this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2024
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If you look at who is manufacturing silicon, the numbers look even worse for Intel. All of these competitors are using TSMC fabs. AMD, Apple, Qualcomm, etc.
TSMC is the real 500lb gorilla in the room.
It’s gonna suck so hard for the whole world when they get invaded :(
Pray they don't, but I'm almost certain they will now that the US is appointing complete morons to every portion of the US government. The US won't really be able to help until this rot gets cleaned out. China has four years before we can really help Taiwan again. (Or at least give them air superiority)
Biden just finalized the Arizona TSMC plant.
If that gets invaded, I think semiconductors are the least of our problems.
But the Arizona plant wouldn't be allowed to manufacture the most cutting edge chips.
How/why is that blocked?
Would it still be if China invades Taiwan?
Taiwan is incentivized to keep the latest and greatest local, so they can hopefully get protection from the USA and Europe
Taiwans rule. Foreign tsmc fabs have to be a gen behind. This would definitely change if China took over Taiwan, but who knows what China will do or allow at that point. They could shut the whole US fab down if they want. Even if they did try to re-tool the US fab (taiwan or china or tsmc) in a few years, it would cost billions and a lot of time to get it done.
you also have to keep in mind, the client that purchases cutting edge nodes first is apple. AMD only currently uses it for Zen 5c, and Qualcomm uses it for snapdragon elite/8 gen 4. mobile usally always gets them for efficiency reasons(and better yields due to smaller dies). other markets have historically been a node behind already (e.g despite the 9800x3d being new, its only a N4 die with a N6 io die)
And Intel. Intel has been using TSMC fabs for a while.
They used to get a 40% discount, too, but that stopped recently when Pat Gelsinger said people should stop buying from TSMC because there's a good chance they'll be invaded.
TSMC's CEO didn't like that, and said "ok, no more 40% discount for you. Effective immediately." (TL;DR'd, obviously).
Even some of Intel's Arrow Lake/Lunar Lake chips are being fabbed at TSMC.