continue using GloFlo for that time as a condition of the split.

Zen 2 is also where Ryzen went from "exciting and competitive, but not top of the line" to actually giving Intel a run for their money in more than just highly multithreaded workloads.

Improved architecture put AMD within striking distance of Intel and the move to TSMC allowed them to pull ahead.

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