TSMC's N2 wafers will cost $30.000 - 66% higher cost than N3

The four horsemen of terminal stage capitalism are here: gambling, price gouging, rent-seeking and pornography. Even corporations are in on the scalping now... Can't blame them: they saw governments slacking on regulating this shit peer-to-peer and went pro with it. Margins are secret, after all.

"I'm making US$0.27 on each of these wafers, trust me."
 
Last edited:
Very low. Intel has delayed their nodes and failed to meet PPA targets since 2016, Samsung has been an absolute disaster in the last few years and there's no one else even trying to compete with TSMC.
China is certainly working on it, not even by choice, but we, primarily the US, forced them to. And they made some progress in manufacturing, i think they are at 7nm, without EUV- I think Huawei aims at 3nm, still without EUV-, and chip design itself, where GPUs were so far terrible but I think their ARM chips are not really bad anymore. Much like solar panels and smartphones in the past years, EV cars right now ... imho it is inevitable that they catch up, because they go all in and financing it will be a state task pratically without any limit. So imho the opposite of very low! And that as well will be a huge thread to thousands of jobs. Maybe it would have happened anyway with how profitable it is, but the ASML restrictions forced them to engineer it themselves and not come to that goal just by an economic decision.
 
In china, technology now seems to be making rapid progress. Maybe something will come from there.
They can imitate, which means offering same thing as tsmc just few(5-6-7?) years later for cheaper, coz of no patent laws, but to actually compete they would literally have to invade taiwan/destroy tsmc physically.

Closest competitor we had back in 2020/2021 was samsung, they were bit behind but not crazy behind, otherwise nvidia wouldnt make 30xx series cards on samsung 8nm process back in 2021.
Not anymore, tsmc has lead big enough over samsung/intel that all major players order from them, even at much inflated cost its still worth it, technological advantage is simply that big atm.

Its enough to quote one sentence from conclusion in this big up to date (25th may 2025) article:
TSMC is the dominant force in semiconductor manufacturing, with Samsung and Intel struggling to keep up.
 
Last edited:
We already have arrived at that point.
Current gen and even Switch 2 are not using the newest and latest node.
Exactly for that reason.

One of the reasons we do not get price cuts anymore....

Nintendo never uses the latest node. They've been that way since the N64. They always cheap out on hardware.

Nintendo is not really a signal of what Sony or MS will do. But nevertheless, I largely agree that we've reached that point now that we're talking about $30k wafers.
 
They can imitate, which means offering same thing as tsmc just few(5-6-7?) years later for cheaper, coz of no patent laws, but to actually compete they would literally have to invade taiwan/destroy tsmc physically.

Closest competitor we had back in 2020/2021 was samsung, they were bit behind but not crazy behind, otherwise nvidia wouldnt make 30xx series cards on samsung 8nm process back in 2021.
Not anymore, tsmc has lead big enough over samsung/intel that all major players order from them, even at much inflated cost its still worth it, technological advantage is simply that big atm.

Its enough to quote one sentence from conclusion in this big up to date (25th may 2025) article:
I don't think samsung and Intel are far when putting things into perspective. 5 years from they have improved yields and face same high pricing problems.
 
I don't think samsung and Intel are far when putting things into perspective. 5 years from they have improved yields and face same high pricing problems.
5 years ago that was strongest gaming gpu tho:
Current BiS is 3,5x stronger, even including slowing down of the tech :P
 
just imagine what would happen if China decided to invade Taiwan..
Well, potentially WWIII. I am not sure how gaming would go in post nuclear war apocalypse.

If things stay "local", at best, it will be world wide economic crash making Great Depression seem mild.

Oh, and China produces like 90% of magnets and rare earth refined minerals, so the West will be f-d. Mind you, so will China, and Taiwan will be ruined.

Gaming will be about the last thing to worry about there.
 
We heard Cerny's opinion on future trends in the PS5 Pro technical breakdown and I would say this is nothing that isn't expected and already accounted for. Much in the same way when single core CPUs gave way to multi-core and we immediately dropped back to 1.2ghz-1.8ghz from +3Ghz (on PC) and gaming still advanced forward.

The cost of these wafers is crazy, but given where we are in gaming with conventional rendering and conventional simulations plateauing and ML inferencing being a new paradigm shift - mountain to climb - I suspect the real cost to factor in for these wafers is what impact will it have on low latency esram/edram pricing and sizes.

The design of the PS5 Pro and the technical talk about PSSR shows that it is total parallel cache memory bandwidth - for compute - that is the new paradigm's bottleneck for console gaming, not the number of tensors in a monolithic chip or just the clock speed of the tensors, and the showcase of Unreal 5.6/5.7 features in real-time in the Witcher 4 tech demo yesterday with nanite foliage on a base PS5 and running at 60fps with RT indicates that ML AI upscaling on Pro/PS6/PC is going to have a much easier time going forward with quality reconstruction from even lower native res.

Essentially, now that heavily used alpha mask 2D foliage hack - that easily trips up ML AI upscaling - is being replaced and cheaply without ML AI upscaling - just using geometry instancing on base PS5 - the gains that ML AI will achieve above and beyond without chasing Moore's law wafer gains on processing should at least kick this problem down the road a decade or two for console gaming IMO.

edit:
I also think generation length could become less of an issue, as Microsoft seem pretty happy to be selling games on PlayStation, so don't have the same need to pre-empt generations early, and judging by the Witcher 4 tech demo showcase exclusive to PS5 seemingly a non-issue, now I suspect optimal hardware usage might return if even Epic are razor focused on PlayStation/PC first over generalized multiplatform development, meaning greater software innovation over a generation reducing the cadence of hardware upgrades.
 
Last edited:
They can imitate, which means offering same thing as tsmc just few(5-6-7?) years later for cheaper, coz of no patent laws, but to actually compete they would literally have to invade taiwan/destroy tsmc physically.
SMIC lost legal battles against TSMC and paid penalties ... so "no patent laws" is certainly some China equals wild west myth.
No idea how they could prove that and if they still steal technology from TSMC and more important ASML but since there is no other player they either do steal OR actually do it themselves today. TSMC, Intel and Samsung stopped using DUV around 10 or maybe latest 7nm, SMIC does 7 on that and want's to reach 5 and 3 also with DUV. So if they imitate, they will also have done some innovation to some degree since they won't get the top end more modern EUV machines as long as America says no.
China is great at copying and then mindlessly mass manufacture, but once they have the fundamentals down, however acquired, they certainly can build on top of them too. With their large pool of people it's impossible that you don't have thousands upon thousands clever people.
 
China would become no1 public enemy among every1 having any electronic devices(including phones), basically modern day nazi germany :P

Well, potentially WWIII. I am not sure how gaming would go in post nuclear war apocalypse.

If things stay "local", at best, it will be world wide economic crash making Great Depression seem mild.

Oh, and China produces like 90% of magnets and rare earth refined minerals, so the West will be f-d. Mind you, so will China, and Taiwan will be ruined.

Gaming will be about the last thing to worry about there.

When Russia invaded Ukraine, many thought it would not happen. Putin was just posturing, and the entire western world would despise him for it and destroy them.

Yet here we are. Russia continues to decimate Ukraine with impunity, sanctions didn't work, it grew economic ties with other western adversaries. If anything, China and Russia combined have the resources and military might to do whatever they want, China alone has the best AI infrastructure in the world by a mile. I think it is a matter of time before the posturing becomes a real conflict.
 
SMIC lost legal battles against TSMC and paid penalties ... so "no patent laws" is certainly some China equals wild west myth.
No idea how they could prove that and if they still steal technology from TSMC and more important ASML but since there is no other player they either do steal OR actually do it themselves today. TSMC, Intel and Samsung stopped using DUV around 10 or maybe latest 7nm, SMIC does 7 on that and want's to reach 5 and 3 also with DUV. So if they imitate, they will also have done some innovation to some degree since they won't get the top end more modern EUV machines as long as America says no.
China is great at copying and then mindlessly mass manufacture, but once they have the fundamentals down, however acquired, they certainly can build on top of them too. With their large pool of people it's impossible that you don't have thousands upon thousands clever people.
China is full of scammers and no1 cares :

U get even such a fun stuff there like 3min long unskipable tik tok ads :)
And lets see what we got here:
 
Last edited:
Tech companies are having a blast with this realising they can overcharge even more and just blame this.
 
When Russia invaded Ukraine, many thought it would not happen. Putin was just posturing, and the entire western world would despise him for it and destroy them.

Yet here we are. Russia continues to decimate Ukraine with impunity, sanctions didn't work, it grew economic ties with other western adversaries. If anything, China and Russia combined have the resources and military might to do whatever they want, China alone has the best AI infrastructure in the world by a mile. I think it is a matter of time before the posturing becomes a real conflict.
As a polish guy who lives 60miles away from russian border- barely any1 in the world cared about russian invasion to ukraine, same way barely any1 cares about whats happening in palestine right now, for the simply reason it doesnt really affect our daily life for the most part.
China invading Taiwan and loss of tsmc would impact every1 in the world(well lets say 95% of the world, there are exceptions like some tribes in africa, aborigenal tribes in australia and such) in such a negative way that every1's quality of daily life would get visibly worse and not even after few years- ppl would notice huge impact likely in a matter of weeks :)

If China was sure they can take over Taiwan they would do it by now, Russia(Putin) but even many western countries too were sure they could conquer Ukraine in a matter of days, worst case scenario 2-3weeks.

I actually thought China gonna invade Taiwan just before US presidential elections so late summer/early autumn 2024, but looks like for some reason China wasnt sure they could do it- predicted some nasty consequences for themselfs of such actions- they are not stupid, if they decide to go peaceful route they know stuff- like for example that next decade/in 2 decades their situation gonna keep improving vs the US hegemony so its fine to wait.
 
As a polish guy who lives 60miles away from russian border- barely any1 in the world cared about russian invasion to ukraine, same way barely any1 cares about whats happening in palestine right now, for the simply reason it doesnt really affect our daily life for the most part.
China invading Taiwan and loss of tsmc would impact every1 in the world(well lets say 95% of the world, there are exceptions like some tribes in africa, aborigenal tribes in australia and such) in such a negative way that every1's quality of daily life would get visibly worse and not even after few years- ppl would notice huge impact likely in a matter of weeks :)

If China was sure they can take over Taiwan they would do it by now, Russia(Putin) but even many western countries too were sure they could conquer Ukraine in a matter of days, worst case scenario 2-3weeks.

I actually thought China gonna invade Taiwan just before US presidential elections so late summer/early autumn 2024, but looks like for some reason China wasnt sure they could do it- predicted some nasty consequences for themselfs of such actions- they are not stupid, if they decide to go peaceful route they know stuff- like for example that next decade/in 2 decades their situation gonna keep improving vs the US hegemony so its fine to wait.
China isn't going to wait, IMO. They are getting ready to be able to launch around 2027-2028.

Troop transports, co-ordination between branches, additional combat ships, etc… they are getting things ready.

And we are f-d after that goes.
 
Early adopters for Apple hardware can pay for the new fab plants

Only problem is getting the price back down once people are paying it. With no competition
 
Why people here are freaking out about 2nm when it's not meant to be for gaming yet ? The 5090 with all its power is still on 5nm .

We are very far off for the 2nm for gaming to even worry about this and its pricing . By the time it starts to be meant for gaming . The 2 nm will be found at Costco with the hot dog and drink combo for 99 cents -_-
 
I wonder how many decades we are away from quantum computers becoming doable/viable in the consumer market. Obviously its not possible at the moement, and only experimental even in the goverment/military/highend business world, but modern computers started that way too.
 
Why people here are freaking out about 2nm when it's not meant to be for gaming yet ? The 5090 with all its power is still on 5nm .

We are very far off for the 2nm for gaming to even worry about this and its pricing . By the time it starts to be meant for gaming . The 2 nm will be found at Costco with the hot dog and drink combo for 99 cents -_-

Isn't the p5 slim on 6np and the pro on a variant of 4nm ? (Although technically I think 4 is just a newer variant of a 5nm design)

I think timing more than anything in the console world is key. It used to coincide with cost savings or new tech. Being able to move to a significantly smaller node

Now smaller seems to equate to more cost, even with more chips per wafer (if you shrink an older chip. Rather than fan a new one)

2nm is on its way for Apple, some memory chips and probably the AI world

Where as before that may have created the opportunity for consoles to redesign down and reduce the cost. But moving to that freed up capacity at say 3nm. Now it would probably only result in a more expensive Xbox, or ps5
 
Regardless, these wafer costs are unprecedented.

Sony paid close to $7 - 9k per wafer for the launch PS4. This is over 3x the wafer cost.

At some point it stops making economic sense to build a console on the latest node unless you think you can sell a $900 box to a mass market.

Global Foundries, Samsung, and Intel all screwed the pooch and let TSMC run too far ahead. Now they have no competition and they're just price gouging for all their worth.
I think inflation since 2013 also had a big impact on that cost along with the AI boom. Over time though they would build it on the latest node as the wafer cost gets somewhat offset by the ability to have more chips per wafer at a lower node and the material cost of cooling blocks becomes lower due to the efficiency gain. There is just way too much demand by the bigger players now though so everybody is charging too much, not just TSMC, because they know the big tech companies would pay. Unfortunately the less lucrative markets take a back seat and have to wait for it to become cheaper.
 
We already have arrived at that point.
Current gen and even Switch 2 are not using the newest and latest node.
Exactly for that reason.

One of the reasons we do not get price cuts anymore....

This is why I'm curious about what happens with next gen.

I guess it's possible that the consoles have only marginal increases in compute and are more focused on architectural advances.
 
China isn't going to wait, IMO. They are getting ready to be able to launch around 2027-2028.

Troop transports, co-ordination between branches, additional combat ships, etc… they are getting things ready.

And we are f-d after that goes.
nah.
China is just as dependent on TSMC as everyone else and the fabs down to the ASML machines are very openly known to have kill switches. China would fight a war with everyone that needs Taiwan`s chips, most prominently the US, just to conquer a worthless piece of land in case of a success in the end.
There`s a reason TSMC has openly refused to produce the high end nodes off-island, it`s literally their insurance against China.
However if China or one of its allies manages to miraculously catch up in semiconductor fabrication tech Taiwan is toast.
Not only because they lose their insurance but because they will simply bribe the rest of the world with cheap replacements if they just look the other way because no one openly fights a war if they are not directly impacted, no matter how "just" it would be.

Why people here are freaking out about 2nm when it's not meant to be for gaming yet ? The 5090 with all its power is still on 5nm .
And it is a giant wafer space gobbling die that eats 600W because of it.
We are very far off for the 2nm for gaming to even worry about this and its pricing . By the time it starts to be meant for gaming . The 2 nm will be found at Costco with the hot dog and drink combo for 99 cents -_-
Nope. The issue with node shrinking slowing down is that the whole stack keeps their prices much longer stable because older nodes are much much longer viable.
 
Last edited:
This is why I'm curious about what happens with next gen.

I guess it's possible that the consoles have only marginal increases in compute and are more focused on architectural advances.
3NM node may be doable for say PS6 in 2028. It's not going to be $500 for "Digital" model though, more like $700 I am thinking. Basically Pro pricing.
 
This is all from demand.

Coin mining, car sensors, drones, and phones.

We need new fabs set up that only make video game hardware that we can buy for $200 like the good old days.

Maybe Valve, Sony, and Nintendo could afford to spin up their own custom ARM SOC like Apple did with their M chips?

Or maybe develop RISC-V more?

Regardless, we can't keep on competing with government subsidized industries for our damn video game hardware.
 
This is all from demand.

Coin mining, car sensors, drones, and phones.

We need new fabs set up that only make video game hardware that we can buy for $200 like the good old days.

Maybe Valve, Sony, and Nintendo could afford to spin up their own custom ARM SOC like Apple did with their M chips?

Or maybe develop RISC-V more?

Regardless, we can't keep on competing with government subsidized industries for our damn video game hardware.
Just need everyone on Gaf to subscribe to the special Fab Gold tier.
Would this be in Austin TX? Instead of being banned for being a pest on Neogaf, we could sentence posters to a few weeks working making chips. Have to put on those clean suits and no bathroom breaks.
 
Just need everyone on Gaf to subscribe to the special Fab Gold tier.
Would this be in Austin TX? Instead of being banned for being a pest on Neogaf, we could sentence posters to a few weeks working making chips. Have to put on those clean suits and no bathroom breaks.
Harsh but fair...

off to the mines with ye!

baby_chick.jpg
477652_300.jpg
 
Top Bottom