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[Haint]

Not sure I follow…

TSMC buys the lithography machines from ASML. ASML is really the king of lithography by a huge margin, almost everyone else is either so behind that they’re a non factor or closed doors. But the bulk of the “witchcraft” is on ASML’s side, not TSMC. They just somehow had so much capital injected to buy the majority of ASML’s yearly output that they choked competition.

But still, what’s to stop Apple from buying these? They’re $150M a pop. Surely they can figure out the rest with the budget and smart peoples they have. US government would probably even step in to help as they want to lower their dependency to Taiwan as it’s almost a WW3 trigger point with China at this point.

If it were anywhere near as simple as buying machines, Samsung, Intel, Glofo, etc would all be churning out the same nodes with the same yields as TSMC.

 

[Thebonehead]

They will get their comeuppance soon enough when China attacks Taiwan and nationalizes TSMC.

I think TSMC would be pile of smoking rubble before that would be allowed to happen.

 

[Buggy Loop]

If it were anywhere near as simple as buying machines, Samsung, Intel, Glofo, etc would all be churning out the same nodes with the same yields as TSMC.

70% of ASML machines go to TSMC and they book ahead the new nodes before anyone else. You do understand that having the machines later, in lesser numbers, can put months of delays in implementing a process node and it only gets worse from then on as you’re only playing catch up? Customers will go to TSMC as the node is ready before the others, which lowers cash income of Samsung and others, which mean they then have less cash to continue expanding and capital spending, which worsen your position to buy more ASML…

It’s a strategic battle all around ASML and TSMC won this strategy with extraordinary capital investments from Taiwan and key customers like Apple.

90% of the difficulty is in lithography, literally countries who invested mind boggling amounts of money to have their own tech, many in Japan, lost the race to ASML.

TSMC wouldn’t even be what it is today without Apple’s business. 6000 employees made a fab specifically for Apple. TSMC’s entire roll out strategy is made to accommodate Apple.

It just takes China to take possession of Taiwan and Europe to cut off ASML from supplying them that you’ll understand how this entire castle is made off ASML’s tech. They would be irrelevant in the span of 2 years or less.

I suggest Asianometry channel on YouTube to dive into.

 

[Haint]

70% of ASML machines go to TSMC and they book ahead the new nodes before anyone else. You do understand that having the machines later, in lesser numbers, can put months of delays in implementing a process node and it only gets worse from then on as you’re only playing catch up? Customers will go to TSMC as the node is ready before the others, which lowers cash income of Samsung and others, which mean they then have less cash to continue expanding and capital spending, which worsen your position to buy more ASML…

It’s a strategic battle all around ASML and TSMC won this strategy with extraordinary capital investments from Taiwan and key customers like Apple.

90% of the difficulty is in lithography, literally countries who invested mind boggling amounts of money to have their own tech, many in Japan, lost the race to ASML.

TSMC wouldn’t even be what it is today without Apple’s business. 6000 employees made a fab specifically for Apple. TSMC’s entire roll out strategy is made to accommodate Apple.

It just takes China to take possession of Taiwan and Europe to cut off ASML from supplying them that you’ll understand how this entire castle is made off ASML’s tech. They would be irrelevant in the span of 2 years or less.

I suggest Asianometry channel on YouTube to dive into.

LOL, because Samsung and the SK govt, or Intel/Glofo and the US govt can't afford to outbid Taiwan for some machines, and are choosing to let a contested territory/warzone buy out the most important and most valuable inventions in human history. Ok chief. Thats why they're all 5 years behind TSMC, can't afford a 150 million dollar machine. An "advantage", which by the way, didn't exist years ago when they somehow managed to run Glofo and now Intel out of the business. Dumb luck I guess, as it had nothing to do with TSMCs contibutions by your accounts.

 

[In Cold Blood]

Node shrinks are coming to the end of the road pretty quick.
There will be innovation, there always is, but as far as graphics and gaming go, this is why external hardware other than plain raster will need to be brought in.
Both AMD and Nvidia know this reality and have gone down differently roads to address it.
AMD with their power per watt savings and now moving to chaplets, while Nvidia went in the direction of tensor cores, DLSS etc.
For too long devs have been lazy by just relying on raster increases to improve fidelity and performance, whole being to slow on adopting tech like Mesh Shaders, SFS, VRS etc.
Microsoft has spent alot of effort pushing towards efficiency gains with DX12U, and Mesh Shaders and VRS has been out for a long time prior to that, yet not taken advantage of. There are benchmarks showing up to 700% increase in framerates using mesh shaders (obviously dependent on type of gameplay)

 

[rnlval]

http://[URL][URL][URL][URL][URL]htt...crease-over-5nm-next-gen-cpus-gpus-expensive/

[/URL][/URL][/URL][/URL][/URL]

An important thing to note is that N7 waffer was priced at 6500$ just 2 years ago. But TSMC decided to jack up prices, because of high demand.
But now that demand has fallen off a cliff, they insist on keeping the same price, just because of pure greed.
And of course, the prices for other process nodes were increased as well. So we have an increase in prices because these nodes are harder to develop, but were exacerbated because of plain old greed.

Lack of effective competition in the contract fabrication market.

From

In the 1970s and 1980s, the Taiwanese government gave the semiconductor industry strategic priority for development.


Meanwhile

https://news.metal.com/newscontent/...enough-to-build-a-complete-local-supply-chain

TSMC founder Zhang Zhongmou gave a negative view of the US government's policy of spending money to attract semiconductor companies to set up local factories

-----
Zhang Zhongmou couldn't handle the "race to the bottom" when it comes to government subsidies.

Following Taiwan's 1980s chip subsidies, China and South Korea applied government subsidies for their respective chip fabrication companies before US's chip fabrication government subsidies. It's a "race to the bottom" when it comes to government subsidies for their respective chip fabrication companies.

-----

For context and scope, from https://tradebarrierindex.org
Trade Barrier Index 2021 with a lower tariff score has fewer trade barriers.

New Zealand's tariff score is 2.92
Australia's tariff score is 3.03
UK's tariff score is 3.94
Japan's tariff score is 4.05
US's tariff score is 4.54

Germany's tariff score is 4.88
EU's tariff score is 4.88

China's tariff score is 5.68
Russia's tariff score is 6.16
South Korea's tariff score is 7.35
India's tariff score is 8.18

 

[rnlval]

LOL, because Samsung and the SK govt, or Intel/Glofo and the US govt can't afford to outbid Taiwan for some machines, and are choosing to let a contested territory/warzone buy out the most important and most valuable inventions in human history. Ok chief. Thats why they're all 5 years behind TSMC, can't afford a 150 million dollar machine. An "advantage", which by the way, didn't exist years ago when they somehow managed to run Glofo and now Intel out of the business. Dumb luck I guess, as it had nothing to do with TSMCs contibutions by your accounts.

"Intel 7" is based on TSMC's "7nm" density parameters.

"Intel 4" is based on TSMC "4 nm" density parameters.

A significant amount of TSMC's recent rapid growth is linked with handset SoCs from Apple and Qualcomm.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/26/22595002/intel-qualcomm-chips-foundry-services-amazon-aws-20a
For 2024, Qualcomm already signed a deal with Intel for "20A" process node. Gelsinger has previously mentioned that Intel is in talks with over 100 companies for foundry work.

"Intel 4" fabrication capability is available but Meteor Lake is not yet completed. Fabrication capability is nothing without ASIC designs.

In terms of X86-64 designs, Intel 7-based Raptor Lake is competitive against TSMC 5nm/6nm based AMD Zen 4.

 

[rnlval]

Ever heard of the relationship Apple`s chips have with ARM?
Developing and actually implementing fabrication technology nearly from scratch and (re)designing some existing chip architectures which then are conveniently produced elsewhere is absolutely incomparable.

Your comparison is nonsense.

Apple's M1 design is an ARMv8.4-A instruction set compatible clone and it's not based on ARM's ASIC ARMv8.4-A design.

 

[ReBurn]

TSMC needs to get their act together so I can start buying raspberry pis again.

 

[MarkMe2525]

There's actual physics limitations when you approach 1nm (look up electron gating), and even if you manage to overcome that, you'd still run into the problem of running out of actual physical space between transistors (0.6nm); things cannot get smaller forever.

Idk, Planks length is pretty small

 

[rnlval]

TSMC needs to get their act together so I can start buying raspberry pis again.

The production rate for RPi is about 400,000 units per month and prioritizing commercial customers.

 

[ReBurn]

The production rate for RPi is about 400,000 units per month and prioritizing commercial customers.

Which is frustrating considering raspberry pi boldly states they are a charity "with the mission to enable young people to realise their full potential through the power of computing and digital technologies."

It seems a lot like "we'll get to you sooner or later normal people we need to take care of all of these poor corporations that are turing around and selling these to you at 5x the normal price" instead.