[HN Gopher] TSMC "Apple-first" 3nm policy leads to AMD and Qualc...
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TSMC "Apple-first" 3nm policy leads to AMD and Qualcomm mutiny
Author : DeathArrow
Score : 275 points
Date : 2021-11-25 13:20 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.club386.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.club386.com)
| shmerl wrote:
| Shouldn't there be some anti-trust limitation on that?
| mikhailt wrote:
| How would we define the limitations on this?
|
| Natural monopolies are not illegal and Apple is selling
| hundreds of millions of devices that use these chips every
| year. Apple silicon is in every Apple Watch, Apple TV, iPhone,
| iPad, Macs of all sizes (soon), headphones, and so on.
|
| Placing limitations on a single company itself would be anti-
| competitive because we'd be restricting natural monopolies from
| growing and placing favoritism on other competitors, which
| itself wouldn't be fair either.
|
| Wouldn't Apple customers suffer just as well because they can't
| get Apple Silicon SoC due to supply restrictions enforced on
| them?
|
| Apple isn't stocking chips to prevent others from taking over,
| they're buying every supply they can to ensure they have enough
| to sell all year long and they're planning several years in
| advance.
|
| Put it another way, if AMD was richer years ago, AMD would be
| doing the same thing to get larger share.
|
| There's nothing stopping AMD and others paying TMSC several
| tens of billions of dollars to build a fab for them.
|
| Also, let's remember that AMD had their own fab but sold it off
| (GlobalFoundries).
| Zigurd wrote:
| This is Tim Cook's strategic masterpiece. Everybody knows how he
| made the iPod dominant with a supply chain strategy. That same
| pattern was repeaded in other places in Apple's products with
| less media attention.
|
| This is next level: Without building his own fabs, Cook has
| dominated microprocessors with a combination of an industry
| leading design _and_ dominating state of the art manufacturing.
| This is even better than what Intel had in their dominant period
| because this strategic pattern can be shifted into different
| areas of products and their supply chain. The car industry better
| watch out.
| smoldesu wrote:
| By the time Apple gets to the car industry, I reckon European
| antitrust will be knocking them over, _hard_. There 's no way
| Apple can continue to play this game of lockout without
| attracting attention from international interests. The US
| doesn't care since they're domestic, but Europe's repeated
| questioning is preparing to reach a boiling point...
| Jensson wrote:
| Or when China decides they want to compete with Apple for
| real.
| smoldesu wrote:
| I doubt it. They wouldn't punish a lapdog for obedience.
| Decabytes wrote:
| Using another foundry is good because we need to break TSMCs
| monopoly. But AMD using a different foundry brings back Glo-flo
| nightmares
| [deleted]
| webmobdev wrote:
| Now that most of Apple's top talents from its CPU division have
| left for greener pastures (1), I guess this is their new strategy
| - somehow delay their competitors from launching new and better
| chips while Apple scrambles to find new talents in the limited
| pool available. Apple has bet their future on Apple Silicon, and
| it badly needs to retain a lead on other competing CPU for a year
| or two, to capture sufficient market share (the perception of
| Apple Silicon leading over other CPUs is very important for
| this).
|
| TSMC also seems to be taking a big gamble, pissing of existing
| good clients.
|
| Edit: (1) https://semianalysis.com/apple-cpu-gains-grind-to-a-
| halt-and...
| mrweasel wrote:
| Aren't you making the assumption that Apple haven't developed
| new in-house talent over the last few years?
| defaultname wrote:
| We've been hearing this "they've lost all their CPU talents"
| claim for literal _years_ , during a period when Apple keeps
| having win after win. At what point will it start to ring a
| little hollow?
|
| "somehow delay their competitors from launching new and better
| chips"
|
| Both AMD and nvidia have designed and built on older processes
| _long_ after newer process capacity was available to them. They
| aren 't being delayed at all.
|
| Apple committing to production capacity is neither "Apple
| first", nor is it Apple "delaying" competitors. There is finite
| production capacity, and customers spread across the available
| options. There is literally nothing notable or interesting in
| that.
|
| But once you add words like "Mutiny", you pander to a very
| gullible crowd.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| It takes around 5-6 years for a CPU architecture to go from
| first conception to production. Even if Apple's talents all
| left you wouldn't see the receipts for that until 5-7 years.
|
| NVidia and AMD do not have access to the latest processes.
| There is not enough capacity left at TSMC because of the
| Apple orders getting priority, so they have to stay on older
| processes. NVidia Ampere was not designed for Samsung 8nm, it
| was designed for TSMC 7nm but they couldn't get by with the
| leftovers so they had to put the consumer line on Samsung
| 8nm.
|
| Apple is absolutely first. They are using their warchest to
| ensure their competitors do not have access to high quality
| processes.
| defaultname wrote:
| "There is not enough capacity left at TSMC because of the
| Apple orders getting priority"
|
| Reality: Apple had designs ready and committed to
| production. Indeed, the first 5nm production was Apple
| chips, and _HiSilicon_. Yes, HiSilicon with stock ARM cores
| somehow managed what AMD and nvidia (who are barely even
| Apple "competitors") couldn't.
|
| "They are using their warchest to ensure their competitors
| do not have access to high quality processes."
|
| Again, nvidia and AMD _both_ tend to hang two processes
| behind (making their chips cheaper, higher yield, and
| because they have a slow design iteration for new
| processes), but let 's _pretend_ that they were really
| trying for the newest process (you know, the one that
| HiSilicon managed to get). Apple 's evil here is apparently
| simply _making products_. Because you know that Apple isn
| 't just reserving unused capacity -- they are literally
| making A15s and M1s and soon 5G models in the hundreds of
| millions. It's pretty amazing that simply making your
| products is now nefariously blocking competitors (if you're
| ignorant enough of actual fact to think that was actually
| happening).
| sudosysgen wrote:
| AMD and Nvidia _literally_ cannot make enough product to
| meet demand, even after jacking up prices and using two
| different processes at once. Yet we 're pretending that
| they couldn't design for only one lithography and that's
| why they couldn't get their orders first? And let's not
| pretend they couldn't do it in time, AMD was in the first
| running for 7nm, and they have a 5nm version of their
| GPUs that Samsung uses. HiSilicon is obvious, they wanted
| to produce as early as possible before US sanctions hit
| and were ready to pay any price for that.
|
| And AMD/Nvidia are direct competitors to the entire M1
| line.
|
| By the way, AMD die size production only for the next-gen
| consoles in less than a year is equivalent to ~100
| million iPhones as they use 4x more silicon, and that's
| in supply constrained conditions. AMD and NVidia
| absolutely can move more wafers than Apple, they just got
| outbid by a company that can buy them both.
|
| The issue is that we're in a market where Apple can
| afford to pay suppliers so much that other companies
| literally cannot afford to compete. Their positions in
| the market is slowing down technological advancement.
| defaultname wrote:
| "Yet we're pretending that they couldn't design for only
| one lithography and that's why they couldn't get their
| orders first?"
|
| Don't manufacture arguments and then soundly beat them
| down. They didn't _prioritize_ the new process so they
| ended up at the back of the line. They made a choice (to
| virtually no market detriment, and improving their
| financials in the process). As mentioned, both companies
| often run on older processes because power simply _didn
| 't matter_, and wafer yield just mattered more. nvidia
| often has _monster_ chips because...eh. If your GPU or
| giant AMD processor uses 300W, eh, that 's life.
|
| This may come as a shock to some, but despite all of the
| nonsensical rhetoric posted on HN (by Apple naysayers who
| have to dismiss anything Apple does with One-Simple-Trick
| nonsense that has zero association with reality -- I
| recall when it was the magical "big cache", as if Apple
| was sneaky having big caches, cheating the system),
| process improvements are not as big as they are held on
| here. They are of course a benefit, but a process
| improvement yields power _or_ performance _or_ density
| benefits (yup, even that last one is conditional on other
| factors), but the fiction spinners declare that no really
| it 's everything all at once. It doesn't work like that.
| So they opted not to prioritize it.
|
| Yet read your other posts and not only would AMD and
| nvidia be world's better than Apple in every dimension
| (see above about the Apple naysayers and their
| ignorance), but also they couldn't afford to because I
| guess the $1500 GPUs and $5000 CPUs just can't afford the
| big bucks Apple can spend making a smartphone CPU (where
| apparently they're outbidding everyone on every
| component, yet also simultaneously having by far the
| highest profit margin in the industry...my normal brain
| cannot even comprehend the lengths of how ludicrous and
| contradictory this nonsense is). Oh, and HiSilicon making
| chips for discount, very low end smartphones also
| apparently has more money to blow on this.
|
| "The issue is that we're in a market where Apple can
| afford to pay suppliers so much that other companies
| literally cannot afford to compete"
|
| So the bill of materials for Apple products must be
| enormous, right? Oh wait, they're absolutely _rolling_ in
| profit, with some of the highest profit margins in the
| business. No, it isn 't that whatsoever. Absolutely
| nothing indicates that Apple used its "warchest", or that
| it is paying a penny more than anyone else. Can you point
| out a _single_ authoritative source claiming that?
| Because actual economics say no, that 's utter nonsense.
|
| But sure, Apple is "slowing down technological
| advancement" in the same post where you declare that
| they're paying more for that technological advancement.
| The desperate lengths this rhetoric has to go, with
| laughable self-contradiction, is embarrassing.
| beebeepka wrote:
| Exactly. Does the guy you're arguing with really think
| they are all idiots. Sure sounds like that.
| defaultname wrote:
| How does anything I said imply they are "all idiots".
| Quite the opposite, the other guy's argument demonstrates
| that they had zero need to go to a new process because
| they were going to do well regardless.
|
| nvidia is currently selling very low power control boards
| for robotics, computer vision, drones, cars, etc, built
| on 12nm. There simply was no compelling reason for them
| to have a higher BoM to go smaller, and they had proven
| existing designs. There is a world of excess 10nm fab
| capacity, and you can sign up for 7nm all day long. Nope.
| Because what random blowhards say on HN has little
| correlation with fact.
| afandian wrote:
| Got a link for that?
| webmobdev wrote:
| > _... In 2019, Nuvia was founded and later acquired by
| Qualcomm for $1.4B. Apple's Chief CPU Architect, Gerard
| Williams, as well as over a 100 other Apple engineers left to
| join this firm. More recently, SemiAnalysis broke the news
| about Rivos Inc, a new high performance RISC V startup which
| includes many senior Apple engineers. The brain drain
| continues and impacts will be more apparent as time moves on.
| As Apple once drained resources out of Intel and others
| through the industry, the reverse seems to be happening now._
|
| > _We believe Apple had to delay the next generation CPU core
| due to all the personnel turnover Apple has been experiencing
| ..._
|
| https://semianalysis.com/apple-cpu-gains-grind-to-a-halt-
| and...
| ericmay wrote:
| Interesting they're talking about the A15, since then the
| M1 chips have come out and they seem pretty good...
| nvrspyx wrote:
| A15 was released with the iPhone 13 series this year,
| after the M1.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| M1 isn't a generational leap for Apple. It is just 7%
| faster for single core than last year's iphone 12. Apple
| was already so far ahead of the competitors in the chip
| department for multiple years.
|
| https://browser.geekbench.com/ios-benchmarks
| Ciantic wrote:
| Gerard Williams claims credit for M1 Pro and M1 PRO Max
| as well:
|
| > Chief Architect for all Apple CPU and SOC development.
| For CPU, lead the Cyclone, Typhoon, Twister, Hurricane,
| Monsoon, Vortex, Lightning and Firestorm architecture
| work. Chief Architect for Apple MAC hardware platform M1
| Pro and M1 Max.
|
| I guess they were in the works long before he left.
|
| https://www.linkedin.com/in/gerard-williams-iii-27895aa
| formerly_proven wrote:
| Microarchitectures are not developed within a year.
| bdhess wrote:
| The A15 was released in September with the 2021 iPhone;
| the M1 was released in November 2020.
| jeromegv wrote:
| While this shows that talent has left, I don't think that
| the quote about "most of Apple's top talent has left" is
| quite well explained by this article. Your comment make it
| seem like there's hardly anyone left and all they can do
| now is delay the competition with exclusive contracts...
| which is quite a leap.
| webmobdev wrote:
| I drew the conclusion that the top "innovators" had left.
| Without them, can Apple Silicon really keep improving?
| [deleted]
| tpush wrote:
| > Now that most of Apple's top talents from its CPU division
| have left for greener pastures, [...]
|
| ??
|
| > [...] somehow delay their competitors from launching new and
| better chips while Apple scrambles to find new talents in the
| limited pool available.
|
| Nonsense, Apple buying capacity because they actually need to
| manufacture that much stuff. Anything else would be completely
| idiotic.
|
| > Apple has bet their future on Apple Silicon, and it badly
| needs to retain a lead on other competing CPU for a year or
| two, to capture sufficient market share (the perception of
| Apple Silicon leading over other CPUs is very important for
| this).
|
| Share of what market are they supposedly wanting to capture?
| Share of PCs in general? They care about share of premium
| devices, where they are very well represented.
|
| Share of Macs themselves? That'll solve itself, since Apple
| won't be offering non-Apple Silicon Macs at some close point in
| the future.
|
| > TSMC also seems to be taking a big gamble, pissing of
| existing good clients.
|
| They take the offer with the most money attached, no one's
| (neither AMD nor Qualcom) surprised by that.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Apple doesn't need to manufacture their stuff at TSMCs latest
| protest, neither do AMD or Qualcomm or NVidia.
|
| Taking the offer with the most money attached is not a good
| idea in the long term. They're currently providing
| unprecedented leverage to Apple.
|
| Apple Silicon _needs_ the performance crown as the comment
| you 're replying to mentioned. Having a good market share in
| the premium sphere is not good enough - if instead of trading
| blows but still ending up ahead of AMD, AMD processors also
| were on 5nm with DDR5 memory they'd be plainly slower. Then
| Apple would be in the position where their laptops are slower
| and have worse battery life than the competition and also
| Docker doesn't work right for developers and some of your
| VSTs don't work at all, and few people would take the pain of
| changing architecture for worse performance.
| kergonath wrote:
| I find quite interesting how you frame Apple designing good
| SoCs as a nefarious plot to take over the world and somehow
| kill companies they're not competing with. That's some
| impressive mental gymnastics.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| The architecture itself is worse than it's competitor.
| Even with a node advantage and 3x faster RAM at the same
| power consumption, it cannot beat a 5980HS in single
| thread by a large margin
| (https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-
| performanc...) and it can only beat it in multicore by
| using almost twice as much power. In the phone space,
| their chips are also only ahead by 10-20% despite a huge
| process advantage (35% higher density).
|
| Their SoCs are pretty good. But they're only good because
| Apple has almost exclusive access to TSMC 5nm.
|
| I'd love to hear about how the M1 isn't competing against
| AMD and NVidia.
| klelatti wrote:
| > The chips here aren't only able to outclass any
| competitor laptop design, but also competes against the
| best desktop systems out there, you'd have to bring out
| server-class hardware to get ahead of the M1 Max - it's
| just generally absurd. (Anandtech as you linked to)
|
| You're making claims about hypothetical AMD / Nvidia
| performance at different nodes which are impossible to
| verify.
|
| And Apple is clearly taking a huge risk by investing
| massively in the latest node. At the minimum they deserve
| credit for that.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| They're pretty easy to verify. Find the average
| difference in performance at a given TDP and substract
| the efficiency improvement, this breaks down in single-
| core somewhat but not in multi-core.
|
| There is very little speed differential between desktop
| and mobile single-core performance nowadays. The M1 Max
| is nowhere even close to the best desktop systems which
| would be the 3990X or the upcoming 5990WX. Despite having
| much faster RAM - which is the biggest reason why it can
| perform so well in FP workloads - in integer workloads it
| cannot compete. I'm citing Anandtech on their data, not
| on their opinion.
|
| I'll give them credit for investing a lot in 5nm.
| kergonath wrote:
| How do you go from "we found one CPU that has similar
| performance" to "their core is worse"? The source you
| quoted says that the M1 has a 20% performance lead on
| average, so you'll have to define "significant margin".
| The M1 package also almost never reaches 35W without
| stressing the GPU.
|
| In any case, if someone said that the M1 was
| unquestionably faster than anything else on Earth it was
| not me. It does not change the point that asserting that
| better is somehow worse is still stupid.
|
| > I'd love to hear about how the M1 isn't competing
| against AMD and NVidia.
|
| To whom are they selling their GPUs?
| sudosysgen wrote:
| The M1 Max exceeds 35W for all but one test and even
| _averages_ 62W for one test that does not use the GPU.
|
| The point is not that it is not faster. A 20% performance
| advantage on average given 3x faster memory and an up to
| 50% more efficient process means that the architecture is
| slower on average but that it makes it up in (third-
| party) memory and process.
|
| >To whom are they selling their GPUs?
|
| A lot of professionals that would otherwise buy high-end
| AMD or NVidia GPUs for now, and eventually they will
| probably be used for virtualization.
| wtallis wrote:
| Please stop throwing around that 62W wall power
| measurement when discussing package power software
| estimates. You aren't taking enough caution to interpret
| or present disparate measurements in a valid context.
|
| Some of the conclusions you're presenting in this thread
| _are_ correct. But you 're doing a terrible job of
| justifying them despite the available data, and making
| unnecessary exaggerations. This discussion deserves a bit
| more rigor.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| It's not wall power consumption. It's wall minus idle.
| Package power consumption metrics are often unreliable.
| If you have another explanation for where that power went
| I'm all ears, but my experience tells me that the on-
| board power consumption meter is simply off.
|
| Actually looking closer at the data, the reported package
| power is often even higher than wall minus idle, which
| means it's almost certainly inaccurate.
| wtallis wrote:
| So you _do_ understand at least some of the limitations
| in the different measurement methodologies, but you still
| choose to compare with the less similar of the two
| available numbers?
|
| If you want to respond to someone who specifically
| referred to _package_ power reported on Apple 's chip, or
| if you want to make comparisons against _package_ power
| and TDP reported on an AMD chip, _why_ do you choose to
| respond with the wall power measurement? Subtracting out
| idle power doesn 't remove all the potential sources of
| error from measuring at the wall, and in particular it
| cannot remove the error introduced by _inconsistently_
| including all the inefficiencies of converting from wall
| power to the low voltage DC the chip actually runs on.
| You seem to be disingenuously cherry-picking by going
| with the 62W wall power rather than the corresponding 44W
| package power measurement that was published a few pixels
| above it.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| AMD CPUs typically have a very accurate SoC power
| measurements that's within 95% of reality. Obviously that
| is not the case for the M1 Max, which is not abnormal.
| This is probably because of the offsetting Apple does to
| avoid counting RAM power consumption, storage power
| consumption, etc..., that on the M1 Mac Mini amounts to
| something like 5W.
|
| Yes, using wall power masks the efficiency of the
| charger. That said, the charger is _> 94%_ efficient :
| https://www.chargerlab.com/apple-87w-usb-c-power-
| adapter-a17.... VRM efficiency at the middle-power range
| is generally >95%.
|
| On the other hand, using wall minus idle also has some
| advantages - you don't take into account the baseline
| power consumption of the memory controller, the baseline
| power consumption of the GPU, or the PCI/storage
| controllers, or the baseline power consumption of the USB
| controllers, and so on and so forth - that's easily 2-4W
| even on an M1, on a Ryzen chip this is included in
| package power, whereas it's not for the M1 Max.
|
| Because of that I judged the two numbers to be the
| closest to each other, and the minimal power consumption
| losses are more than offset by excluding a fair amount of
| power consumption that is reflected in the package for an
| AMD chip (and indeed any chip).
|
| I didn't explain and justify all of this because I didn't
| have the time to do so and I don't think it was necessary
| to clutter up the text this much. I'm not cherry-picking
| either. There is a reason why wall-power is included for
| Intel and M1 reviews but very rarely for AMD, including
| in AnandTech's reporting, and it's obvious from reading
| the Apple data on idle power usage for the M1 Mac Mini,
| from everything that the M1 chip does on-package and from
| the 7.2W idle, from which only the screen, fans and NAND
| chips (not controller) are outside the package, that this
| is not a package power reading, but an estimate of what
| on the PC World would be called "Core+SOC", which is
| typically significantly lower than actual package power.
| If there was a Core+SOC number provided for the 5980HS
| I'd compare that but I don't have one and I didn't find
| any. In either case in the real world the two
| measurements are going to be at most 1-2W apart and I'm
| not sure if it advantages the M1 Max or the 5980HS.
| ZuLuuuuuu wrote:
| Can't talk much about AMD but Apple-first policy isn't the
| problem with Qualcomm CPUs. Anybody who follows Qualcomm news
| knows that they were 99% focused on 5G for the last few years.
| TSMC 7nm node is available to them for a long time, and yet, they
| couldn't even come up with an answer to Apple's 2 year old A13
| which was also TSMC 7nm.
|
| I know I know, they bought NUVIA (which is widely believed to
| become the savior of Qualcomm CPUs), but we won't see any results
| of that acquisition until 2023.
| ruslan wrote:
| How about the good old principle "don't build round one customer"
| ? In long term Apple will twist their hands out. I don't think
| TSMC managements is so dumb not to understand that, yet their
| shareholders may be.
| jagger27 wrote:
| This really doesn't seem true. Maybe Qualcomm, but not AMD.
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| Ironic, given that Nvidia is moving away from Samsung for the
| next gen GPUs. Rumour has it they are dissatisfied by production
| capacity and yields.
|
| Can't imagine their N3 process will be much better, but its good
| they found customers to finance their latest node with I guess.
| enragedcacti wrote:
| you can't _necessarily_ conclude that Samsung 's N3 will be
| worse because their N8 was worse. Bleeding edge manufacturing
| requires gambles every couple of nodes with what technology you
| decide to invest your R&D into. TSMC's mix of lucky and good
| with EUV patterning won them an advantage over samsung who kept
| rolling with DUV for 8nm. Intel similarly gambled and fumbled
| around the same time.
|
| Lots of people were asking why TSMC wasn't charging a higher
| premium for their 7nm when it was the best process in the
| world, my theory is that they understand the above and need to
| maintain relationships for the possibility that Samsung (and
| Intel as they adapt their business model) can come back around
| with a little bit of luck and a lot of investment.
| xyzzy_plugh wrote:
| This is really nothing new. Apple has been playing this game for
| years, ask anyone who shared an adjacent floor with Apple in
| Foxconn in the last decade.
|
| Whether it's unibody aluminum milled frames, bleeding edge
| injection molding, glass, silicon...
|
| It's done nothing but good for Apple to be aggressive and as
| vertical without owning the manufacturer as possible. Some of
| their processes are _years_ ahead of what anyone else can get
| their hands on, because they buy all the equipment, lease all the
| floors, and just throw money around like it's nobody's business.
| AMD and certainly Qualcomm can't touch em.
| georgeburdell wrote:
| Eh I can think of many areas where Apple is behind its
| competitors pretty handily. Samsung has more advanced display
| tech, for example (OLED, integrated touch, polarizer-free,
| etc.)
| jiggawatts wrote:
| Which is the exact same display in my iPhone, made by
| Samsung.
| jeswin wrote:
| > Some of their processes are _years_ ahead of what anyone else
| can get their hands on
|
| They are about a year ahead on CPUs. But pretty much everything
| else (screens, camera sensors, battery) has been on a par with,
| or behind what everyone else is doing.
| hinkley wrote:
| Uh, no?
|
| When they moved away from unibody laptops they did so by
| introducing friction-stir welding. That was hot tech on
| Boeing airplanes at the time. Some of those Boeing patents
| are still active.
| 2muchcoffeeman wrote:
| I think I'm terms of pure features that most people care
| about, other manufacturers are on par.
|
| But Apple products tend to have some really interesting
| manufacturing or technology. Machining steel for the iPhone
| 4, FSW, putting an Xbox Kinect into the notch, LiDAR,
| making edge to edge screens without a chin, custom silicon.
|
| Most of this is easily replaced or omitted because it
| doesn't really matter much to the end user.
| WithinReason wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friction_stir_welding
|
| Cool! I mean hot.
| danuker wrote:
| > unibody laptops
|
| You mean the "unibody" made of two sheets of aluminum glued
| together in a way that the heat unsticks the adhesive?
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7XSckjRPo0
| raydev wrote:
| > You mean the "unibody" made of two sheets of aluminum
| glued together in a way that the heat unsticks the
| adhesive? [video link]
|
| No. The unibody was the second gen redesign: https://en.w
| ikipedia.org/wiki/MacBook_Pro#2nd_generation_(Un...
|
| Rossman is handling a first gen MacBook Pro in this
| video, pre-unibody, and discontinued in 2008.
|
| Not suprised to see Rossman succeeding in mining anti-
| Apple rage clicks.
| TMWNN wrote:
| >Not suprised to see Rossman succeeding in mining anti-
| Apple rage clicks.
|
| Rossman's video is about the pre-unibody, but the first-
| generation unibody indeed had a heat-unsticks-the-
| adhesive issue. The EM209 issue
| (<https://randyzwitch.com/broken-macbook-pro-hinge-fixed-
| free/>) affected me _twice_ , the second time not covered
| by Apple
| (<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21542522>).
| amelgares wrote:
| The laptop in that video is obviously not a "unibody"
| model. It is a A1260 MacBook Pro 4,1 from early 2008.
| hinkley wrote:
| That is a 20 minute piece of homework you just assigned.
| Time offsets please.
|
| The bit I scanned through shows cracking due to dumb
| placement of holes. And that's on the lid, not the laptop
| body.
|
| Drilling holes through the edge of load bearing elements
| is still a classic failure mode for home construction, so
| I'm disappointed but not surprised. There's a lot of bad
| blood about their hinges, and I'm not gonna fight anybody
| on that. They wanted the thinnest laptops, they got them,
| but not without consequences.
|
| But part of that thinness was actually pretty smart, and
| that's what we are discussing here. Using billet aluminum
| and CNC fabrication for complex shapes instead of gluing
| (gluing takes large contact points which means more
| material). Switching to airframe construction techniques
| was cooler and probably faster. Carving them out of solid
| aluminum was innovative mostly because it sounded so
| crazy. Stir welding sounded positively sober by
| comparison, even though it was hot shit at the time.
| toiletfuneral wrote:
| I have to push back on this...apple shipped high dpi screens
| before windows could even manage to support anything above
| 72dpi
| blackoil wrote:
| If it continues for few years as expected, it would be
| interesting see how anti-monopoly agencies/govt. will handle it.
| Unlike other times/resources, processors are a matter of concern
| at all levels. Supply chain issues with unprecedented demand
| means TSMC can't increase capacity even if money is not an issue.
| If Samsung can't compete, we'll have a complete monopoly.
|
| Apple gaining marketshare because of this should be a matter of
| concern for many nations.
| zucker42 wrote:
| Is Samsung 3nm competitive with TSMC 3nm? The information I'm
| finding online says Samsung 3nm pretty close to TSMC 5nm in
| density (for example [1]).
|
| [1] https://www.breakinglatest.news/business/samsung-3nm-
| technic...
| ksec wrote:
| Yes, because Samsung decide to be the world first in GAA ( Gate
| All Around d) hence first generation of 3nm is essentially a
| TSMC 5nm in density but slightly better in performance or
| energy and power _on paper_. ( Blame Samsung ) Think of it as
| TSMC 4nm.
|
| Their 2nd Generation 3nm which should be what AMD and Qualcomm
| are using should he little better than this but we dont have
| any data. ( yet )
| ksec wrote:
| And this is the start ( if it hasn't already started ) of PR
| campaign against TSMC. Its going to be a long journey, probably
| take 4 - 5 years.
| libertine wrote:
| Couldn't this pose a case to force TSMC to open their IP?
|
| It's a genuine question - because they're in such a crucial
| industry, and they're taking sizes based on order volume,
| damaging other businesses?
| fundad wrote:
| Chips are critical, the highest value new process chips are not
| as much. AMD and Qualcomm's PR departments want you to think
| otherwise.
| melff wrote:
| I don't think Taiwan is too keen on breaking TSMC's monopoly,
| not to mention all the other international politics around
| this.
| hristov wrote:
| There is a bigger problem than Apple first that the article does
| not mention. It is Mediatek second (i.e., after apple). Mediatek
| used to be a strictly second tier mobile processor maker, with
| Qualcomm and Apple's internal team occupying the first tier. Now
| Mediatek has overtaken qualcomm in market share. The main reason
| is that TSMC is making more chips for Mediatek than Qualcomm.
|
| One can explain TSMCs preferential treatment for Apple based on
| purely commercial terms. Apple is after all the biggest foundry
| services consumer and they usually demand the advanced nodes
| which tend to be more expensive.
|
| But there is no such explanation for TSMCs preference for
| Mediatek over Qualcomm. Qualcomm is generally as large as
| Mediatek, in fact they used to be significantly larger before
| TSMC hobbled them.
|
| Well the first explanation that leaps to mind is patriotism
| (mediatek is a taiwanese company like TSMC, Qualcomm is
| American). But if that plays a significant factor then perhaps
| the chipmakers of the world should not so eagerly trust TSMC to
| make their chips.
| throwaway19937 wrote:
| > But there is no such explanation for TSMCs preference for
| Mediatek over Qualcomm. Qualcomm is generally as large as
| Mediatek, in fact they used to be significantly larger before
| TSMC hobbled them.
|
| Qualcomm has a longstanding reputation as a bad actor; they're
| the Oracle of hardware. It's easy to believe that other
| companies would prefer to avoid doing business with them.
| Jensson wrote:
| Doing business with people who live in the same area, speak the
| same language and have the same culture is a lot easier and
| less risky.
| NonEUCitizen wrote:
| Much more likely is that MediaTek was willing to invest what's
| needed (i.e. agree to TSMC's asking price) to catch up to /
| overtake Qualcomm.
|
| Qualcomm as incumbent could've taken too much time trying to
| negotiate a lower price (e.g. "if you don't lower your price,
| we'll go to Samsung!").
| Animats wrote:
| It's starting to look like there will be a glut in fab capacity
| 2-3 years out. New fabs are being built in all the major
| industrial countries. 29 fabs, with a total cost of $140 billion,
| are under construction.[1] Even auto parts maker Bosch, fed up
| with automotive supply chain problems, is building a fab.
| Capitalism is starting to work again.
|
| [1] https://community.cadence.com/cadence_blogs_8/b/breakfast-
| by...
| rapsey wrote:
| Only TSMC can produce the most advanced chips. They have a
| monopoly on that. There will be no glut for AMD/Qualcomm.
| Animats wrote:
| Right now, yes. Samsung and Intel have 3nm fabs under
| construction, though.
| [deleted]
| fomine3 wrote:
| I really wish Qualcomm to use latest TSMC's latest process to
| make Android phones competitive for performance. Even when they
| used same process as Apple A series, their perf/watt (now it's
| almost same as perf) were a bit behind.
| jonplackett wrote:
| It's interesting that Apple's decision to transition to their own
| chips was probably lead, at least partly, by the fact they knew
| the could lock down all this next gen production.
|
| If everyone else had access to cutting edge TSMC I'm sure Apple's
| chips would still be good but I don't think we'd be quite as
| impressed.
| Zigurd wrote:
| It is an integrated strategy: volume + design + supply chain +
| market power. Apple's CPUs are designed for scaling and
| binning. The chip designs, along with products like iMac and
| Mini, can be adjusted to respond to manufacturability and
| yield. Apple draws a winning hand no matter how the deck is
| shuffled.
| fundad wrote:
| Exactly Apple made themselves first because otherwise AMD and
| Qualcomm would have been hogging the capacity but it's only
| unfair if Apple does it.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| When did AMD and Qualcomm ever exclusively operate a cutting
| edge node? Apple would have had to deal with reduced supply,
| but so would every other player.
| pram wrote:
| It's "interesting" that I never read any posts about how unfair
| it was when AMD was using TSMC 7nm to beat Intel. Makes you
| think, it does.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Unlike AMD for 5nm, Intel was free to fab their chips on 7nm
| at any time and chose not to. It's not an analogous
| situation.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Probably because TSMC 7nm =! Intel 10nm
| rsynnott wrote:
| > It's interesting that Apple's decision to transition to their
| own chips was probably lead, at least partly, by the fact they
| knew the could lock down all this next gen production.
|
| Eh? The vast majority of Apple chips that will be made on this
| process will go into phones, and Apple has been doing its own
| phone chips for about a decade. The M1 won't be quite a
| rounding error, but it won't be far off; they just don't sell
| that many Macs.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| If everyone had access to cutting edge processes, Apple silicon
| would be behind. They're not even cleanly ahead despite a
| generation leap in RAM and in processes in CPUs and they're
| still behind in GPU performance per watt compared to NVidia on
| 8nm. If Apple wants to lead in performance they can't allow
| NVidia and AMD to be on the same process. They would even risk
| Qualcomm chips catching up.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| Source?
| gruturo wrote:
| Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.... but I
| guess we could settle for just ordinary evidence, if you
| could care to provide some. Because, in its absence, what you
| wrote doesn't ring at all true.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| How is this the case? AMD mobile CPUs, core for core, are
| anywhere from 13% slower to 20% faster (between Geekbench
| and Cinebench r20 and everything in between), and the M1
| Max has a generational process advantage and 2-3x faster
| RAM, despite a similar TDP. In multicore, the Apple
| processors plainly consume way more power (62W vs 35W
| sustained) than any of the latest generation AMD processors
| yet released. Clearly the gap is within to ~25% process
| advantage and that's without taking into account much
| faster RAM.
|
| Same goes in phones. The A14 is around 10-20% faster in all
| metrics than an 888 and has around that much of a process
| advantage.
| wtallis wrote:
| You seem to be comparing the nominal TDP of AMD chips
| against the actual measured power of Apple chips. It's
| really not safe to assume that a chip's advertised TDP is
| well-correlated with real power consumption for any
| particular workload; a sound comparison requires matched
| power and performance measurements. This is especially
| necessary when discussing benchmarks that have a short
| duration or are a variable workload, because a single TDP
| number cannot convey turbo behavior.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| I am not assuming that. The 5980HS actually consumes only
| 35W for sustained loads. It can boost up to 62W for 1-2
| seconds and then drops to 42W and soon drops to 35W after
| a maximum of 5 minutes.
|
| The SPECInt suite lasts from 1000 to 3000 seconds.
| Therefore the 5980HS was at 35W for the vast majority of
| the test.
| wtallis wrote:
| > The SPECInt suite lasts from 1000 to 3000 seconds.
| Therefore the 5980HS was at 35W for the vast majority of
| the test.
|
| That cannot be presumed based solely on the nominal TDP
| and the total duration. SPECInt is a suite of a wide
| variety of sub-tests. It is not at all a consistent
| sustained test like the Prime95 results you are using as
| the basis for the turbo behavior. Actual power
| consumption during SPECInt is highly variable, because
| the workload itself is highly variable. Whether it truly
| averages out to 35W over the full duration is something
| that must be _measured_ , not assumed. And you
| _definitely_ cannot generalize your assumptions to apply
| to benchmarks or workloads with durations that are not
| far longer than the 5 minute turbo duration observed
| under Prime95.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| That's not how the turbo works on this AMD mobile chip.
| There is maximum time that the chip can sustain turbo and
| that is _exactly_ 300 seconds. As long as the chip is in
| it 's maximum p-state for the duration of the MT test, it
| will count towards that 300 second turbo time. Prime95
| uses more ALUs, caches, and pipelines and thus hits the
| thermal limit faster and at the same power runs at a
| lower clock, but this isn't a thermal limit, it's a power
| limit.
|
| Indeed, we see the 300-second turbo limit not only on
| Prime95, but also on lighter, real-word tests like on an
| Agisoft DC workload.
| wtallis wrote:
| I'm not contesting that the AMD chip in question (as
| typically configured by notebook OEMs) will not remain in
| turbo mode for more than 300 seconds at a time. What I'm
| pointing out is that you cannot assume that all workloads
| are steady enough over time to produce the simple
| sustained behavior illustrated with Prime95. This is
| especially inappropriate when you are referring to
| another test that directly contradicts this assumption
| and illustrates variable performance and power
| consumption, where power does _not_ always stay at 35W
| even after the initial turbo period is over:
| https://images.anandtech.com/doci/16446/Power-Agi-5980HS-
| Per...
| sudosysgen wrote:
| If you look closely at the Agisoft test, you will see
| that it does not exceed 35W until first dropping under
| 35W, and indeed the average power consumption still does
| not exceed 35W after the sustained 35W period.
|
| Therefore the assertion that the 5980HS cannot have been
| exceeding a 35W average load by very much over a
| 1000-3000 second long test is correct. As you can see
| after the 300 second initial turbo period the 5980HS is
| not averaging much than 35W, while the M1 Max is
| averaging much more than that for multiple sub-tests.
| [deleted]
| floatboth wrote:
| > generation leap in RAM
|
| You mean the exact same LPDDR4X that everyone else uses now?
| Maybe not in huge quantities but there are a lot of AMD
| Renoir and Intel Tiger Lake laptops with the same 16GB setup.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| The M1 Max and M1 Pro uses LPDDR5, not LPDDR4X. LPDDR5 is
| around 6 times faster than LPDDR4X but the CPU can use a
| bit less than half of that.
|
| If you compare the M1 that uses LPDDR4X it loses or ties in
| multicore and is barely faster in single core.
| akmarinov wrote:
| Well that's a load of bull that you just wrote.
|
| Qualcomm uses the exact same process that Apple uses for the
| 888 and TSMC produces it, yet it's inferior in every way to
| the A14
| sudosysgen wrote:
| The 888 is produced on Samsung 5nm LPE, not TSMC :
| https://www.anandtech.com/show/16463/snapdragon-888-vs-
| exyno...
|
| Despite an inferior process, the 888+ and 888 are only
| 10-20% behind the A14 in most metrics including energy
| efficiency, despite being on a process with 35% lower
| density.
| akmarinov wrote:
| That didn't work out and they switched to TSMC -
| https://www.notebookcheck.net/TSMC-to-manufacture-some-
| of-Qu...
| dsign wrote:
| Fierce competition in this space is a good thing, we sorely need
| faster matrix multiplication for everything from graphics
| processing to the grammar checker in [insert name of your word-
| processing software]. So yes, more transistors please.
| melff wrote:
| I think the opposite is true. Modern Hardware is more than fast
| enough for pretty much all end-user applications(except maybe
| high-end gaming, but that's not sorely needed), we're just too
| wasteful with all the performance we've already got.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| Do we really? (Serious question - what are the end-user
| applications that cannot be done today because of the lack of
| faster matrix multiplication?)
| pfortuny wrote:
| VR headsets, games running at 4K 120fps, etc...
|
| Anything using massive linear algebra.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| 4K 120fps - is that "sorely needed"?
| belval wrote:
| Of course not and "640K software is all the memory
| anybody would ever need on a computer".
| dmitriid wrote:
| False equivalence
| throwaway4good wrote:
| No. I am asking if there are genuine new use cases that
| will be enabled by say a ten-fold increase in processing
| power? Other than it is nice going from 2K at 30 Hz to 4K
| at 120 Hz (which is an 8-fold increase).
| belval wrote:
| Your question is difficult to answer in good faith
| because "everything" would benefit from a ten-fold
| increase in processing power. Super computers could
| process protein foldings faster, any kind of simulation
| really could benefit from it. Deep learning could eat a
| ten-fold increase overnight (especially if accompanied by
| faster buses and memory) gaming at 30Hz is really not
| great, gaming at 60/120/144Hz is much better. VR was
| already mentioned in this very thread.
|
| I answered your question with a joke because your
| question is a joke, what doesn't benefit from a 10-fold
| increase in processing power? Why would no new use case
| arise from a widely available 10-fold increase in
| processing power when the last 40 years have shown that
| new tech always materializes?
|
| Or maybe you just wanted to make a cynical statement,
| that all this tech from the last 20 years was pointless,
| that social media are a net negative for the world, that
| better video game graphics are pointless because only
| gameplay matter, that smartphones (only possible because
| of a previous wave of 10-fold increases) are only
| addictive little screens and not actually useful in
| everyday life?
|
| Yes there are genuine new use cases that would appear
| with a ten-fold increase in processing power. It's a
| certainty.
| dangus wrote:
| If we asked this question in similar terms just a few
| years ago we wouldn't have things like consumer VR and
| AR.
|
| You absolutely need high refresh rates and frame rates
| for VR, or else you get motion sick and/or lose
| immersion.
|
| You'd pretty much always benefit from higher resolution
| for VR since the pixels are being placed much closer to
| your eyes and spread across your entire peripheral
| vision.
|
| VR reduces the resolution your GPU can handle at the same
| level of performance/fidelity because two separate images
| are drawn.
|
| The increase in performance in graphics cards is enabling
| entire industries to exist and accelerating scientific
| research.
|
| Phones in your pocket are performing on-device ML and AR
| in ways previously thought impossible. They're being used
| to shoot actual movies that are shown in actual theaters.
|
| Low power tech like smartwatches wouldn't be possible
| without these breakthroughs because ultimately faster
| processors also imply low power devices that can actually
| do decent amounts of computation.
|
| So to answer your question, new use cases have _already_
| been unlocked by simply having more processing power to
| play with. It's never been the case that all possible use
| cases are crystal clear before the tech that enables
| those use cases exists.
|
| If you want to know why Facebook changed their name to
| Meta, it's actually because they see a near-future of
| VR/AR devices getting a lot less clunky to the point
| where they can offer a seamless virtual social network
| and/or truly next generation video conferencing where
| everyone feels like they're in a room together. While the
| exercise may appear to be damage control from an arrogant
| billionaire, I can see the argument and business case for
| their vision.
| shock-value wrote:
| The equivalent of that (or more) is needed for a good VR
| experience.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| In that sense no it's not needed. In fact computers
| aren't needed at all. We made due without them for
| thousands of years.
| thrashh wrote:
| Imagine being able to have the top of the line graphics
| performance that you can get now but on a chip the size of
| your fingernail in the future and the kind of industries that
| would be created once that became possible.
| oDot wrote:
| Does anyone know if Samsung's 3nm and TSMC's 3nm are the same? I
| recall different fabs measure differently.
| jpgvm wrote:
| They have long since become disconnected from feature size.
| They are more just for progression/naming purposes now. I think
| these 2 are similar in performance with TSMC with a slight edge
| from memory.
| gigatexal wrote:
| Good. More supply for Apple at TSMC and more customers for
| Samsung to drive down per unit costs and make bigger investments
| to compete in the chip space. This move really only helps the
| semiconductor manufacturing market and makes it more likely that
| Apple will be able to make all the hardware their fans like me
| buy up so ravenously.
| peteyPete wrote:
| There was a good report on CNBC the state of chip manufacturing,
| TSMC, etc.. There is investment in building two large fabs in the
| US to help solve some of the current issues and to help avoid
| being cut off in case of geopolitical instability in the region.
| Worth the watch.
|
| Secretive Giant TSMC's $100 Billion Plan To Fix The Chip Shortage
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GU87SH5e0eI
| Jyaif wrote:
| What are the bottle necks preventing TSMC from meeting the
| demand?
| [deleted]
| mschuster91 wrote:
| It is incredibly expensive to expand microchip production
| capacity. You need extremely large, extremely clean clean rooms
| filled with expensive machines from ASML and other vendors for
| the well over 1.000 different steps that need to be done for a
| modern chip. And then you need staff to operate these machines.
| bXVsbGVy wrote:
| The ASML are the star of the show, and they are divas.
|
| They demand staggering amount of power, purest water, liquid
| H, liquid He.
|
| And if one of those are missing, they will refuse to work. So
| you better have backup.
|
| In the end, the cost of the ASML machine won't be that high.
| tobylane wrote:
| Do you know any numbers for the staggering amounts? And
| what size these machines are?
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Enough to draw attention of environmental protection
| regulators: https://wccftech.com/tsmcs-second-2nm-plant-
| sparks-environme...
|
| Edit: apparently, TSMC _alone_ is responsible for nearly
| 5% of the _entire energy consumption of Taiwan_. Holy.
| https://english.cw.com.tw/article/article.action?id=2766
| leoc wrote:
| And while everyone wants more investment in capacity,
| presumably no-one wants to be an investor who's left holding
| the bag if capacity overshoots and supply exceeds demand in
| 1-3 years' time.
| xyzzy_plugh wrote:
| You'd be surprised. You can almost _always_ sell excess
| supply given enough time. These parts... take up very
| little space. Even if it has to sit in a warehouse for 5
| years eventually someone will buy them and while they may
| not break even, they'll get close.
| dragontamer wrote:
| I don't think you understand the scale at which these
| companies act.
|
| A 300mm wafer holds 150ish chips, and TSMC makes 13
| million wafers a year. Or roughly 2 trillion chips per
| year.
|
| Now let's say TSMC expands to 2.2 trillion chips/year
| with a new fab.
|
| If there is no customer for the 200 billion chips / year,
| you need to keep building newer and newer warehouses
| constantly. That's just not a number that can be solved
| with one or two warehouses.
| mafuy wrote:
| Should that be 2 billion/y, not 2 trillion/y?
| foobiekr wrote:
| That's a terrible situation from a capital efficiency
| standpoint.
| wtallis wrote:
| The problem with supply exceeding demand isn't unsold
| inventory/capacity, it's that your profit margin gets
| slim enough that you can no longer fund the R&D and fab
| construction necessary to remain on the leading edge.
| This is especially apparent for memory chips that are
| more commoditized than processors. Boom and bust cycles
| frequently result in at least one major bankruptcy,
| merger or pivot away from leading-edge processes.
| Qimonda, Elpida, Winbond all had their heyday as major
| DRAM manufacturers. For logic fabs, casualties include
| Chartered, GloFo, UMC, Motorola/Freescale--all of whom
| were once able to manufacture competitive processors.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| Probably none in the longer term.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| Though I would think they are worried about overinvesting /
| overexpanding - building investing in capacity now that is
| not needed when it becomes ready.
| dragontamer wrote:
| Machines from ASML.
|
| ASML can only build so many machines... IIRC, there is also a
| loop here because ASML needs advanced chips to make those
| chipmaking machines.
| bXVsbGVy wrote:
| Even if ASML could build more machines, I would still limited
| by Zeiss optics.
| Zigurd wrote:
| Even if anyone can buy the same machines (and wafers and
| chemicals) as TSMC, integrating and operating a fab that
| results in good yields is an art. Only a couple competitors
| can do it. The learning curve is hideously lossy: You have
| high costs, billions in capital tied up creating those
| operating losses, and you have to sell for less because
| your customers know the pain you are in.
| macintux wrote:
| Apparently one of them is water for cooling; Taiwan has been
| suffering from a severe drought.
| eloisius wrote:
| That drought was back in April. It has been raining
| frequently and reservoirs across the country are full[1].
| It's not a problem right now, but it's a recurring issue and
| will probably spur investment into additional reservoirs or
| desalination plants.
|
| [1]: https://eng.wra.gov.tw/
| RodgerTheGreat wrote:
| Scaling up fabs is eye-wateringly expensive and, more
| importantly, depends on a supply chain of boutique equipment
| manufacturers. All the money in the world won't build a new
| cutting-edge fab in 3 months, or even 6.
| stemc43 wrote:
| this is so depressing (for those not mac fanboys). while amd is
| pushed out me as a consumer is gonna end up suffering.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| Apple has a long history of buying their suppliers a production
| line in return for guaranteed production levels, going back to
| the start of the Tim Cook era.
|
| An early example.
|
| https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2005/11/21Apple-Announces-Lon...
|
| A more recent example.
|
| https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-corning/apple-award...
|
| If you go back to the time when Apple was looking at single
| sourcing all their SOC production at TSMC, you'll see TSMC's CEO
| publicly saying it would make sense to dedicate a Fab to a single
| customer.
|
| >The world's leading foundry chip maker Taiwan Semiconductor
| Manufacturing Co. Ltd. is considering operating single-customer
| wafer fabs, according to chairman and CEO Morris Chang.
|
| "I think that they are going to be larger customers, and now it
| makes complete sense to dedicate a whole fab to just one customer
| and hold that - to hold fabs in fact to just one customer."
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20120728040723/https://www.eetim...
|
| I think the reason that Apple is always first in line at TSMC is
| that they bought TSMC a Fab.
| rob74 wrote:
| They don't have to buy TSMC a fab, they simply have to pay
| (slightly) more than other TSMC customers - and Apple with its
| uniquely high margins can afford to do just that. Of course,
| depending on other details of the contract (such as
| guaranteeing certain volumes, which Apple can also do much more
| easily because they use the chips themselves), they don't even
| have to pay more to be TSMC's preferred customer.
|
| Actually I would put the blame squarely on AMD and Qualcomm for
| making themselves dependent on TSMC - especially AMD who have
| turned themselves into a "fabless manufacturer" and are now
| experiencing the consequences...
| GeekyBear wrote:
| > They don't have to buy TSMC a fab
|
| They don't have to, but buying production equipment for their
| manufacturing partners (in return for guaranteed pricing and
| production levels) is the norm at Tim Cook's Apple.
| ksec wrote:
| Is the norm for Tim Cook's Operation ( both before and
| after Steve Jobs ) at Foxconn. Or more specifically
| industrial design and manufacturing.
|
| Apple dont buy production equipment for TSMC, or Samsung
| Foundry. Zero.
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| Maybe not literally, but effectively. If Apple's willing
| to place a cast-iron multi-year order worth tens of
| billions of dollars with TSMC, the latter is going to go
| out and build more fabs. Any bank would lend them the
| money to do so on that basis.
|
| Undoubtably that's why Apple gets such preferential
| treatment from TSMC and other suppliers.
| robocat wrote:
| > Any bank would lend them the money to do so on that
| basis.
|
| There is a good chance Apple lent TSMC the money -
| although the actual transaction would probably not simply
| be lend at x%, but be designed to be taxation efficient
| for both parties which might involve other parties or
| securities.
| mcphage wrote:
| They also did it for the company in Arizona they hoped
| would produce sapphire boules for iPhone screens.
| qeternity wrote:
| And another company that laser bored small holes in the
| unibody aluminum cases for LEDs to shine through.
| JiNCMG wrote:
| They did for the glass manufacturer who built the large
| panels for the Apple Flagship Store in NYC. They also
| invested in Corning for building the glass for the iPhone
| (Tech that Corning shelved for decades).
| simonh wrote:
| We can't know for sure, but it's highly likely they
| provided heavy capital investmeny to TSMC, and you can
| bet that came with strings attached.
|
| To add to the other examples given here, Apple actually
| owned the manufacturing equipment for the first
| generation retina panels, even though it was housed in
| factories owned and operated by Sharp.
| gpapilion wrote:
| AMD has a real issue in that there feature set is 2+ Years
| behind Intel. They are counting on access to better process
| to remain competitive.
| WithinReason wrote:
| Arguably becoming fabless and manufacturing at TSMC is what
| brought AMD its edge over Intel and its recent success.
| cptskippy wrote:
| I don't think there's any debate. GloFo abandoned 7nm
| research 3 years after TSMC shipped. TSMC has since pushed
| out 6nm and 5nm while GloFo is just languishing in 12/14nm.
| selectodude wrote:
| They're not languishing, they just stopped trying.
| anfilt wrote:
| GloFlo is still doing some pretty cutting edge stuff for
| specialized processes. There is more to semi-conductors
| than just the highest density.
| agumonkey wrote:
| It was a difficult seat to be in and they managed to use
| what they had extremely well. Let's see how they fare now.
| to11mtm wrote:
| Yeah this one is hard to look at, especially because for a
| while it looked like it was a very bad move for AMD. In
| retrospect it was still a kinda bad contract for them for a
| while (IIRC, GloFo couldn't deliver on process for
| Bulldozer, which led to poor yields/heat/etc, killing
| demand, but AMD had contracts with GloFo stipulating
| penalties for not hitting certain order numbers.)
|
| But at the same time, they were then unshackled as you
| said; As time went on and they could move more volume to
| TSMC it wound up helping them out immensely.
|
| It's kinda worth remembering too though, that even at their
| 'peak' in the early 2000s AMD was 6-12 months behind Intel
| on process tech if you go by releases. Given the trouble
| Intel has had keeping up one could only imagine where AMD
| would be now.
| totalZero wrote:
| The reason AMD went fabless had nothing to do with edge. It
| was a move to prevent bankruptcy. Intel fell behind because
| of its process woes and managerial issues. They weren't
| outworked, they played themselves.
| mjevans wrote:
| Only half the story. AMD also needed to do that due to
| antitrust shenanigans that harmed AMD. In my recollection
| of history, this was litigated in court and (I think?)
| eventually settled before a verdict.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Micro_Devices#Liti
| gat...
|
| "n 2005, following an investigation, the Japan Federal
| Trade Commission found Intel guilty of a number of
| violations. On June 27, 2005, AMD won an antitrust suit
| against Intel in Japan, and on the same day, AMD filed a
| broad antitrust complaint against Intel in the U.S.
| Federal District Court in Delaware. The complaint alleges
| systematic use of secret rebates, special discounts,
| threats, and other means used by Intel to lock AMD
| processors out of the global market. Since the start of
| this action, the court has issued subpoenas to major
| computer manufacturers including Acer, Dell, Lenovo, HP
| and Toshiba.
|
| In November 2009, Intel agreed to pay AMD $1.25bn and
| renew a five-year patent cross-licensing agreement as
| part of a deal to settle all outstanding legal disputes
| between them."
|
| Unfortunately by that point the damage had been done.
| Fabs are an extremely expensive, normally lower margin,
| business. Risk averse companies probably can't get into
| that game. Even with Apple they appear to have focused on
| something of a partnership with TSMC rather than their
| own fab.
| adamlett wrote:
| _They don 't have to buy TSMC a fab, they simply have to pay
| (slightly) more than other TSMC customers_
|
| They don't even have to do that. They just have to place
| orders that are sufficiently larger than any of TSMC's other
| customers'.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| I agree. ALl AMD / Qualcomm have to do is guarantee a
| sufficiently sized order, and that's equivalent to the "Apple
| buys a production line".
|
| And uh yeah: AMD and Qualcomm do have the order sizes to do
| that.
| JeremyNT wrote:
| Indeed, this is the obvious risk of allowing a TSMC monopoly,
| and its "fabless" customers have little justification for
| complaining.
|
| AMD is not the savior here, nor any other TSMC customer.
| Intel completely squandered its lead, and now we really need
| to hope they can catch up and remain competitive. We
| shouldn't allow TSMC to take total control of the market.
| Klinky wrote:
| I don't think they would only need to pay slightly more. It
| is a bad move to be entirely dependent on a single customer
| to the detriment of your other customer relations. To gain
| exclusivity there would likely need to be a significant
| premium paid and minimum order commitments.
| desiarnezjr wrote:
| They're not though. There are still many fabs available,
| just not the premium ones. It's up to every other company
| that wants those seats to pony up and do what they need to
| do to get that capacity.
|
| It's like a restaurant reservation for a very regular "VIP"
| customer. They may get really special treatment, because
| they're probably spent enough to earn it. And everyone else
| schleps in line.
|
| Really there's nothing wrong with that. It may be annoying,
| but someone is paying way more and consistently for that
| table.
| Klinky wrote:
| I think that restaurant analogy is pretty bad. Driving
| customers to a competitor is a risk you take when locking
| them out of your restaurant, and those customers could
| also be lucrative VIP customers as well, not just schleps
| from the street. If that mega VIP ever stops coming to
| your restaurant, and you've lost your other VIP/customer
| base, you'll be hurting big time. This can lead to
| leverage the mega VIP has over you, as they know you've
| overcommited to them, and can tighten the screws.
| mdasen wrote:
| > they simply have to pay (slightly) more than other TSMC
| customers
|
| I'd argue that they need to pay _significantly_ more than
| other customer in order to get such preferential treatment.
|
| In a short-sighted view of things, you only need to pay
| slightly more. If AMD is willing to pay $1 and Apple is
| willing to pay $1.01, you make more profit selling to Apple.
| However, as this article shows, you might end up losing the
| other business if you offer Apple such preferential
| treatment. If Apple isn't going to use all of your capacity
| year-round, you don't want to alienate the other companies
| whose orders you rely on.
|
| I think Apple likely has to pay a significant premium for
| getting access to the latest and greatest to the detriment of
| competitors. It's not in TSMC's interests to become too
| dependent on Apple. If AMD and Qualcomm mutiny and their
| orders start boosting Samsung's foundries with more money for
| R&D, TSMC could find itself 1) competing against a better-
| funded Samsung foundry; 2) with one customer that now has
| leverage over TSMC and getting paid less.
|
| If AMD and Qualcomm move all their orders to Samsung, it
| provides Samsung with the money to reinvest in its chip
| business. If they're able to make long-term commitments to
| Samsung, that's bad for TSMC since it will allow Samsung to
| invest knowing it will make a profit (just as TSMC has been
| able to do that with Apple's commitments).
|
| Likewise, if the two other giant chip design companies move
| to Samsung exclusively, that leaves TSMC in a tough
| negotiating position with Apple. Before, Apple would have to
| compete against AMD and Qualcomm for capacity. Now if AMD and
| Qualcomm have made long-term commitments to Samsung, TSMC
| becomes really reliant on Apple and Apple will know that TSMC
| has capacity they can't sell elsewhere. Sure, MediaTek and
| others exist, but it swings the power away from TSMC and
| toward Apple. Let's say that Apple was using 40% of TSMC's
| capacity, AMD 25%, Qualcomm 25%, and MediaTek 10%. Now AMD
| and Qualcomm make long-term commitments to Samsung. Apple
| knows that TSMC's orders have dropped 50% and that gives
| Apple a lot of power.
|
| Giving Apple the best to the detriment of AMD, Qualcomm, and
| others is a risky play for TSMC. They'll definitely want to
| be getting very well compensated for it, not merely slightly
| more. They'll want to make sure that what Apple is offering
| is enough to offset the substantial risk of angering
| competing chip design companies who might look for fabs
| elsewhere.
| TrainedMonkey wrote:
| Not sure I totally buy your point, but it does sound
| interesting/intriguing enough for an Asianometry video:
| https://www.youtube.com/c/Asianometry/videos
| ricw wrote:
| Apple is 20% of TSMCs revenue. That's enough to make such
| demands. On top of that they're likely also paying top
| dollar.
| tooltalk wrote:
| Apple is not known for overpaying. Apple is however a
| significant volume customer and volume customers usually
| enjoy a huge discount that smaller customers don't get.
| So in addition to preferential allotment, Apple is
| probably paying less for the same node.
| myohmy wrote:
| Eh, the business world isn't as simple as Econ 101. Personal
| and business relationships matter. Risk matters quite a bit
| too. Which is why strategic partnerships happen between large
| businesses.
| gameswithgo wrote:
| AMD would be dead if they had not done that.
| toast0 wrote:
| > Actually I would put the blame squarely on AMD and Qualcomm
| for making themselves dependent on TSMC - especially AMD who
| have turned themselves into a "fabless manufacturer" and are
| now experiencing the consequences...
|
| The consequences being if you don't like what your fab is up
| to, you can switch fabs. Doesn't sound too bad.
| GlobalFoundries, the former AMD fab, has all but given up on
| smaller nodes at this point, but AMD switched to TSMC for
| CPUs and a mix of TSMC and Samsung for GPUs. On the other
| hand, Intel had problems with their fab for several years,
| and is only now starting to consider using other fabs, when
| their process seems to be starting to work.
|
| Yes, designing chips to fabricate on different lines is more
| work, but it's something AMD has intentionally done and it
| has benefits over running your own fab, especially when your
| own fab has trouble with node shrinks.
| [deleted]
| masklinn wrote:
| > They don't have to buy TSMC a fab, they simply have to pay
| (slightly) more than other TSMC customers
|
| Also large minimum orders, and probably a bunch of the
| payment upfront or somesuch.
| inasio wrote:
| I had a chat with an engineer that was building apple stores
| (the big anchor ones). The stone for the walls came from a
| quarry that was fully bought by apple, apple people would go
| there to select the stones that had the quality they wanted and
| use those.
| fomine3 wrote:
| What Apple did for Japan Display is interesting. They invest to
| build new JDI Hakusan factory for iPhone LCD but they were
| going to transitioned to OLED as a result. Then the factory
| become debt. https://www.strategyanalytics.com/strategy-
| analytics/blogs/c...
| Someone wrote:
| Yes, it is capitalism at work. Whomever pays more, decides.
|
| Apple says something along the lines of "we guarantee to buy x
| million chips this year, y million next year. We know it's
| expensive to build that capacity, so here's a few billion up
| front".
|
| That's an offer few can make and nobody else is willing to
| make.
| _ph_ wrote:
| The big point indeed is, that Apple pays in advance to
| finance the buildup of the production facilities. Of course
| they get the first access at the output as a consequence.
| donny2018 wrote:
| That's reasonable, I guess. If that is "capitalism" (with
| negative connotation) then what is more fair alternative to
| this?
| fundad wrote:
| Samsung's foundry, obviously. Choosing Apple meant
| letting go of old guard players
| n8cpdx wrote:
| Qualcomm and AMD could have chosen to be more vigorous in
| their competition. Android customers would have gotten
| better phones, Intel wouldn't have waited until 2021 to
| start making decent parts again, and everyone would win.
|
| Maybe a more fair version would be for the federal
| government to socialize each of these players, and decide
| that they will pay a premium for slow, hot, American-made
| parts.
|
| If that sounds ridiculous, meditate on why you think
| capitalism/markets have a negative connotation when they
| are in fact producing great outcomes - amazing chips (M1
| series) and competitive pressure on Intel, AMD, and
| Qualcomm to eventually deliver similarly competitive
| chips.
|
| Unbridled capitalism gets a bad rap, but that's a
| relatively new innovation. You can have a well-regulated
| market produce even more fabulous outcomes; don't blame
| corporations for those outcomes, blame politicians and
| the voting public.
|
| Edit: a theme I see repeated over and over, on hacker
| news of all places, is people making excuses for
| businesses operating in competitive markets. Making
| excuses is bad for consumers, it's bad for competition,
| it's bad for society. Stop making excuses and ask
| business to work harder. Android users deserve fast
| processors, and it is 100% Qualcomm's fault that they
| don't have them. Intel PC users deserve fast, low-power
| processors, and it is 100% Intel's fault that users don't
| get them, or have to go to AMD/Apple for them. Apple's
| success is proof positive that AMD, Qualcomm, and Intel
| have been insufficiently vigorous and innovative in their
| competition, which in manufacturing products also
| involves the surrounding business practices needed to
| ensure access to fab capacity.
| artificialLimbs wrote:
| Upvoted, but:
|
| >> You can have a well-regulated market produce even more
| fabulous outcomes...
|
| Can you cite an example of this?
| smoldesu wrote:
| Does that not qualify as a monopoly? No other company in
| the world has the amount of liquid cash Apple does, so if
| there really are informal arrangements like this I'd expect
| them to be heartily scrutinized at their next antitrust
| hearing.
| tobylane wrote:
| They aren't preventing anyone else from becoming wealthy
| enough. If others wanted to do this they could use their
| own cash supplies
| (https://www.valuewalk.com/2019/11/top-10-companies-with-
| larg... ) or take out loans.
| jtbayly wrote:
| Informal? It's not informal. It's part of the contract.
| What exactly is the monopoly/antitrust violation you are
| seeing?
| rsynnott wrote:
| > No other company in the world has the amount of liquid
| cash Apple does
|
| I'm not sure that's true these days, but, even if it is
| true, plenty of other companies could _raise_ it easily
| enough. It might make less sense for other companies,
| though. Like, realistically, if AMD is beating Intel
| already (and, for the moment, they largely are; Alder
| Lake is niche for now), what does being a little earlier
| with 3nm buy them? Is it worth the money? Perhaps not.
|
| It's even less clear that it would be worth it for
| Qualcomm. For them, it's hard to see that there'd be any
| return; they have a captive audience already.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| "plenty of other companies could _raise_ it easily
| enough"
|
| This extraordinary claim that it's easy to raise 200BN is
| backed up by no argument or evidence?
|
| The claim that it's more worthwhile for Apple than it is
| for a CPU company to have CPU production exclusivity is
| backed up by no argument, logic or evidence?
|
| What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed
| without evidence.
| Jensson wrote:
| > even if it is true, plenty of other companies could
| _raise_ it easily enough
|
| How many companies can easily raise $200 billion?
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/27/apple-q1-cash-hoard-
| heres-ho...
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Why would it?
|
| At a much smaller scale, I have had contracts with
| various vendors to provide "stuff" associated with
| services they provide to us.
|
| In one case, they had a facility dedicated to my
| company's needs, with tooling maintained by my company.
| The contractor has an SLA to achieve different levels of
| operational readiness.
|
| What Apple is doing is no different, except they are
| buying 8-9 figure tools or loaning lots of cash at
| favorable terms.
|
| I certainly wouldn't shed many years for Qualcomm, which
| has an actual monopoly on modems. Their lack of strategic
| competence isn't Apple's sin.
| JiNCMG wrote:
| They aren't buying up all of the infrastructure. Samsung
| and Intel offer the same services. It's not a monopoly
| for a company to pre-order ahead of time. It's like
| Kickstarter but at a grander level.
| brundolf wrote:
| Getting an advantage by having more money than everybody
| else isn't a monopoly. That's just the garden-variety
| unfairness of capitalism.
| Jensson wrote:
| Using lots of money to buy up all supply isn't just
| "garden-variety capitalism". Buying all available supply
| is a way to become a monopoly. You got there by having
| lots of money, but after you get there you are the
| monopoly.
|
| Although most would argue that lower end architectures
| are perfectly fine replacements, so Apple gets an edge
| here but can't be said to be a monopoly.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| It's probably market manipulation, rather than monopoly.
| Jensson wrote:
| Buying all supply is usually called "monopolizing".
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Thats true in popular disource, but there are like 20
| different forms of unfair competition, ranging from
| collusion to dumping.
|
| I don't have the nessesary background to know which one
| is applicable, but I think monopoly is not the right one.
| lottin wrote:
| Technically, that's not a monopoly but rather a monopsony
| --a market dominated by a large buyer.
| 23iuhj23oi wrote:
| Samsung S21 beats iPhone 13 in performance (!!!) despite using a
| less advanced semiconductor technology (not TSMC) and being an
| older smartphone:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MxC6eVjPFQ
|
| So, Apple CPUs are not that great at the end.
|
| By the way, the guy on the video forgot to turn off power saving
| mode on S21 (-> less performance) and S21 still beat iPhone...
| elzbardico wrote:
| Yeah, sure, a random guy in youtube that gets an opposite
| conclusion to all the established tech press review teams.
| akmarinov wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QaI3tGLStVQ
|
| Here's the reverse video where the iPhone beats the S21 ...
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| AMD hasn't even moved to 5nm till now even though it is available
| to them. Why are they complaining?
| qayxc wrote:
| Well, they can't move to 5nm because Apple bought basically the
| entire 5nm production from TSMC.
|
| In other words, they couldn't move to 5nm because they wouldn't
| be able to procure any significant volume from it. Why bother
| with 5nm if you wouldn't be able to ship products?
|
| That's exactly why NVIDIA ditched TSMC in favour of Samsung
| despite their inferior process.
| fomine3 wrote:
| Nvidia Ampere uses Samsung 8nm that is basically 10nm+. I
| wish they use Samsung 7nm even if they can't afford TSMC 7nm.
| monocasa wrote:
| Samsung 7nm probably doesn't have the yields to make it
| worth it yet.
| kuschku wrote:
| Because Apple had bought 100% of 5nm capacity, and so no
| capacity at 5nm was available to AMD?
| pmarcelll wrote:
| There is a significant amount of time between starting the
| development of a CPU die on a specific node and actually
| releasing the final product onto the market. This has already
| happened for Zen 4 on 5nm (so R&D/product development has moved
| to 5nm a long time ago) and the article is probably about Zen 5
| (current gen is Zen 3 on 7nm).
| 1cvmask wrote:
| This seems to me a replay of when Apple bought out all the
| capacity of Toshiba hard drives to that effectively blocked other
| MP3 players from emerging:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod
|
| https://9to5mac.com/2021/10/23/20-years-ago-today-ipod-chang...
| rkangel wrote:
| Not saying you're wrong, but an alternate interpretation was
| that Apple was just leveraging their large order size to get to
| the front of the line because they want to make products to
| sell. If you're TSMC, who are you going to favour - the large
| single customer who's guaranteeing order size over a period of
| time, or several smaller customers?
| q-big wrote:
| > If you're TSMC, who are you going to favour - the large
| single customer who's guaranteeing order size over a period
| of time, or several smaller customers?
|
| This depends on your business strategy: having a single or
| few customers makes you much more dependent on their whims
| and their negotiation power. If you have more customers you
| are in a better position for pricing negotiations.
| melony wrote:
| When you have a monopoly on a single component, it doesn't
| matter.
| bigdubs wrote:
| Big point of strength for TSMC in negotiations is they're
| the only fab that can make 3nm chips in volume, which gives
| them a ton of leverage to push back against Apple.
| JiNCMG wrote:
| Nothing to negotiation. Apple invested (pre-ordered)
| before 3nm was built.
| intricatedetail wrote:
| I wonder if they had the same competitive advantage if they
| were not allowed to use tax avoidance schemes. Smaller
| corporations cannot afford to build such structures so they
| have more difficulties to compete.
| fundad wrote:
| Making motherboards high volume that are faster than your
| competitors is something small businesses could not afford
| to do. We're talking about one process that makes the same
| chips but more valuable.
|
| And AMD and Qualcomm want more access to it than they have
| so they complain to the press. This is the supply chain
| folks.
| intricatedetail wrote:
| Tax avoidance benefits build up through years. Basically
| smaller companies have less money to work with which is
| compounded by excessive taxes. Big corporations don't
| have such burden.
| rzwitserloot wrote:
| Several smaller customers; anything else would be myopic.
|
| General business intelligence: You do NOT want one of your
| 'verticals' (companies that you need to buy supplies from, or
| companies that you sell your product to) to turn
| monopolistic; after all, once they are a monopoly they can
| really squeeze you out.
|
| This holds even if you are also nearing a monopoly or are an
| effective monopoly (in that you're the only one that can
| supply it at the quantity and quality required).
|
| There are mitigating circumstances, but most of them don't
| look good for apple:
|
| * TSMC is stupid. Don't knock it - I've seen companies go for
| the quick buck, then get killed by the monopolistic monolith
| they enabled and be surprised.
|
| * TSMC laughs in the face of this and simply isn't taking an
| apple near monopoly on chips particularly seriously. I can
| definitely see that - the risk is presumably that apple gains
| massive increases in marketshare of PCs/laptops and
| smartphones, but TSMC presumably doesn't think it'll be so
| high as to risk the situation that TSMC can produce more
| chips than non-apple buyers could buy. In other words, that
| apple's total 'TSMC fab capacity' needs won't go anywhere
| near 50% of what TSMC is likely to ever be able to
| manufacture.
|
| * Apple is putting pressure on TSMC. TSMC knows this is a
| risk and doesn't want to, but apple does want this to happen
| and is making some shady deals so that TSMC does the math and
| decided that the gains in dealing with apple exceed the
| losses*odds-it-will-happen of the squeeze if apple is a
| monopoly buyer for TSMC (as in, of dubious legality and
| certainly of questionable morality, but then, it's apple, a
| company. Waiting for companies to act morally is silly, you
| write laws and set up societal systems to incentivize them to
| do so instead, companies are amoral (not immoral - they just
| don't really know what it is, by design).
|
| Your comment seems to suggest it's a smart move for TSMC to
| just sign one giant deal with apple and be done with it: You
| can send the lawyers and salesfolk to early retirement, get
| some money upfront, guarantee 100% sales of all your fab
| capacity with a party that is unlikely to renege or declare
| bankruptcy.
|
| It's not. It's a dumb move. Either the C-level execs at TSMC
| are missing something pretty fundamental or more likely we
| don't know enough to realize that there's sufficient weights
| on the other side of the balance to counteract the downside
| of enabling the monopoly on verticals.
| rkangel wrote:
| I wrote that very badly. What I wrote came out to be about
| a diverse customer base which is obviously a good thing.
| What I _meant_ to talk about was "predictable demand".
| Being able to know your exact order profile for a lead time
| of years is very valuable in manufacturing.
|
| That said, Apple probably just invested money in their 3nm
| in exchange for priority (or similar) and maybe TSMC is
| being a bit short sighted.
| ksec wrote:
| > more likely we don't know enough to realize that there's
| sufficient weights on the other side of the balance to
| counteract the downside of enabling the monopoly on
| verticals.
|
| Because your angle completely miss capacity and resources
| planning. As the 30 years old joke goes, most expensive Fab
| in the world isn't the leading edge Fab, it is the Empty
| Fab. And then there is the initial capital and order
| guarantee. As a matter of fact, it is nearly the same
| across all industry supply chain. Insert Pizza Doll,
| Sausage Rolls, Paper Towels, or the recent pandemic event
| Toilet Paper, and your skill set from production line are
| all the same.
|
| It is not Apple is without risk, so to speak. They will
| have to fill the Fab orders, even if somehow no one buys
| any iPhone. It just happens Apple has never had this
| problem. Compared to Qualcomm, AMD, Nvidia which all have
| their fair share of flops and market did not react as they
| expected. Or you could end up like Nvidia where they had
| three quarter worth of GPU stocks sitting channel during
| the BitCoin crash.
|
| Getting Apple ( or the largest customer )'s order filled
| with a price premium is and will always be the simplest and
| effective way for the business.
|
| And there is a huge market in GPU, HPC, AI, and Cloud
| Computing along with forever increasing chips in all
| segment. TSMC isn't really beholden to Apple like Dialog or
| PowerVR IMG.
| oblio wrote:
| Monopoly buyers are called monopsonies, FYI.
| ascar wrote:
| > the risk is presumably that apple gains massive increases
| in marketshare of PCs/laptops and smartphones
|
| Apple is very far from monopolistic market share of
| smartphones and even much further away with Laptops. Apple
| with their intentionally overpriced products caters to a
| branded premium segment. They are not even aiming to take
| the mass market of low to mid level smartphones that makes
| up most of the market outside the US
|
| I would also not be afraid if I were TSMC, especially as
| this is just about the new 3nm process that is catering to
| the highend market and doesn't eliminate the existing
| business.
|
| Your comment reads a bit like there could be a distopian
| world where a shortage of 3nm results in Apple becomeing
| the only option for phones and laptops
| jagger27 wrote:
| This is complete FUD.
| kergonath wrote:
| The whole post seems a bit myopic, to be honest. First,
| TSMC is more of a monopoly than Apple is (and ever will be
| as long as they don't care about entry level consumer
| devices).
|
| Then, Apple gets a temporary exclusivity on the new node
| (which they helped finance), but this leaves a lot of
| capacity on the older nodes. These processes are still
| really good, the vast majority of TSMC customers don't care
| about being on the bleeding edge for the sake of it.
|
| Let's be realistic: what would have been the alternative
| for TSMC? Leave Apple's investment out of the table and
| waste time bringing their new process online without it?
| AMD or Qualcomm would not be in a much better position
| right now. Or TSMC, for that matter.
|
| What is the end game you're afraid of? Apple takes its
| business elsewhere? To whom? Wouldn't this leave TSMC with
| paid-for facilities they could now use to produce chips for
| other customers at a discount?
| gpapilion wrote:
| I don't think they needed to help finance the research. I
| think the apple volume is likely an order or two of
| magnitude larger than the next customer. It's probably an
| advantage to have the large volume, and sync is making
| the right choice.
|
| Similarly intels process issues showed up when they
| started trying to make xeon before the desktop
| processors.
| JiNCMG wrote:
| TSMC may not have needed it but Apple did invest (pre-
| order) and they will continue to do so. There is not
| exclusivity but pre-purchased capacity and similar video
| games and kickstarters. They don't always work out for
| Apple (the Sapphire glass) but majority of the time they
| are working out perfectly (iPod Toshiba Hard Drives and
| the TSMC M1 cpus).
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > First, TSMC is more of a monopoly than Apple is (and
| ever will be as long as they don't care about entry level
| consumer devices).
|
| From TSMC's perspective, the entry level market isn't
| where they make their money. You can make entry level
| devices on old processes that have a lot of competition.
| It would be really bad for TSMC if Apple were to
| monopolize the high end of the market, because that's
| what uses the advanced process nodes TSMC makes its money
| from.
|
| > Then, Apple gets a temporary exclusivity on the new
| node (which they helped finance), but this leaves a lot
| of capacity on the older nodes. These processes are still
| really good, the vast majority of TSMC customers don't
| care about being on the bleeding edge for the sake of it.
|
| Except that they do care, because they're competing in
| the same market. Apple is currently making a lot of hay
| out of the fact that the M1 is more power efficient than
| PC laptops, which is attributable in no small part to the
| fact that they're on TSMC 5nm when everyone else is on
| TSMC 7nm or worse.
|
| If nobody was on the newest node, or Apple was making
| products that didn't compete with
| AMD/Qualcomm/Nvidia/Intel in the market, the others not
| having it wouldn't matter. When the device customer is
| going to prefer the best one, and the one on the best
| node has an advantage, it does.
|
| > what would have been the alternative for TSMC?
|
| If Apple isn't signing some kind of exclusivity deal
| requiring TSMC to give all of its new capacity to Apple,
| build more of it using their own money so that when it
| comes online, there is enough for more than Apple. If
| they are demanding exclusivity, inform antitrust
| authorities of this.
|
| > What is the end game you're afraid of? Apple takes its
| business elsewhere?
|
| Suppose Apple monopolizes the high end market. They take
| 75% of it using the process advantage, then take the rest
| as the network effect from that crushes alternatives.
| They're now your only customer for the newest process
| nodes, so they squeeze your margins to zero. At the same
| time, they buy Global Foundries and pour money into it
| until their process is better than yours, and you no
| longer have the money to compete because you let all your
| other high end customers be destroyed.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| >Suppose Apple monopolizes the high end market. They take
| 75% of it using the process advantage, then take the rest
| as the network effect from that crushes alternatives.
| They're now your only customer for the newest process
| nodes, so they squeeze your margins to zero. At the same
| time, they buy Global Foundries and pour money into it
| until their process is better than yours, and you no
| longer have the money to compete because you let all your
| other high end customers be destroyed.
|
| It's what Apple did to Imagination Technologies and tried
| to do to Samsung.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| Having Apple as it's unique or main customer was a disaster
| for Imagination Technologies.
| Jensson wrote:
| TSMC has a market cap of $600 billion, it is a totally
| different scale, Apple can't just push them around like
| they do with "small" billion dollar businesses.
| nojito wrote:
| They don't need to push them around....they will just pay
| more than everyone else combined.
| hedgehog wrote:
| You're missing that the customers aren't all buying the
| same thing. Apple is willing to make the
| investment/commitment and take the pain of shipping a
| product on a brand new node, and the tooling will last
| longer than Apple needs it for. That rolls from phones up
| (eventually) to big pro chips as yields etc improve, but
| then volume tapers off after a few years as most products
| move to newer chips on the next process. Apple needs a lot
| of capacity up front (iPhone launch) so they make the deals
| so TSMC can scale up. Later smaller players like AMD,
| NVIDIA, Intel, etc can use the proven nodes with less risk.
| 16nm/12nm is still perfectly good for lots of things. TSMC
| keeps the fabs busy for a long time, Apple gets the volume
| of parts they need at a good price. Apple doesn't directly
| compete with the other major semis so it doesn't really
| matter that they always have access to better
| manufacturing. It's all fine.
| pfortuny wrote:
| "My app depended on google and I have been banned"...
| hinkley wrote:
| Everyone has forgotten that when Apple moved to Intel, part
| of the deal was that Apple had the fastest laptop CPU for
| about 6 months.
|
| To me this says as much about Intel as about Apple. When
| Intel has a new chip or a bin that has small yields, they
| can't supply a large customer. But MacBook had maybe a third
| of the market share it has now, so that's a relatively small
| niche you can supply while you boost your yields.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| This is HN, the audience should know that VC's have a very
| strong preference for a large number of small customers over
| a small number of large customers, and why.
|
| Obviously TSMC doesn't care about VC's, but the same reason
| why VC's prefer a large number of small customers still
| applies.
| InGoodFaith wrote:
| > VC's have a very strong preference for a large number of
| small customers over a small number of large customers, and
| why.
|
| This is intriguing and I would appreciate if possible to
| get any sources to read up on this?
| chevman wrote:
| Makes your public metrics look better (ie "we have over
| 500+ customers!!!!") and also demonstrates (in theory) a
| more durable product.
|
| When people see small number of large customers, the
| implication is you are basically just running an
| outsourced dev/consultant/staff aug shop. Less product
| vision and ability to "scale".
| thrashh wrote:
| "too many eggs in one basket"?
|
| Especially for a new untested company no customer is sure
| they actually need yet
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| Anyone should prefer lots of customers to a few key ones.
| The latter have more leverage. They also make one's
| metrics risky, as a single defection can swing the firm
| from profitable to barely eking by.
| sosborn wrote:
| > Anyone should prefer lots of customers to a few key
| ones.
|
| I think the caveat/variable is "all else being equal or
| close to equal."
|
| If having 10 customers will net you $10 total per month,
| and having one large customer will net you $100 per
| month, it is really hard to justify going with the $10
| customers. But if those 10 customers will net you $10
| EACH per month, then the 10customers is a better
| situation.
| JiNCMG wrote:
| Yeah but if 1 of your customers offers to prepaid for 10
| years of service at the same price you wouldn't turn that
| away. Allowing you to maintain your other customers.
| Apple's pre-order of 3nm will get them priority as they
| ordered it before it was an option. (see Kickstarter)
| sosborn wrote:
| As I said, "all else being equal or close to equal."
| jeromegv wrote:
| Was it to block competitors, or was it because they were
| selling millions of iPod and needed all the capacity they can
| get? The iPod was not first to market and that Toshiba HD was
| available before but nobody was ordering it in any kind of
| significant quantity.
| yareally wrote:
| Probably a little bit of both.
| JiNCMG wrote:
| No one was demanding those hard drives, Toshiba was close
| to shelving it before going into production. Jon Rubenstein
| convinced Steve Jobs to invest in them for the music device
| they were building and 8 million was given to Toshiba so
| they can start producing these drives.
| megablast wrote:
| How can it be both.
|
| They either needed that many because they were selling that
| many.
|
| Or bought way more to stop others from buying.
| [deleted]
| Arnt wrote:
| You can order parts today that you'll need in four,
| eight, twelve, sixteen months. You can do that even
| though both you and the competition plan to release new
| models in a few months, if you're willing to decide on
| the storage capacity of your next product already.
|
| So how much you need is a forecast, or more precisely, a
| range of forecasts that depend on what you and your
| competitors will sell. Your order will say "I commit to
| buying x and want an option on y more" and a larger x
| gets you a lower unit price for the first x you buy.
|
| If the vendor's production capacity is within your
| forecasts, or near it, why shouldn't you just commit to
| order everything and get a nice low unit price? You'll
| lose if your forecasts are very wrong, but then that's
| true whatever you do. It sucks for your competitors, who
| did not order according to their own forecasts.
| tomxor wrote:
| Once they were selling a large enough quantity to begin
| with they can gamble their profits on overstock for
| future production, wiping out future supplies for
| competitors... at which point it's more of a guarantee,
| if there are multiple viable products and you remove all
| but one, consumers have no choice.
|
| These are separate things (getting to the point of large
| scale production and blocking your competitors), e.g they
| could have played fair with the same initial success
| without excessive overstocking, allowing their
| competitors to continue competing and letting market
| forces decide, and letting suppliers gradually match
| current demand.
|
| In short, there is no advantage to overstocking to such
| an excess other than to block your competitors. But you
| can only do so once you have a foot in the door and
| enough money to do so.
| JiNCMG wrote:
| But there wasn't and will never be any overstock at Apple
| since Tim Cook started working there. In 2008 Apple still
| had Texas warehouses with old beige Mac but all of the
| Mac produced in the Tim Cook era do not last more than a
| 2 - 3 weeks in a warehouse. This includes components and
| this is why every January after an iPhone release the
| business journalists start predicting Apple's downfall
| because they lower their part orders for display, memory,
| etc. They don't let any of that stuff sit in a
| warehouse... EVER.
| hinkley wrote:
| But did they overstock?
|
| What I recall is them being production limited over and
| over again because their best wasn't always good enough
| to stay ahead of demand. Nobody has talked about them
| hoarding.
|
| Blocking competition was a benefit, but not the goal.
| thrashh wrote:
| But they probably discussed it happening in a meeting.
| Therefore it also became a goal.
| m12k wrote:
| I think they bought what they needed, but that was enough
| to block others from getting produced.
| yareally wrote:
| Yes, unintentional side effect. I'm sure it crossed the
| minds of some the executives that they might be screwing
| their competition by buying out all the chips.
|
| Apple is obviously not going to buy less so their
| competition can have more when Apple needed the supply.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| Intentional effect.
|
| The fact that it's one of severel effects and one of
| several motivations does not make it unintentional, or
| even necessarily just a side effect.
|
| It could just as well be simply one of multiple fully
| considered effects, and surely was.
| hvgk wrote:
| I don't think so. This is the failure of having a choke point
| in semiconductor manufacturing and centralisation of all
| manufacturing infrastructure. No business is going to turn down
| the largest pile of cash being thrown at them. AMD and Qualcomm
| could of course have invested heavily in reducing this risk but
| no, they didn't.
| hinkley wrote:
| I've worked for a couple places where we as a vendor we're
| not given the respect and/or margins that the customer's road
| map demanded. It was lousy watching customers crow about us
| while we were going bankrupt. If a deal is too good to be
| true, it probably is.
|
| I'm not claiming Apple respects TSMC more than Qualcomm does
| (but does Qualcomm respect anybody? They are practically the
| bad guys in any number of stories), but this is what respect
| would probably look like.
|
| Speaking of Qualcomm, Apple is trying to compete with them on
| radio chips, so leaving TSMC probably works to that goal.
| tentacleuno wrote:
| > AMD and Qualcomm could of course have invested heavily in
| reducing this risk but no, they didn't.
|
| We're in the middle of a chip shortage, though.
| fundad wrote:
| Yeah everyone need capacity and only one player can get it
| first.
| cormacrelf wrote:
| If, having seen the risk turn into reality, they want to
| buy some of Apple's capacity, they are free to make an
| offer.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Why would Apple allow that? They clearly have the money
| to outbid AMD and Qualcomm just to prevent them from
| competing, and the leverage to threaten moving their
| phones to a competitor and drop the prices for TSMC in
| the opposite case.
| mcphage wrote:
| "It would be expensive to compete so why bother?" isn't
| really how you succeed under capitalism.
| cormacrelf wrote:
| The only way to analyse this as something bad Apple has
| done is to make out a case under competition or antitrust
| law in some jurisdiction. In Australia we have the
| concept of exclusive dealing, which the US (I think)
| doesn't have an equivalent to, but even then, it's
| extremely difficult to violate this law as a purchaser of
| goods/services, using money to buy them. This is because
| ANYBODY can acquire money and compete with you by
| offering more money. You could hold a monopoly on your
| own products (and then if you imposed exclusivity
| arrangements on purchasers of your products you would be
| abusing your market power to lessen competition), but
| it's essentially impossible to hold a monopoly on money
| itself.
|
| In all, you're characterising Apple, competing fiercely
| in an open market, as preventing other people competing
| by being too good at it. That is a bit ridiculous. If AMD
| and Qualcomm die out as a result, it will be because they
| couldn't keep up, which is capitalism functioning
| correctly. Even under those very broad laws, the only
| party you can remotely fault is TSMC, and even then, they
| are literally just taking from the highest bidder, which
| is again capitalism functioning correctly.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Ultimately I'm not making a legal argument. All I'm
| saying is that it's very bad for the industry and for the
| public in general that Apple is the only entity that has
| access to the cutting edge and that it's only available
| in their golden cage. It doesn't really matter to me if
| this is capitalism working correctly or not, or if it's
| legal or not, ultimately all that matters is that because
| of this computing is being pushed back, we're not seeing
| as much competition on performance as we could be, and
| that's generally bad for everyone. I understand that
| Apple is just looking out for #1, I just think this is
| bad for the general public.
| cormacrelf wrote:
| Right, and I'm saying they are not the only entity with
| access, because all you have to do to get into the golden
| cage is have a really good idea and get financing, and
| that is possible. Letting everyone else get your idea of
| a fair share of production capacity to produce sub-par
| chips is not my idea of good progress. If they truly
| deserve capacity allocated to them, they should
| demonstrate they can design better chips, convince
| someone with money to fund it, and do what Apple's done
| (buying TSMC a fabrication plant). That they haven't done
| this, and they are punished by not having the cash to
| acquire production capacity, means that they will feel
| the pain, and have to start innovating their way out.
| This is what capitalism gives you: the fire under your
| butt to innovate. That's how it's good. If you prefer the
| lazy to succeed anyway, you are free to feel that way.
|
| Edit, to address what you said exactly: this is the way
| in which losing out on capacity forces them to compete
| harder. If they fall behind in benchmarks for a few
| years, and you read that as a lack of competition, you
| are wrong: it is perfect competition, they fell behind,
| and are now working harder than they were before to
| design something better. Just because capitalism in the
| long term usually gets competitors to converge does not
| mean a temporary winner in the lead indicates competition
| is not occurring. Apple delivered a jolt to a market that
| had been flatlining, so there is more competition now
| than there was before.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| But the chips are not sub-par. The entire point of my
| argument is that at an equal lithography the competition
| can outperform Apple. The performance advantage that
| Apple can demonstrate is under the margin of improvement
| from 7nm to 5nm all else being equal (RAM, TDP, etc..)
|
| There was already a fire under their butt before Apple.
| Both AMD, Intel, NVidia and even Qualcomm are competing
| against each other. And that competition yielded
| architectures that are at least on par and very probably
| better than what Apple can do.
|
| They can design better chips. They just don't have as
| much money as Apple. It's something that Apple already
| did before with, for example, the first generation of
| small HDDs, they bought out the entire production line
| and their competitors, despite being able to make MP3s
| that were just as good, had to wait for years to access
| the parts.
| cormacrelf wrote:
| I wouldn't be too worried. If they are competitive
| designs, they will be able to get money to have them
| manufactured. There is lots of money to be made doing it,
| so there is lots of capital available. I don't think this
| will result in a huge setback to humanity's progress like
| you are making out.
|
| But for now, you can't fault Apple at all for planning
| for this better than they did, but you can fault these
| companies for not raising tons of cash in anticipation
| this would be an issue. Darwinian capitalism applies to
| supply chain strategists too.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| The designs _are_ competitive, and they can 't get the
| money to have them manufactured. By the time AMD and
| NVidia have access to 5nm Apple will be about to move to
| 3nm. They are going to have a full node of delay for the
| foreseeable future.
|
| You can't just raise cash magically. I assure you AMD and
| NVidia were and are doing everything they can to raise as
| much money as possible and were trying as hard as they
| could to get capacity. They just couldn't outbid Apple.
| There is nothing that can be done for them to outbid
| Apple. They could have a 50% performance advantage and
| they still will never outbid Apple, because the majority
| of Apple processors aren't even being sold on
| performance.
|
| Yes there is lots of money to be made. The issue is that
| selling processors is very competitive. There will never
| be enough profit to be made for them to outfinance Apple
| unless iPhone sales nosedive.
| cormacrelf wrote:
| Right, so 5-10 years ago, seeing the writing on the wall,
| one of these companies should have bought/merged with
| another to pool more resources so as to remain a big
| enough bidder in the face of an entrant who would soon be
| massive. If the goal is to get a 5nm chip out the door
| today, maybe it seems hopeless, but if the goal is to
| compete with Apple, there are so, so many things to be
| done. It's a fair fight, they're just losing. I don't
| really have anything more to contribute, but this has
| been a good talk.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| >but if the goal is to compete with Apple, there are so,
| so many things to be done
|
| Can you give some examples? And a time frame in which
| AMD, Qualcomm, Nvidia can use the same tech as Apple?
| cormacrelf wrote:
| I just gave you both. Merge, and 5-10 years. Also
| shepherd or buy your own chip manufacturer like Apple
| did.
|
| Unrelated, I am shocked, shocked that people on this
| Silicon Valley hideout are downvoting me because they do
| not like the reality of capitalism. This is like
| complaining that Germany is unfairly occupying all of
| France's land in 1941, why can't they let the Allies have
| a small parcel of land up in Brittany or something, when
| Germany won it fair and square under international law.
| Apple owes them nothing. Get used to it, folks, if you
| think this is all very unfair, you have seen NOTHING,
| wait till you see what companies do when they decide they
| don't want to play by the rules!
| JiNCMG wrote:
| It's not Apple's fault that Global Foundry and Intel
| didn't invest in the 3nm. If you read up on Apple and
| Intel you would know that Apple (Jobs) was ready to use
| their CPUs for the iPhone but they won't produce anything
| other than the x86 (note: StongARM is shelved). Same crap
| happened with the PowerPC consortium. Motorola would not
| produce any enhancements in the CPU that dealt with
| graphics processing cause they only cared about their
| networking devices. IBM didn't care about power
| efficiency because they just wanted CPU that were going
| into their mainframe. Apple worked an agreement with
| Intel to make the Intel processor (not AMD) exclusive for
| the Mac, Apple would get new top of the line CPUs in
| quantity and Intel would get access to Apple's PowerPC
| patents (AltiVec). Intel also started to ignore the
| laptop market (just sold underclocked existing
| processors). Apple dabbled in CPUs with the iPhone 4S and
| years later released the M1.
| kuschku wrote:
| If Apple can open their war chest (which they created through
| years of monopolistic actions) and buy capacity, that's not
| fair.
|
| AMD didn't run a monopolistic business with 90%+ profit
| margins for years, and couldn't have done so.
| zepto wrote:
| Apple's profit margins have never been 90%+. I recommend
| you do some googling before posting false information.
|
| Apple has never had a monopoly on anything.
|
| They just use the same silicon for a lot of products and
| have good profit margins, so they can place large orders
| with TSMC.
| 23iuhj23oi wrote:
| Apple get's 30% from sales in their app store without
| doing much. It is a huge amount of money for very little
| effort.
| donarb wrote:
| Here's what developers get for their 30%, and yes for
| very little effort on the developer's part:
| - 24/7 worldwide availability, instant payment/app
| download - Easy re-install after deletion, you
| still own the app even if deleted from the device
| - Region restriction - Separate app pricing by
| region - Revenues paid to developer from multiple
| region currencies without conversion fees -
| Tax calculation and collection - Instant customer
| refunds - User rankings and reviews - App
| store advertising in category listings - Video
| previews of the app in operation - Packaging of
| media content allowing developers the ability to load
| game levels as needed. This allows a user to
| start playing your game quickly. - App sales stats
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| Development of that amortized years ago and maintenance +
| new features cost small fractions of that 30%.
| 988747 wrote:
| So what if it amortized? That's why Apple made that
| investment in the first place, so that they can make
| profit out of it. If any app developer tried to re-create
| it now it would cost them much more than 30% of their
| revenue.
| kuschku wrote:
| As someone also hosting my own fdroid repo for my own
| apps, no, it wouldn't.
|
| You don't need most of that, and what you do need can be
| had extremely cheaply at 10-50EUR/mo + 0.2%
| zepto wrote:
| No it can't. Almost nobody uses fdroid for good reason.
| It's also simply not comparable from a business
| standpoint, dealing with the taxation and regulation in a
| hundred countries seamlessly.
| hinkley wrote:
| Also the App Store ripped 70% fee rates out of the
| carrier's hands.
|
| Apple's 30% was a huge deal in the mobile software space
| when it hit. That's why so many people defected. And when
| they started turning profits, others followed. Most of
| the millionaires IIRC came out of the second and third
| wave, before everyone and their mother were doing it and
| people were making money telling you how they made a
| million 2 years ago (tricks that didn't necessarily still
| work).
|
| I agree that it's a shame that Apple hasn't periodically
| lowered their fees. Even a couple percent would make
| news. However, a different group would cry monopoly
| (dumping) because it would have kept more people focused
| on IOS exclusive applications.
|
| They did eventually bow to public opinion and they
| lowered the fees for small developers to 15% a couple
| years ago.
|
| I keep hoping they lower the fees for everything except
| in-app purchases. I think it would do their customers a
| lot of good.
| zepto wrote:
| > lowered the fees for small developers to 15%
|
| Worth noting that this covers almost _all_ developers.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Apple has a monopoly on the iOS app store, which is a
| lucrative enough "market" to create systemic problems.
|
| But from a physical perspective, they've never had the
| kind of monopoly Intel enjoyed for decades.
| JiNCMG wrote:
| hmm, Nintendo, Sony, Sega and MS all have a monopoly on
| their stores. In fact, Target has a monopoly to their
| retail stores. You can't just sell your crap at Target
| because you want to. Also to probably lose 50% to the
| retailers.
| zepto wrote:
| > Apple has a monopoly on the iOS App Store
|
| The courts have ruled that the iOS App Store is not a
| monopoly.
| jsnell wrote:
| They haven't, in the level of generality you imply. The
| ruling was much narrower: that Apple doesn't have a
| monopoly in the market of "digital mobile gaming
| transactions".
| Notanothertoo wrote:
| A yes the courts, such an informed non biased authority
| zepto wrote:
| Perhaps you aren't aware that the meaning of legal terms
| is decided by courts.
|
| The alternative is that you don't know what monopoly
| means and you are just using it a general way to say you
| don't like Apple.
| kuschku wrote:
| The meaning of legal terms are decided by courts _for
| their jurisdiction_.
|
| When I, as european, wrote monopolistic, then that
| definition can still hold, as the European definition of
| that term is not decided by US courts.
| zepto wrote:
| Are you the person I was replying to?
| kuschku wrote:
| I started the comment chain with my comment to which you
| replied "Apple has never had a monopoly on anything"
| kergonath wrote:
| As opposed to random posters on the Internet?
| melff wrote:
| > Apple has never had a monopoly on anything.
|
| They do on thier secoundary markets, (esp App Store) but
| they are also being monopolistic with replacement parts
| and repair.
| [deleted]
| zepto wrote:
| The App Store was ruled in court not to be a monopoly.
|
| Apple sells tools and parts to anyone who wants them, so
| it's not really clear what you are talking about when it
| comes to repair.
|
| But even if there was some merit to that point, it's
| silly to suggest that their repair policies have anything
| to do with them buying a lot of silicon from TSMC.
| melff wrote:
| > The App Store was ruled in court not to be a monopoly.
|
| The App Store is a de-facto monopoly, it may not fit the
| legal definition of a monopoly but it practice it is (or
| what other App Stores can end-users install on iOS?). I'm
| not making a legal argument.
|
| > Apple sells tools and parts to anyone who wants them
|
| Where can I buy the tools needed to pair serialized
| replacement parts with the system? Regarding replacement
| parts, I don't work in the repair industry so I don't
| have first hand experience buying apple parts, but Louis
| Rossmann is telling a different story, do you have a
| source contradicting him?
|
| > it's silly to suggest that their repair policies have
| anything to do with them buying a lot of silicon from
| TSMC.
|
| I'm responding to your claim that apple never had a
| monopoly on anything.
| halostatue wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2y8Sx4B2Sk
| Pet_Ant wrote:
| > The App Store is a de-facto monopoly, it may not fit
| the legal definition of a monopoly but it practice it is
| (or what other App Stores can end-users install on iOS?).
| I'm not making a legal argument.
|
| Ford has a monopoly on Ford-branded floor mats! I mean
| you could choose other floor mats, but if you want Ford-
| branded ones they got a monopoly. A large audience is not
| a monopoly. I may not like Android phones, but they are
| sufficiently good, have almost all the same apps, and
| plenty of people have them.
| melff wrote:
| Pardon me, I think you misunderstand what I claim they
| have a monopoly on. They (obviously) don't have a
| monopoly on the mobile(or mobile software) market. They
| have a monopoly on the iOS software distribution market(a
| secondary market spawned by apple themselves). On an iOS
| device you cannot install a different App Store, therefor
| the end-user has no other choice than using Apple's App
| Store to download/buy software(=monopoly).
|
| TL;DR iphones don't have a monopoly, the _AppStore_ has.
|
| On Andoird the situation is a bit murkier, you
| technically can install software from outside Google's
| playstore, but you have to click trough scary
| dialogs(warnings about the danger of doing so), and App
| Stores installed that way don't have the same device
| permissions than googles play store have(you have to
| manually confirm each software update, for example). so
| yeah, on android it's debatable, but that's a story for
| another time.
| zepto wrote:
| Everyone has a monopoly on their own products. Samsung
| has a monopoly on Galaxy phones. Tesla has a monopoly on
| Model Ss. It's meaningless to say that Apple has a
| monopoly on a certain part of the iPhone infrastructure,
| since _it's their product_.
|
| Of course they don't have a monopoly on mobile apps or
| app stores or phones. There are competing products.
| melff wrote:
| You're conflating the phones themselves with the
| secondary markets they create.
|
| The problem is that Apple has a monopoly in
| selling/distributing Apps to iphone users. This is not
| the case on other operating systems, technically not even
| on android(eg. Samsung) and has nothing to do with a
| "monopoly on their own products".
| jkestner wrote:
| Let's not focus too much on the use of 'monopoly', but
| why we care about monopolies. A company doesn't have to
| have one to harm consumers and markets, and harm can be
| things other than high prices. See: Lina Khan.
|
| Some of the trust-busting policymakers' discussions about
| tech products are painful to listen to, but it's all
| trying to recalibrate anti-trust law to the rise of
| vertically integrated products, which have created
| amazing user experiences but but also high switching
| costs that create the conditions of a monopoly, without
| meeting the technical definition.
| kuschku wrote:
| A significant portion of Apple profits is from the store,
| and the store has profit margins well in excess of 90%.
|
| > Apple has never had a monopoly on anything.
|
| We'll see what the EU antitrust commission says about
| that, so far there's been no legal decision in an
| independent jurisdiction yet.
| newsclues wrote:
| If AMD didn't sell Global Foundry and had kept pace with
| investment for modern fans would be an interesting
| alternative reality...
| fomine3 wrote:
| Or what if UAE funds don't give up investing.
| volta83 wrote:
| Yeah, one in which AMD actually ended up bankrupt and Intel
| became the only vendor supplying x86 chips.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| AMD just didn't have that kind of money.
| naasking wrote:
| > This is the failure of having a choke point in
| semiconductor manufacturing and centralisation of all
| manufacturing infrastructure.
|
| Arguably, bleeding edge silicon fabs are natural monopolies.
| Pushing transistor sizes down to atomic scales entails non-
| linear increases in costs to get decent yields. That's why
| there are very few fabs at the bleeding edge any more.
| nojito wrote:
| They also pre-bought all airfrieght that year so that they
| won't have any supply chain issues for the holiday season.
| georgeburdell wrote:
| As an outsider, dealing with Apple as a vendor strikes me as
| dealing with the mafia: once they've set their sights on you,
| they'll make you an offer you can't refuse.
|
| Should you accept, they'll give you a shot of capital in the arm
| and you'll grow faster than you ever could have to meet their
| schedules. Soon, your engineers are tied up in daily afternoon
| stand-ups to go over the latest data with Apple's engineers, and
| they're dictating your R&D schedule. Your company is effectively
| dependent upon Apple because investors expect revenue growth.
| Inevitably, however, they'll discard you when a cheaper
| competitor comes along, or they decide to take the work in-house.
|
| Should you refuse, they'll poach away your employees, or enable
| your competitors to do the same.
|
| I haven't thought of a scenario where a vendor can actually
| rebuff Apple and stay intact.
| klelatti wrote:
| Has any of this happened to TSMC? Are they now the most
| valuable semiconductor manufacturer?
|
| Which is not to excuse some of Apple's less moral behaviour.
| georgeburdell wrote:
| It's been covered in the media that TSMC loans its employees
| to Apple. You can also tell that Apple's fingerprints are on
| TSMC's leading edge node processes because products using it
| clock lower and consume lower power than comparable Intel
| processes. Also, to my knowledge, TSMC doesn't particularly
| stand out in semiconductor sub-fields where Apple doesn't
| play, such as III-V, embedded memory, and photonics. They are
| definitely at risk of getting disrupted in these areas.
| klelatti wrote:
| Apple is the biggest TSMC customer. I would be astonished
| if Apple doesn't influence TSMC's R&D, product focus etc.
|
| But to characterise Apple as somehow abusing their
| relationship with TSMC as a result of what you've said is
| not right. It's just a normal commercial relationship
| between a customer and a large supplier.
|
| Also bear in mind that TSMC has a large number of mobile
| SoC customers - maybe they think that's their strength and
| focus on that rather than say photonics. Seems to be
| working!
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