[HN Gopher] AMD, Intel, and Nvidia Reportedly Slash Orders with ...
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AMD, Intel, and Nvidia Reportedly Slash Orders with TSMC
Author : mirzap
Score : 124 points
Date : 2022-12-30 14:38 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.tomshardware.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.tomshardware.com)
| cm2187 wrote:
| Is this because of the economic slowdown as the article suggests,
| or simply because 2020-2021 covid lockdowns lead to a big surge
| in buying of computer hardware, and therefore a big drop now
| given that modern computers last a lot longer and everyone is
| equipped?
| jmalicki wrote:
| > 2020-2021 covid lockdowns lead to a big surge in buying of
| computer hardware, and therefore a big drop now given that
| modern computers last a lot longer and everyone is equipped
|
| In other words, the slowdown?
| cm2187 wrote:
| Computer hardware doesn't drive the economy. You can have a
| slowdown in computer buying that isn't the result of a
| general economic slowdown.
| adastra22 wrote:
| It's the same effect though.
| j_walter wrote:
| Both of those were reasons given by the CEO of TSMC recently.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| Maybe both?
| barbariangrunge wrote:
| Sorry; what is tsmc? Is there a single manufacturer with all the
| patents that everyone relies on?
| Out_of_Characte wrote:
| Its worse, TSMC is the single biggest semiconductor
| manufacturer for general logic chips. Samsung has their own
| fabs for ram and ssd's specialised for density. All the
| litography equipment they use come from a single company called
| ASML. They also have complete market domination for the past
| few generations of litography machines and are the first and
| only producers of EUV litography.
|
| Semiconductors are so complex and capital intensive that even a
| duopoly couln't balance the expense.
| j_walter wrote:
| This is all pretty accurate. The only real surprise is that 40um
| tech and above are still running full steam and even the 20+ year
| old tech has only dropped a few percent for next year.
| Veliladon wrote:
| 3D NAND, which basically underpins all of our SSD tech, is hard
| enough to make at 40nm. They basically have to fill a tiny hole
| really precisely with layers of five different materials to
| create a vertical stack that works. It's really hard to go down
| node sizes plus once you hit 28nm the price of transistors
| stops decreasing and starts increasing instead with 22nm and
| smaller.
| zeusk wrote:
| Micron, Samsung and SK Hynix are doing volume production of
| 1xnm QLC devices with further complexity like CuA.
| wtallis wrote:
| None of that is really relevant, because TSMC isn't in the
| business of making flash memory. The fab processes for logic
| and for flash memory are so different that there's no point
| to making comparisons between their respective nodes.
| bob1029 wrote:
| I don't know about "no point to making comparisons", but
| they are definitely different animals.
|
| When I worked at Samsung, flash & LSI were like 2 different
| companies. Lots of reuse at the systems engineering level
| though. At a certain point of abstraction you can't tell
| what is on the wafer anymore so you might as well track it
| in the same database.
| j_walter wrote:
| Completely different animals. I know that when TSMC has
| looked at acquiring used fabs before and in at least one
| case because the fab was DRAM it was more costly and time
| consuming to convert it to Logic fab than just building a
| whole new fab.
| monocasa wrote:
| This idea that the price per transistor gets higher after
| 28nm needs to die. Right now the cheapest node for logic
| dominated chips is N6 (an optical shrink of N7). And even
| then, N5 is still cheaper than N10.
|
| https://www.tomshardware.com/news/tsmcs-wafer-prices-
| reveale...
| ilyt wrote:
| This is entirely unsurprising if you actually look at things
| other than big CPU/GPU/IO.
|
| Power regulators doesn't need small transistors, it wants big
| nice and fat transistors. You'd get at least one of them in
| every device and a bunch in any bigger device. Same with any
| power device, LEDs, and really anything that passes some
| current.
|
| Any microcontroller smaller than "runs full fledged linux"
| often cares about cost of production first and foremost, hell,
| STM32 only recently [1] got on 90nm node!
|
| Interestingly enough, bigger node might get you worse uA/MHz
| but often lower idle current (the bigger things are the lower
| the leakage) so they might even be desirable. And the chip
| might want to have some mA current output on each pin (so it
| doesn't require external drivers to control stuff), which again
| means some transistor size in your I/O port is fixed and can't
| be made smaller so your savings from going to smaller process
| are not linear.
|
| For vast majority of non CPU/GPU chips it comes to cost to
| manufacture and those 20+ years old lines not only paid for
| themselves multiple times, they also have great yields.
|
| * [1] https://blog.st.com/stm32g0-mainstream-90-nm-mcu/
| petra wrote:
| Infineon has cost-optimized cortex-m0 mcu's at 65nm and 40nm.
|
| But they are not optimized for low idle current , they're for
| motor control and led driving.
| taffronaut wrote:
| That STM32 blog about 90nm is from 2018. They are shipping a
| significant number of STM32 devices on 40nm now.
| RC_ITR wrote:
| Just to add color to the discussion above, what distinguishes
| a microcontroller from other chips is that the volatile
| memory is on the same piece of silicon as the processing
| cores.
|
| This allows for power saving because you don't have to
| condition signals as they jump from silicon piece to silicon
| piece (oversimplification).
|
| It is somewhat harder to make the above on smaller nodes than
| it is to make _just_ processing cores or _just_ memory.
|
| That fact (in addition to a number of other cost and
| technical factors) is why microcontrollers lag process nodes.
| zorgmonkey wrote:
| > It is somewhat harder to make the above on smaller nodes
| than it is to make just processing cores or just memory.
|
| I'm not convinced this is the reason because the
| microcontrollers I know of use SRAM not DRAM and SRAM is
| what CPU caches are (plus of course some extra logic for
| the cache management aspect). I am aware that designing
| dense and power efficient SRAM for a cell library is
| considered a pretty hard thing to do, but it seemingly has
| already been for modern processes.
| dragontamer wrote:
| > STM32 only recently [1] got on 90nm node!
|
| STM32G0 is value-oriented.
|
| The latest-and-greatest power efficiency STM32 is the
| STM32U5: https://www.st.com/content/ccc/resource/sales_and_ma
| rketing/...
|
| Which seems to be 40nm.
|
| I'm not 100% sure if the STM32U5 is the smallest node they're
| using. But 40nm (or better) seems like a safe bet these days.
| Pet_Ant wrote:
| > Power regulators doesn't need small transistors, it wants
| big nice and fat transistors.
|
| Is it possible to make bigger transistors using a smaller
| process? Just because you are using saying a 7nm process,
| can't you still make a transistor (like if you needed) that
| was the same size as it was on 90nm? I think of newer
| processes as merely being more precise so you could still do
| the old designs on them, you are just unecessarily tying up
| the newer machines... but concievably in the future you could
| just start using 5nm process to keep producing 30 nm and 90
| nm chips just to consolidate production lines, non?
|
| I know nothing about this, so I'm just asking.
| mota7 wrote:
| It's hard to convey just how ridiculously complex and
| expensive 5nm is compared with 90nm.
|
| 5nm is a multi-billion dollar fab, absurdly high running
| costs, and very expensive wafers.
|
| As a data point: 5nm lithography equipment is > $100M/unit,
| needs megawatts of power to run, and they handle about
| 60-80 wafers per hour.
|
| 90nm lithography equipment is ~ $1M/unit, needs kilowatts
| of power to run, and they handle about 60-80 wafers per
| hour.
|
| So a wafer scanned on 5nm equipment that could have been
| scanned on 9nm equipment is carrying a very large capital
| and operational cost burden that's pointless.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| 5nm also has about 100x more density than 90nm, to be
| fair.
| dragontamer wrote:
| Only to a point. Certainly not at 5nm. That's too advanced
| and power-inefficient.
|
| 5nm is extremely inefficient to make: IIRC, you need to
| submerge the parts in ultra-pure water and blast it with a
| ultraviolet laser to get down to 5nm. This is because even
| ultra-pure filtered air has too many particles that
| disperses the laser that you're off by a few nanometers...
| ruining the design. Filtering all that water and powering
| ultraviolet-spectrum lasers is extremely high power /
| electricity usage.
|
| In contrast, a 40nm process is still airborne. You can
| largely do 40nm with "more standard" equipment. No ultra-
| pure water needed. No ultraviolet lasers. No quad-
| patterning. You can use "regular" light, with "regular
| cleanroom air", and "regular" processes to make the design
| at far, far lower costs (or at least, with less
| electricity).
|
| ---------
|
| IIRC, the "ideal" cost-efficiency moving forward is to
| rebuild our older fabs for 300mm wafers, standardize upon
| that wafer size. Older fabs were standardized on smaller
| 200mm wafers with only ~45% area of the bigger wafers (and
| less in practice, because the edge of a wafer has all sorts
| of inefficient issues involved).
|
| There's also the issue that a lot of these designs, such as
| Power MOSFETs, are... just one, maybe two, transistors. If
| your transistor is like a centimeter in size, there's no
| point using 5nm or 40nm or even 90nm nodes on it. There's
| just much much cheaper ways to fabricate a "centimeter-
| sized" MOSFET. There's all sorts of application of "chips",
| from 1-transistor Power MOSFETs to ~100 transistor op-amps,
| to ~10,000 transistor transceivers, to 10-million+
| transistor NAND-Flash arrays. (1 Megabyte isn't much these
| days though, lol)
| a9h74j wrote:
| Yes, some power transistors place many smaller transistors
| or mosfets effectively in parallel. An early example AFAIK
| was the "hexfet" geometry (achieving a very wide width of
| short-length channels). I'd guess that precisely the same
| process would not be optimal.
| arriu wrote:
| They are forecasting a lower demand in the short term future. I'd
| guess they ran the numbers and producing fewer high cost items is
| more cost effective for them.
|
| Unfortunately, this likely means more shortages and costs stay
| high for the consumer.
| sitkack wrote:
| The fact that the market can still do this (reduce supply to
| operate in the high margin quadrant) is a temporary blip due to
| the x86 duopoly. Soon anyone will be able to supply cycles/$ at
| a better rate than the entrenched players.
| cypress66 wrote:
| On the gpu side there is no "x86 duopoly" and the situation
| is arguably worse than cpus. So that's probably not it.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| Nvidia and AMD have been a GPU duopoly just as much as
| Intel and AMD have been for CPUs.
|
| Intel's new Arc product is the first competitor from
| another company in a very long time.
| cypress66 wrote:
| But anybody's free to enter, there is no x86 IP in the
| way, as parent mentioned.
| sangnoir wrote:
| From my limited outsider perspective, it appears like
| there are way more CPU and FPGA startups than GPU
| startups - why is that when GPUs seemingly have lower
| barriers?
| jmalicki wrote:
| Most of the related startups are targeting the much
| higher-margin deep learning training accelerator portion
| of the GPU system market, and there are a lot there:
|
| https://www.ai-startups.org/top/hardware/
| szatkus wrote:
| It would take a lot of time and money to create anything
| competetive with Nvidia and AMD's offerings. It took
| Intel over a decade and their dGPUs still aren't very
| good.
|
| GPUs are insanely complex and the drivers are full of
| hacks (even per game basis, a driver could swap shaders
| with ones written by Nvidia/AMD if it detects you're
| playing the newest popular title). The threshold to enter
| the market is incredibly high.
| echelon wrote:
| Nvidia has a pretty tight stranglehold on deep learning
| thanks to CUDA.
|
| We really need the forces that be to change this.
| brink wrote:
| Can't they at least wait until we start to reliably see product
| on shelves?
| meltyness wrote:
| TPUs have been all over the shelf, and adoption was snubbed.
| More graphics cards than ever before! Real-time raytracing
| available on your cell phone, laptop, and all 5 smart TVs in
| your home and backyard porch!!
|
| You were unable to convince your executives to adopt
| huggingface, IOT, and instead they opted to employ phone calls
| and Excel spreadsheets.
|
| You, consumer, _failed_ to accept Stadia into your heart,...
| and now you _shall pay_ for your snide indifference!!
| walterbell wrote:
| Where can TPUs be purchased? Vendors linked from Google Coral
| (https://coral.ai) have been out of stock for some time.
| meltyness wrote:
| Colab and huggingface are fishing for customers by handing
| out compute time in these things for free, and getting a
| militia's worth of tensor-connected memory isn't too
| expensive if you get provisioned to spin up a p2 on EC2, or
| presumably azure or gcp.
|
| Of course real consumers can't buy the hardware, real
| consumers don't have AAA credit ratings.
|
| You can always eBay a K80 as well if your motherboard
| supports the >4G decoding switch, but my primary point was
| about the insane purchasing power that affords large
| CommSvc sector company the ability to crash the market for
| a product before anyone even has logistics in place,
| apparently wishing to gatekeep any applications.
|
| - Game devs haven't made any games that stress a cloud
| gaming environment, they didn't even push VR.
|
| - Corporate consumers are hardly adopting AI at all,
| because there's still barely even a workforce.
|
| - Some _very vocal_ people find proof of work a distasteful
| mechanism to support logistical metacommodity growth.
| oblak wrote:
| Maybe this isn't strictly about GPUs. Or maybe it's just FUD
| designed to signal that no, video cards aren't getting cheaper
| and they'd rather cut supply than lower their margins. Who
| knows with this industry.
| drewg123 wrote:
| I would assume they are forecasting far less demand due to
| the crypto crash..
| ddorian43 wrote:
| Probably just the upcoming recession. Powell will destroy
| demand at all costs.
| adra wrote:
| Despite popular belief, most computers are used for
| business and unless there's an entire multi industry
| collapse, the potential demand destruction probably won't
| be that high outside of the prosumer PC gaming markets.
|
| I do think crypto is demand destroyed due to their own
| collapse unrelated but related to the economy in general.
| My expectation is that the next crypto bubble will take
| longer to inflate this time vs the last, but hell what's
| the point reading tea leaves. This could be the end of
| crypto. All we need is a new and exciting meme way for
| early adopters to sell losing bets into ignorant
| followers.
| ddorian43 wrote:
| Powell will kill all bubbles (crypto,stock,real estate,
| bonds, used cars, etc)
| [deleted]
| Mistletoe wrote:
| Ethereum also moved to proof of stake and it was by far the
| highest amount of hash rate mineable by GPUs.
|
| https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/09/the-end-of-
| ethereum-m...
|
| Really awesome charts here-
|
| https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/video-card/
| robotnikman wrote:
| If I were Intel, I would see this as an opportunity to break
| into the GPU market by releasing their GPU's at very
| competitive prices and ensuring enough supply.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| This is my hope for the Arch GPUs as I'm in the market for
| a cheaper--if less powerful card. Sadly their performance
| with OpenGL isn't great, apparently because of an emulation
| layer.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| Their drivers mean their performance is an order of
| magnitude worse than nvidia or even amd. I would not buy an
| intel gpu until it can give at least 6700 xt perf with rock
| solid stability for less money.
| Sakos wrote:
| Arc GPUs already sell at a significant discount and are
| competitive on performance. The problem is that the drivers
| aren't mature enough and you can't count on that
| performance. It's way too inconsistent to pay that much
| for.
| [deleted]
| dragontamer wrote:
| NVidia 3xxx series is flooding the shelves. NVidia wants this
| product to sell out before they move on.
|
| It doesn't make much sense for NVidia to increase production of
| 4xxx series when there's so much 3xxx series sitting around in
| warehouse inventory.
| fbdab103 wrote:
| Does a 4xxx card make sense for any pedestrian gamer?
| Clocking in at >$1200, it is a hard swallow to say that the
| extra FPS is worth it. Unless the price comes down massively,
| the high sticker price (plus insane power draw), really leave
| me wondering who is purchasing these things for anything but
| machine learning.
| Wohlf wrote:
| They're not worth it at all. I have a 3080 for 4k/60fps
| gaming without issues and I got it for $500 used. If a game
| struggles to hold a consistent framerate it's usually an
| issue with the game or certain settings, tweaking settings
| is free so throwing hardware at it doesn't make sense.
|
| Unless you're willing to spend $1000+ the real world
| performance differences aren't even that large:
| https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html
| plasticchris wrote:
| The 4080 is reliably on shelves. It's just not a good value.
| ninth_ant wrote:
| It's not just about the 4080 though (though, you are right).
| AMDs new cards are much better value for gamers, but they are
| in this list too.
|
| I think this is less about consumer GPUs and more about cost
| cutting in big corps slowing expansions, and the reduction in
| crypto demand.
|
| Think about every tech company that says "oops we overbuilt
| for covid, whelp let's lay everyone off" well they could be
| buying fewer servers if they over-anticipated their needs in
| that department too.
| chacham15 wrote:
| The problem is that the higher end GPUs are actually the same
| chip as the lower end GPUs. The lower end GPUs are where the
| manufacturing process had an error and thus they fuse off a
| core. All that to say that they cant manufacture a high end GPU
| without also manufacturing a low end one (or multiple depending
| on the manufacturing error rate). So, if they cant sell the low
| end one, it may not make sense to sell the high end one even if
| there is a buyer.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> The problem is that the higher end GPUs are actually the
| same chip as the lower end GPUs._
|
| Don't know where you got that info but that's definitely
| false.
|
| If you look at Nvidia's lineup, each GPU has a die that's
| unique to that product in both size and markings. Sure, there
| have been/are a few products that make use of the same die
| but with defects depending on yelds, but those are usually in
| the same performance class (1070, 1070TI and 1080 had the
| same die), and not the case you're talking about of entry
| level GPUs being high end GPUs dies with defects fused off.
| That's never the case. An RTX 3050 die is a completely
| different part than a 3080/3090 die.
| satellite2 wrote:
| > Slashing orders to a contract manufacturer is not trivial since
| fabless chip designers are obliged to procure a fixed number of
| wafers in certain quarters. Nevertheless, TSMC is reportedly
| willing to accept compensation (as it will hold wafers with chips
| from AMD, Intel, Nvidia, etc., before they are ready to buy them)
| and even renegotiate deals on long-term supply contracts (i.e.,
| increase the number of wafers that a company is committed to
| buying in the future) in exchange.
|
| Sounds like it might not be such a big deal for TSMC, at least in
| the short term.
| glass3 wrote:
| > the utilization rate of TSMC's N7-capable lines will decline to
| around 50% in early 2023.
|
| Will that capacity be utilized by other companies? E.g. what is
| preventing a RISC-V company from leap-frogging the competition?
| monocasa wrote:
| N7 is a rough node to target. You have the high capital costs
| for NRE being an EUV node, but N5 is supposed to be cheaper to
| manufacturer chips on pretty much as soon as N3 is in full
| swing.
|
| So those companies would probably be targeting something in the
| range of 14nm to 10nm in order to take advantage of the fire
| sale on late DUV tooling to prove that they can make a working
| chip to investors, and then leapfrog to N5 after the giants
| have jumped to N3.
| wtallis wrote:
| > E.g. what is preventing a RISC-V company from leap-frogging
| the competition?
|
| They would need to have already taped out on N7 and be ready to
| start mass production _now_. That doesn 't happen overnight.
| Even if you have taped out a ready-to-fab design, you usually
| want to start small and run a few rounds of QA on small batches
| of chips before you start ordering enough wafers to make a dent
| in TSMC's schedule.
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