[HN Gopher] AMD CEO sees chips from TSMC's US plant costing 5%-2...
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AMD CEO sees chips from TSMC's US plant costing 5%-20% more
Author : mfiguiere
Score : 196 points
Date : 2025-07-23 19:34 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bloomberg.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bloomberg.com)
| bsder wrote:
| If that's all, that's a _really_ good bargain.
|
| A 20% premium for one of the pillars of a modern economy to both
| repatriate engineering knowledge as well as be significantly less
| threatenable by your primary geopolitical enemy would be money
| very well spent.
| Teever wrote:
| I wonder if that 20% is a floor or a ceiling too.
|
| Like, as more of the supply chain is reshored will that
| continually increase cost because reshoring is intrinsically
| less efficient or will it decrease costs because the increased
| cost of just reshoring the fab part of the supply chain costs
| more due to less proximity and integration with the existing
| supply chain?
| nobodyandproud wrote:
| I definitely agree, but the next challenge is how to support
| that long-term investment?
|
| Businesses that rely on the chips will see an increase in cost;
| and that means passing the cost down to their customers (or
| having less to invest on their own R&D).
| reliabilityguy wrote:
| The question is: what's AMDs margin? 20% manufacturing cost maybe
| well below 1% of the total development cost. So, not a deal
| breaker at all.
|
| It seems to me that long term having fabs in the IS is net
| positive for the economy: more jobs, more localized supply
| chains, more local expertise, etc etc
| arcanus wrote:
| The manufacturing cost is emphatically not only 1% of the total
| development cost. Particularly for GPUs, the high bandwidth
| memory and manufacturing costs are a significant portion of the
| product price.
| reliabilityguy wrote:
| > The manufacturing cost is emphatically not only 1% of the
| total development cost.
|
| I have no idea what is the manufacturing cost of a 800 mm^2
| die is, but I am sure it is lower than the development cost.
|
| > Particularly for GPUs, the high bandwidth memory and
| manufacturing costs are a significant portion of the product
| price.
|
| HBM is not manufactured by the GPU vendor, it is an off-the-
| shelf component that AMD buys like any other company can.
| Thus, the cost of HBM is tallied in the BOM and integration
| costs (interposer, packaging, etc).
| bgnn wrote:
| 800mm^2 die would roughly cost 300-350 usd axcoeding to
| [1]. That's the Taiwan price and dor N4. This doesn't
| include the memory or the package. The silicon cost for N3
| is close to 2x.
|
| [1] https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-
| components/gpus/spitballing-...
| ZeroCool2u wrote:
| Here's a gift article link to the original Bloomberg source:
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-23/amd-ceo-s...
| snickerdoodle12 wrote:
| https://archive.is/HS9Gi
| gtirloni wrote:
| Aren't they shipping the chips back to Taiwan for packaging
| anyway?
| dangus wrote:
| Even if they are, it's a positive.
|
| It is potentially worth pointing out that container ships going
| back to Asia are basically empty, so that return shipping trip
| is basically free.
| RUnconcerned wrote:
| Shipping the chips back to Taiwan to be packaged so they can
| then be shipped back to the United States for sale is a
| positive? What are you talking about?
| cm2012 wrote:
| Ocean shipping is very very cheap. Less cost in money and
| energy to ship a chip across the ocean than for you to
| drive to best buy to buy the phone its in.
| cheschire wrote:
| Significantly more pollution though, right?
| xxs wrote:
| Sea freight is the least polluting one - due to the
| extreme amount of cargo. Air is expensive and very
| pollutant.
|
| However, talking about chips that are hundreds of watts
| each the pollution produced by them is a lot higher than
| any transport.
| almosthere wrote:
| But the boat is already going back empty
| wila wrote:
| and then the chips stay in Asia?
| almosthere wrote:
| then 5 pounds of chips on the way back is worth millions
| of dollars so it can be flown on a passenger jet or fedex
| jet that is already going here. or a boat and take up 3%
| of a container
| hajile wrote:
| There are moves being made to test ships with modern
| "sails". Here's a paper published about a cargo ship
| fitted with 4 sails in 2010. The findings are interesting
| with it achieving up to 25% better fuel efficiency when
| using the sails.
|
| https://www.stg-
| online.org/onTEAM/shipefficiency/programm/06...
| cm2012 wrote:
| No, much less pollution. It costs less carbon emissions
| to ship from Shanghai to California and back then for one
| person to drive 10 minutes to the store in their personal
| car.
| perihelions wrote:
| It's _many orders of magnitude_ more energy to fab a chip
| than to ship it across an ocean.
|
| TSMC alone accounts for 12% of Taiwan's electricity
| demand, and growing fast:
|
| https://spectrum.ieee.org/taiwan-semiconductor ( _"
| TSMC's Energy Demand Drives Taiwan's Geopolitical
| Future"_ (2024))
| nobodyandproud wrote:
| What about freight trains?
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| It's better (for the US) than if they're made elsewhere,
| packaged elsewhere, then sold here.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| Looking at all of the places in the US that used to make
| things before those things were made elsewhere, I'd say
| it's not better for the US.
| reliabilityguy wrote:
| Shipping is a temporary measure.
|
| What's positive is that we have state of the art domestic
| manufacturing with potential to onshore more and more of
| the required supply chains, building/educating local
| expertise, etc etc.
|
| It's silly to focus on shipping.
| mort96 wrote:
| You can't go all the way in one step. Having built domestic
| chip capacity is positive for the US, even if domestic
| packaging capacity isn't there yet. It's obviously not a
| desirable situation long term.
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| I wonder if chips are literally shipped or just flown.
|
| The extra transport cost might not matter for these precious
| chips. A tray full of Epyc or Blackwell dies is an insane
| number of potential revenue per kg.
| OtherShrezzing wrote:
| Leading-edge chips are flown almost every time. The
| opportunity cost of 6 weeks at sea is too high for a chip
| which can't flow out of the fab fast enough to meet demand.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprised if air cargo works the same way:
| outward loads from Asia subsidize inward loads.
| sct202 wrote:
| Amkor is building a test and packaging facility in Arizona now,
| so there will eventually be domestic options.
| zdw wrote:
| There are other US-based packaging - while it's unlikely to be
| relevant to AMD, Intel does some packaging in New Mexico.
| octopoc wrote:
| The article doesn't say, but I assume these are SOTA AI chips? If
| so, it's a huge deal that American can build them.
|
| Another interesting point:
|
| > AMD and larger rival Nvidia Corp. recently gained a reprieve on
| restrictions imposed on shipments of some types of artificial
| intelligence accelerators to China. It's still not clear how many
| licenses will be granted -- or how long the companies will be
| allowed to ship the chips to the country, the biggest market for
| semiconductors.
|
| It sounds like they're trying to give China some chips but not as
| many as American allied countries. I wonder if they're trying to
| get China "addicted" to western AI chips to hurt Chinese chip
| manufacturing development?
| dagmx wrote:
| That is their goal because they saw their restrictions had just
| made China accelerate domestic development instead.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| China would be stupid to stop the acceleration of its
| domestic development right now.
| mattnewton wrote:
| Exactly what most AI researchers would have predicted, if you
| force like 30% of the worlds top ai researchers to use
| something other than CUDA, they'll work on improving the
| tools for something other than CUDA.
|
| It's wild the same administrations would argue for
| restricting access to the US market for tariffs to strengthen
| domestic production, would not believe that severely
| restricting exports to the Chinese market would strengthen
| their domestic production
| MBCook wrote:
| You're assuming rationality.
| BrawnyBadger53 wrote:
| That is certainly what they are lobbying for and I think I
| agree with the lobbyists for once. Huawei is shaping up to
| become a strong competitor if left at it and it's probably in
| the US's best interest to just let Nvidia and AMD sell to China
| to maintain the hardware monopoly for longer.
| pythonguython wrote:
| They can make advanced chips in Arizona, but the bleeding edge
| is in Taiwan. Arizona can make TSMC's 4nm process, but in
| Taiwan they're doing 3nm and ramping up 2nm.
| procgen wrote:
| Progress on the 2nm facility (P3) in Arizona is apparently
| ahead of schedule, slated to be operational in 2027
| bgnn wrote:
| It's TSMC and Taiwanese state policy is to lag the US fabs
| bu couple of years as they don't want to lose their
| strategic importance and their protection that comes with
| it.
| karmakaze wrote:
| Export restrictions work similarly to tariffs or subsidies. In
| the long term they limit domestic products from global
| competition. DeepSeek comes up with more efficient algorithms
| out of necessity to compete using lesser hardware. Companies
| with deep pockets like OpenAI will be first and best, but only
| for a limited period if they don't invest in efficiency as well
| as capability.
| lossolo wrote:
| > I wonder if they're trying to get China "addicted" to western
| AI chips to hurt Chinese chip manufacturing development?
|
| This has nothing to do with that. It was part of the deal made
| with China recently in Geneva. The U.S. needs what China has
| (rare metals), and China needs what the U.S. has (SOTA chips).
| happyopossum wrote:
| > (rare metals in a place where nobody cares how they're
| harvested as opposed to the ones in North America that can't
| be mined due to ecological concerns)
|
| There - that's a little more accurate.
| dhruvmittal wrote:
| Honestly I thought they might be even more expensive than this
| 5%-20%, it's good to see that it's not a 100% more expensive.
| While it seems we've learned some lessons about supply chain
| resiliency, I'm sure there's a number that puts the brakes on
| this thing.
| atonse wrote:
| Probably because they aren't human labor intensive and most of
| the costs of fabs are in construction and equipment, and almost
| all of the expensive lithography stuff comes from ASML (a Dutch
| company)?
| 3836293648 wrote:
| That's quick. Didn't they only start building that factory two or
| three years ago?
| reliabilityguy wrote:
| Discussion from yesterday:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44663074
| seangrogg wrote:
| A 5-20% markup on CPUs isn't the worst thing, but those still
| need a mobo to socket into and as far as I'm aware we still don't
| have much capability on the availability of boards. Are there any
| companies that are spinning up board production, or even just
| broader consumer electronics in general (arduinos, pis, general
| controllers and the like)?
| chazeon wrote:
| Boards are low tech and low profit, does American company and
| workers even want to do it?
| actionfromafar wrote:
| The tariffs are apparently going to bring back t-shirt and
| sneaker production to the US so it can be great again, so why
| not boards, too.
| bee_rider wrote:
| We're at least 4 years away from that, as it would require
| a round of STEM college students to go EE instead of
| computer science.
| MBCook wrote:
| Ask Smoot and Hawley how well that went.
| qzw wrote:
| Maybe not, but if the entire country doesn't have the ability
| to manufacture it, then it's still going to be a strategic
| weakness when push comes to shove. The entire exercise of
| doing more chip manufacturing in the U.S. is about
| maintaining national competitiveness and independence. It's
| certainly not about cost. So I think it's a good point that
| investments should made to be able to onshore the entire
| stack rather than just the top end.
| hypeatei wrote:
| Or we could strengthen alliances with our neighbors and
| potentially shift some of that burden to them. Trying to
| move _everything_ here is not feasible. We simply do not
| have the human capital or willingness to manufacture every
| low level widget in the world.
|
| What this administration is doing is not a recipe for
| success: trade wars with _everyone_ , immigration
| crackdowns, and unpredictable tariff policy.
|
| EDIT: Oh and hinting at invasion (Greenland, Canada)
| doesn't help either
| MBCook wrote:
| I agree.
|
| But Taiwan or the rest of Asia is still a problem given
| the tensions in the area. If China did something it could
| seriously effect supply even if it wasn't an attack on
| whichever country was supplying us.
|
| We need friends making things in Canada or the rest of
| the Americas or Europe or Africa or some other place that
| isn't China or directly under their thumb.
|
| Even without action by man. The wrong tsunami or whatever
| could effectively wipe enough out everyone would be
| screwed.
|
| We need geographical diversity too. The existing
| alliances we're burning to the ground don't solve that.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Yea, I work in the industry. There are players, but not
| exactly bountiful. Really the backbone of American
| electronics manufacturing is military spending. If the
| defense budget went away, there would be close to zero PCB
| manufacturers left. China makes higher quality boards, faster
| and for dramatically less money.
| bgnn wrote:
| This applies for any manufacturing industry to be honest.
| US shipbuilding capability is so limited compared to China.
| It's only surviving because of military spending, but not
| in a healthy way. US made ships are of lower quality and
| cost much more, compared to European countries. It's the
| same for cars, busses, airplanes. Whole US policy is
| blocking the entry of busses manufactured outside NAFTA. US
| government is keeping Boeing alive by sending POTUS to
| marketing trips etc etc.
| bell-cot wrote:
| Worse - to manufacture _usable_ boards, you need everything
| from the CPU socket and northbridge chip down to the dust-
| mote-sized discrete components that are mounted on it. Plus
| RAM, and ...
|
| 'Most all of which falls square into your "low tech and low
| profit", from a right-thinking* American company's PoV.
|
| Not to say that a saintly American company could do much
| better, if it tried to swim uphill against America's vastly-
| higher cost of living (vs. the countries where most of that
| stuff's manufactured). And other problems beyond its control.
|
| *profit-obsessed, generally
| seangrogg wrote:
| If there is a reason to want to in-house the fabrication of
| chips then it seems silly to not extend that to at least the
| boards that house them, otherwise we wind up still being
| reliant on an international supply chain which seems to
| defeat the purpose.
|
| Even if it was just motherboards in particular and not
| others, that seems like a necessary step in securing the
| supply chain and if we only do that for national defense the
| benefits of competition likely won't extend to consumers that
| are still exposed to trade taxation.
| doublepg23 wrote:
| I think Supermicro does some production domestically.
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| Ajinomoto (Japanese company) is nearly the sole manufacturer of
| build up film need for CPU manufacturing (for about 30 years).
|
| There's all kinds of stuff like this in supply chains. Low
| profit, high barrier to entry critical items.
| zht wrote:
| the MSG company also makes film for CPU manufacturing?
| reaperducer wrote:
| Large Asian companies tend to have their fingers in lots of
| different pies.
|
| I haven't been to Asia in a while, but at one time, Hyundai
| made both computer chips and bulldozers.
|
| Mitsubishi once made computer chips, and had a bank, and an
| art museum.
|
| There are companies that own both department stores and
| subway systems.
|
| America used to have a fair amount of this, but it was more
| common during the Industrial Revolution. Companies that
| owned both railroads and summer resorts. Oil wells and
| banks.
|
| Even as recently as the 1990's there were companies that
| owned both pipelines and fiber optic networks. Toasters and
| television networks.
| ginko wrote:
| Ajinomoto the MSG company?
| hampelm wrote:
| Apparently so! https://www.ajinomoto.com/innovation/our_inn
| ovation/buildupf...
| jrimbault wrote:
| Wild to learn this is the same company selling MSG (mono
| sodium glutamate) and build up film
|
| - https://www.ajinomoto.com/innovation/our_innovation/buildup
| f...
|
| - https://www.ajinomoto.com/brands/aji-no-moto
| lbcadden3 wrote:
| Not really shocking considering how Japan likes
| conglomerates.
|
| Hyundai makes cars and military weapons and probably
| thousands of other things that aren't even related to each
| other, don't know if they still make computers.
| skybrian wrote:
| Hyundai is Korean.
| SpecialistK wrote:
| To nitpick: Hyundai are Korean but the Korean Chaebols
| are in many ways even more dominant than Japanese
| Keiretsu (fmr. Zaibatsu) are. Mitsubishi would be a good
| Japanese example.
| dboreham wrote:
| PCBs are relatively easy to make. But there's a whole supply
| chain of plastic bits and pieces, screws, materials, etc that
| the MBAs decided decades ago should come from the lowest cost
| region.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I don't understand how MBAs differ from others in this
| regard. I have seen people without MBAs minimize costs my
| whole life.
| CivBase wrote:
| 5-20% more expensive? That's way cheaper than I expected. That's
| pretty good, especially for 4nm.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Even 5% more expensive means 80% of people buy the taiwan
| version for $475 instead of $500.
|
| 20% more expensive and 99.9% of people buy the $500 one instead
| of the $600 one.
|
| _Never_ make the mistake of falling for people 's virtue
| signalling and pay attention instead to how they actually apply
| those virtues (spoiler: saving money is the #1 acted upon
| virtue, being far stronger than any other).
| CivBase wrote:
| If the US can maintain even just 5-10% of production volume,
| that's a huge win IMO. It means the US has a foundation of
| knowledge, equipment, and supply chains to expand on in the
| event of an emergency.
|
| Taiwan is in a precarious position, which is a huge liability
| for "western" powers. And a liability for us is effectively
| also a liability for Taiwan, considering we are their
| protectorate. North America and western Europe are
| comparatively safe.
| DSingularity wrote:
| Virtue signaling? What are you talking about. You seem to
| have an axe to grind.
|
| Cost increase in a single part doesn't necessarily mean the
| cost of the device needs to go up. If a CPU costs 120$
| instead of 100$ like that of a competing device 300$ device
| you can always sell yours for 310$ and make less margins.
| Things have to get subsidized in the short term if we are
| going to get domestic production up.
| rkangel wrote:
| If other people agree with Lia Siu about supply chain
| resiliency, presumably what will happen is that they buy from
| both. Maybe they buy more from Taiwan, but the effective
| price will be somewhere between the two.
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| That what tariffs are for. Increases the cost of the foreign
| good to parity with the domestic good (hopefully)
| elcritch wrote:
| There's many fields where paying 10% extra on parts is more
| than worth it for shorter and more reliable supply chain. Not
| to mention probably better for the environment as well. The
| price for parts is often a small piece of the overall costs.
|
| Seems other agree with me on that:
|
| > And while many companies fear that moving their
| manufacturing to the U.S. would cost significantly more, some
| experts estimate that wafer production at the Arizona site is
| only about 10% more expensive compared to Taiwan. Despite
| that, the company says that its customers are willing to pay
| a higher price, with production already sold out until late
| 2027.
|
| Also interesting that many of the new tariffs settle down to
| around 10%. That seems like a good balance for the US, and
| also similar to what European tariffs have been for many
| industries.
|
| IMHO, the idea of entirely free trade is as dumb as excessive
| trade barriers. It's like trying to model people as purely
| rational agents. We're not. It's a decent starting point but
| we need perturbative models based on empirical information of
| human biases.
|
| The ideal solution for tariffs is likely a distribution
| function with a peak around 5-15% with a steep drop off
| toward 0% and a longer tail for higher tariffs. Because 0%
| just leaves you open to any market manipulations of malicious
| foreign actors and corporations looking to offshore for a few
| cents of profits while higher tariffs lead to increasing
| protectionism and local companies becoming lax and
| inefficient.
|
| That would just so happen to align well with these extra cost
| to manufacture in the USA in this instance.
| ethagknight wrote:
| This is the manufacturing cost, not the retail MSRP.
|
| _Never_ make the mistake of assuming a market is perfectly
| efficient and any corporate savings along the way will be
| passed along to the consumer.
|
| When Apple or Google comes along and buys out next year's
| total TMSC output, that 80% of people will just have to buy
| whatever is on the shelf at the time.
| timmg wrote:
| What I really want to know, from someone who _does_ know: Is
| Intel cooked? Like, will they be able to _manufacture_ chips that
| compete with TSMC?
|
| They used to be a crown-jewel of US tech. But it seems like every
| time I read the news, they are announcing a delay or shutting
| down some product.
| akdev1l wrote:
| Tldr; yes they are kind of cooked
| echelon wrote:
| Why is the government bailing them out then? Is that just
| good money thrown after bad?
|
| Regardless, it seems like the company leadership should be
| gutted (the same could be said of Boeing) and the company
| given over to a new technically-grounded leadership team.
| vFunct wrote:
| I'm surprised the US just doesn't fund a new fab company or
| consortium, like Japan did with Rapidus.
|
| But I guess "too much socialism"
| sudofail wrote:
| A lot of countries honestly should be taking this
| approach. Fabrication is just too important for national
| security. At least some domestic production is critical.
| epistasis wrote:
| I don't think the current Republican leadership has any
| opposition at all to handing over lots of government
| money to large business to do things!
|
| The problem is that they are far too incompetent and have
| zero clue about tech, and only understand real estate,
| that simplest of business that can be executed with mere
| lizard-brain intelligence.
|
| Tech is also about small startups disrupting large
| giants, which is _completely_ antithetical to current
| Republican leadership ideals, where the wealthiest get
| all gains, regardless of who does the work.
|
| It will take many years of full-on Democratic leadership
| to reconfigure the Republican Party back to a somewhat
| innovation-friendly business party. Meanwhile the
| Democrats, under Biden, were by far some of the most
| business-friendly politicians we have seen in perhaps a
| century, spurring massive investment in factories and
| industry, mostly across red states. But because it's a
| politically incorrect fact, it never gets reported.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| It irks me that the current administration points to the
| steel industry doing well as an example of bringing jobs
| back to the US. Like great you've made an uncompetitive
| industry more profitable at the expense of every
| downstream user of that material. Doing the very opposite
| of what should be done. We're getting to the point, and
| have passed it in a few industries, where it's more
| expensive to buy raw inputs in the US than refined
| outputs from China. That is a level of insanity that
| cannot last.
| matwood wrote:
| And to put some numbers on it, there are ~100k steel jobs
| in the US. So we have kneecapped a ton of other
| industries impacting millions all to maybe save 100k
| jobs.
| benreesman wrote:
| Seniconductor manufacturing was effectively centrally
| planned via SEMATEC and before that via de facto
| stewardship by things like the the Labs and later Intel
| as a vehicle for national policy.
|
| This neat little dichotomy between "free market
| capitalism" and "centrally planned socialism" is a cute
| story but also complete fiction. In "capitalist"
| countries the government basically always runs R&D during
| any period of time when the stakes are high, and in
| "communist" countries there are always markets, and they
| are always sanctioned to some degree.
|
| All of the foundational progress for American leadership
| in high technology was centrally planned and
| administered, all of it one way or another: through ATT,
| through NASA, through the DoD, through the universities.
| Value _creation_ occurs under the watchful eye of the
| DoD.
|
| Once in a while we go on an orgy of _extractive_ wealth
| transfer like now, instead of _creative_ innovation like
| usually, and the top industry guys always fuck it up. And
| on cue, yeah this is going great.
| epistasis wrote:
| What is the alternative, except dependence on foreign
| countries for key economic inputs?
|
| Betting some on Intel is very wise when the alternatives
| are, as I see it: 1) investing in TSMC building fabs and
| creating more of an employee knowledge base and skill base
| on shore, 2) hoping a US-based startup gets enough traction
| to grow.
|
| Agreed on leadership. But selecting leadership teams,
| especially technically-grounded leadership teams is
| extremely difficult. Which is why companies revert to non-
| technical leadership so often.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| The inability to make SOTA silicon chips domestically would
| be catastrophic in a event of a war in the east.
|
| TSMC is making fabs in the US, but they are not SOTA fabs.
| Those are kept in Taiwan.
| sho_hn wrote:
| A lot of the more complicated equipment in TSMC fabs
| (e.g. EUV equipment) is from Europe.
|
| Building a fab is no mean feat and loss of infra is a
| major blow, but it's certainly not impossible to build
| these fabs in the West, just not economical. You are not
| starting from scratch.
| wbl wrote:
| Texas Instruments would like to say hi. You don't need
| SOTA chips for weapons, but exotic capabilities to
| process data and interact with the radio and infared
| world.
| codedokode wrote:
| Isn't building a TSMC factory in US a violation of a
| "don't build your home on someone's else land" principle?
| US will be able to shut down or even nationalize the
| factory, full of expensive equipment, at any moment. It's
| like lending a goose with golden eggs to your neighbour.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| Throwing good money after bad sounds like something
| governments are prone to do. Dysfunctions tend to grow as
| those who benefited from corruption have more money now to
| spend on more corruption.
|
| Since Intel has been mismanaged for so long I don't know
| how many good lower level employees they managed to retain,
| I doubt much would be left if they properly cleaned house.
| tester756 wrote:
| >Why is the government bailing them out then?
|
| There wasn't any bailout on them, what do you mean?
| _zoltan_ wrote:
| ???
|
| google://Intel chips act billions
| doublepg23 wrote:
| I believe that was a reaction to the global chip shortage
| during COVID. An investment in domestic chip production
| capabilities not a bailout for bad moves.
|
| Intel was looking bad but not the dire state they're in
| now.
| tester756 wrote:
| How can you call it "Intel bailout" if it benefited many
| semico companies?
|
| >The CHIPS Act primarily benefits semiconductor
| manufacturers and related industries by providing
| substantial funding for domestic chip production and
| research. Companies like Intel, TSMC, Samsung, and Micron
| have received significant grants and loans to expand or
| establish new manufacturing facilities in the United
| States.
|
| >The act authorizes roughly $280 billion in new funding
| to boost domestic research and manufacturing of
| semiconductors in the United States, for which it
| appropriates $52.7 billion
|
| >The act includes $39 billion in subsidies for chip
| manufacturing on U.S. soil along with 25% investment tax
| credits for costs of manufacturing equipment, and $13
| billion for semiconductor research and workforce
| training, with the dual aim of strengthening American
| supply chain resilience and countering China
| Yossarrian22 wrote:
| They actually haven't meet the requirements to get CHIPS
| funding, and they kinda got screwed with a military deal
| reducing the amount CHIPS allocated for them if they do.
|
| That being said the government will likely not allow them
| to fail completely out of the foundry business for
| geopolitical reasons
| ryanobjc wrote:
| Because there's a strategic benefit and the cost is
| practically negligible compared to the cost of this section
| of the economy going away.
|
| That is the political calculation, not "throw good money
| after bad" kind of economics 101.
| qzw wrote:
| Cooked in the short/medium term, yes, but remains to be seen
| in the longer term. I feel like they're ironically in the
| same position AMD was in before AMD spun off Global
| Foundries: not being able to keep up with the new nodes on
| the manufacturing side, which also drags down the design
| side. They could follow the same playbook and sell off the
| foundries, which will be a blow to their pride, but should
| free them up to compete better on designs alone.
| klysm wrote:
| I definitely get the vibe that they are rotten to the core from
| the same financialization strategies that have destroyed
| Boeing, TI, etc.
| honkycat wrote:
| Yep, bingo.
|
| They don't want to be competitive they want to bleed the
| company dry.
| lukevp wrote:
| Intel is more than just fabs. AMD spun off digital foundry
| forever ago and just uses TSMC, no reason Intel couldn't do the
| same. At this point their fabs are a liability. They have a new
| leader who's from a semiconductor manufacturing background so I
| have some faith they'll give up on the pursuit of next gen fabs
| and focus instead on their IP. There's a huge opportunity in
| their GPU segment. They've gone from a joke to competitive in a
| couple years, and they offer more VRAM for the dollar. They
| could tailor towards AI and really get some traction there.
| cogman10 wrote:
| > no reason Intel couldn't do the same.
|
| Intel is doing the same. IDK if they are working on new fabs
| at this point, but the last few generations of chips from
| intel have used TSMC.
|
| My expectation is that Intel might still run fabs, but
| they'll be mostly contracting them out to people who want
| cheap ASICs and 10 year old fab tech.
| 9cb14c1ec0 wrote:
| > IDK if they are working on new fabs at this point
|
| Yes, they are.
|
| https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-
| industry/semiconductors/in...
|
| Definitely struggling, but still in the game.
| vonneumannstan wrote:
| How does this scale? TSMC can't literally be the only fab
| in the world...
| treyd wrote:
| They're the only fab company in the world with the
| technology to allow Intel, AMD, and Nvidia to compete
| with each other on the playing field they do.
| vonneumannstan wrote:
| Right but at some point does Nvidia use their muscle and
| block TSMC from making chips for anyone else? The demand
| for GPUs is just increasing too rapidly for this to make
| sense.
| j_walter wrote:
| That will 100% never happen. Nvidia is big, but not even
| close to a majority of TSMC revenue or loading. Apple,
| Intel, Qualcomm, etc...
|
| In this case...TSMC is holding all the cards, not Nvidia
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| Apple was TSMCs biggest customer (25%) and nVidia is 2nd
| (12-15%). The bigger thing being that between the two,
| they lock up most of the bleeding edge process capacity
| and leave everyone else fighting over older processes.
| phkahler wrote:
| But leading edge these days is like 15 to 20 percent
| performance or density. It's not a huge lead any more.
| j_walter wrote:
| You are forgetting AMD...they are up there as well
| (double digits %). Thats how the compete so effectively
| with Intel.
| cogman10 wrote:
| They aren't.
|
| Samsung comes in a close second in terms of tech. GloFo
| is also still floating around though lagging pretty bad
| AFAIK. Micron has it's own fabs that they are actively
| developing (in fact, they are building new facilities
| right now).
|
| What TSMC is is cutting edge. That's why everyone that
| needs top performance uses them.
| vonneumannstan wrote:
| Only one in their class then.
| scruple wrote:
| They are now but they weren't always. I don't know much
| about hardware these days, I gleefully walked away from
| embedded development over a decade ago, but what I
| believe is that you don't really want to forecast to hard
| on any single player too far into the future.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Neither Micron nor GloFo are trying to keep up with state
| of the art, though. AFAICT that's limited to TSMC,
| Samsung, Intel and SMIC.
| whatevaa wrote:
| GloFo simply decided to stay at 14nm because beyond that,
| manufacturing costs actually increase, not decrease, and
| everybody wants the best, not second best.
| qzw wrote:
| Samsung is still in the game at the STOA level, but a
| distant second. But maybe it's the nature of the industry
| that one winner takes all for a number of years at the
| top end. After all, Intel was the only game in town for
| decades.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> Intel might still run fabs, but they'll be mostly
| contracting them out to people who want cheap ASICs and 10
| year old fab tech.
|
| Intel fabs have never had to be as cost effective as
| others. They were selling top end chips for top dollar for
| decades. I bet there are 10 other companies that can make
| 45nm chips cheaper than Intel can on their old equipment. I
| could be wrong.
| bugbuddy wrote:
| >digital foundry
|
| global* foundry
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Owning fabs is the only thing that makes Intel special IMO.
| There are dozens if not hundreds of fabless semiconductor
| companies.
|
| If everyone chases higher margin and ditches their fabs what
| kind of industry are we left with? One giant fab company like
| TSMC? That sounds healthy!
| antonkochubey wrote:
| >There are dozens if not hundreds of fabless semiconductor
| companies.
|
| How many of them develop high performance x64-64 cores?
| mywittyname wrote:
| Right now, it makes no sense to do so because they
| couldn't compete with Intel.
|
| But if Intel joins the fabless club, all of the sudden
| the playing field gets much more level.
| redeeman wrote:
| > Right now, it makes no sense to do so because they
| couldn't compete with Intel.
|
| AMD would disagree?
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> Owning fabs is the only thing that makes Intel special
| IMO. _
|
| Maybe if you ignore they're the only player with remotely
| competitive discrete GPU IP for graphics and AI, after the
| Nvidia and AMD duopoly.
| mywittyname wrote:
| > At this point their fabs are a liability.
|
| Intel outsourcing their core product line is also a massive
| liability. It's just a different kind of liability.
|
| I personally think the world's reliance on TSMC indicates
| that fabs are critically important infrastructure. And
| operating a world class one provides a company with a ton of
| leverage with governments and other businesses.
| zhobbs wrote:
| I think it also shows that fabs who only have one customer
| (ie, Intel) aren't as competitive because they can't
| provide as much scale and are more sensitive to that
| customer's success.
|
| Intel's fab would be doing much better if it spun it out a
| while ago and was making Intel, Nvidia, and Apple chips
| right now.
| dilyevsky wrote:
| They are bringing a lot of that "liability" online in the
| next few years. You're ignoring strategic context - as long
| ad intel maintains domestic fabs it will not be allowed to
| fail
| cptskippy wrote:
| > ... I have some faith they'll give up on the pursuit of
| next gen fabs and focus instead on their IP.
|
| The problem with Intel is that they are so short sighted and
| they change direction and focus very quickly. Intel will
| adopt these seemingly great ideas that require 10-20 year
| strategies, invest heavily in them, and then abandon them 5
| years later. They always measure initiatives against their
| core CPU line and if they don't show similar profitability in
| the short term then they defund and eventually cut the
| programs entirely.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > They have a new leader who's from a semiconductor
| manufacturing background
|
| That's the precious leader. The new CEO is not from a
| semiconductor manufacturing background. His main claim to
| success is leading a company that built EDA tools.
| KoftaBob wrote:
| > At this point their fabs are a liability.
|
| So we're just going to hand control of the US supply of
| semiconductors completely over to TSMC, Samsung, and the
| Chinese fabs in the works? That seems incredibly short
| sighted and reckless.
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| > used to be a crown-jewel of US tech
|
| I feel like x86 itself is kinda legacy tech. So while AMD has
| made advancements, they're somewhat in the same boat as Intel.
|
| It seems like NVIDIA and Micron are the real "crown jewels" of
| US tech
| sho_hn wrote:
| Tech-wise places too much premium on the ISA. Modern
| processor design is fairly orthogonal to the ISA being
| exposed.
|
| Intel could make exciting RISC-V relatively quickly if they
| wanted to; what stops them and other companies like this is
| the strategic asset they perceive their existing ecosystem
| as.
| codedokode wrote:
| I don't think so. For example, if an ISA requires a strict
| memory ordering, this makes the architecture more
| complicated than an ISA with relaxed memory ordering,
| although the latter is a pain to write code for.
| protimewaster wrote:
| There's a nice interview with Mike Clark where he talks
| about this a bit. His take basically matches this. He says
| that, in his view, any efficiency benefits of ARM are just
| that's been the market for ARM. In his view, if x86 had a
| market motive for ARM levels of efficiency, they'd be able
| to deliver it. But, historically, the x86 market wants
| performance more than efficiency, so that's what it gets.
|
| https://www.computerenhance.com/p/an-interview-with-zen-
| chie...
| tester756 wrote:
| ISA is irrelevant
|
| It's like saying that programming language syntax/keywords
| are better than the other.
|
| Everything is about compiler, lib, runtime, etc.
|
| https://chipsandcheese.com/p/arm-or-x86-isa-doesnt-matter
|
| Also some people say that RISC-V is the way to go
| riehwvfbk wrote:
| And yet Itanium flopped.
| lallysingh wrote:
| They required unreasonable things from the compiler for
| instruction scheduling.
| ben-schaaf wrote:
| By all accounts I can find Itanium performance was good,
| perhaps even great when writing assembly. It seems to
| reinforce the point that ISA doesn't really matter.
|
| But let's be clear: Of course ISA matters. It's just as
| trivial to make a bad ISA as it is a bad syntax. But does
| the ISA of modern superscalar processors matter? Probably
| a bit, but certainly not a whole lot.
| dboreham wrote:
| It wasn't good vs peer competitors at the time (HP-PA,
| DEC Alpha, IBM RS/6000, even MIPS). And it was very
| expensive. Huge die. It was an expensive, strange thing,
| that didn't have the necessary 2X peer performance
| advantage to offset those issues.
| ajross wrote:
| But not because of its ISA. I mean, to first
| approximation _everything_ is a "flop" in semiconductor
| architectures (or really in tech in general). The
| population of genuinely successful products is a tiny
| fraction of the stuff people tried to sell.
|
| In this particular case: ia64 leaned hard into wide VLIW
| in an era where growing transistor budgets made it
| possible to decode and issue traditional instructions in
| parallel[1]. The Itaniums really were fine CPUs, they
| just weren't particularly advantageous relative to the P6
| cores against which they were competing, so no one bought
| them.
|
| [1] In some sense, VLIW won as a matter of pipeline
| architecture, it only lost as a design point in ISA
| specs. Your Macbook is issuing 10 arm64 instructions
| every cycle, and it doesn't need to futz with the
| instruction format to do it.
| wbl wrote:
| VLIW came with an implication that static scheduling
| would win out. The deeply OoO chips you see now have a
| very different architecture to support that: Itanium was
| much more a DSP like thing.
| ajross wrote:
| Even in VLIW, DRAM fetches are slow, instructions have
| variable latency and write-before-retire register
| collisions require renaming. Itanium would have gotten
| there at some point. OO isn't an optional feature for
| high performance systems and that was clear even in the
| 90's.
| wbl wrote:
| If you have that what's the VLIW getting you?
| ajross wrote:
| Fewer transistors and pipeline stages required for the
| decode unit, which is a real but moderate advantage. And
| it turned out the window was very narrow and the relative
| win got smaller and smaller over time. And other
| externalities where VLIW loses moderately, like total
| instruction size (i.e. icache footprint) turned out to be
| more important.
| cesarb wrote:
| > Fewer transistors and pipeline stages required for the
| decode unit, which is a real but moderate advantage.
|
| Isn't having fixed-size naturally-aligned instructions
| (like on 64-bit ARM) enough to get that advantage?
| ajross wrote:
| ARM is easier than x86, but not really. VLIW instructions
| also encode the superscalar pipeline assignments (or a
| reasonable proxy for them) and are required to be
| constructed without instruction interdependencies (within
| the single bundle, anyway), which traditional ISAs need
| to spend hardware to figure out.
|
| Really VLIW is a fine idea. It's just not _that_ great an
| idea, and in practice it wasn 't enough to save ia64. But
| it's not what killed it, either.
| codedokode wrote:
| The problem with ia64 was that if you had 1000 legacy
| applications for x86, written by third-party contractors,
| for many of which you don't even have the source, then
| ia64 must be 100x better than standard CPUs to justify
| rewriting the apps.
|
| And by the way that's why open source makes such
| migrations much cheaper.
| codedokode wrote:
| Out-of-order architectures are inhumanly complex,
| especially figuring out the dependencies. For example,
| can we reorder these two instructions or must execute
| them sequentially? ld r1, [r2 + 10]
| st [r3 + 4], r4
|
| And then consider things like speculative execution.
| wbl wrote:
| But you already pay that price anyway.
| tadfisher wrote:
| If only that could have worked, then we could have
| avoided the whole Spectre/Meltdown mess and resulting
| mitigations.
| mort96 wrote:
| Itanium is irrelevant to this discussion. x86 works the
| same as its ARM and RISC-V competitors: a fairly compact,
| abstract language which describes a program, which
| depends on an instruction decoder to translate the
| abstract instructions into microarchitecture-specific
| instructions. VLIW is a huge departure from that.
|
| When people say "ISA doesn't matter", they mean that the
| "legacy cruft" in x86 doesn't matter (that much) and that
| x86 remains competitive with other similar ISAs. It
| doesn't mean that the difference between VLIW and
| traditional ISAs doesn't matter. ISA _paradigm_ still
| matters, just not the "syntax".
| sapiogram wrote:
| > I feel like x86 itself is kinda legacy tech.
|
| The impact of ISA is overrated, it's much more important that
| the ISA continues to grow and adapt as CPUs get larger.
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| modern x86 chips (for a long time really) are hybrid
| CISC/RISC at the hardware level. It's at the microcode that
| the ISA lives and that's changeable.
| cesarb wrote:
| > It's at the microcode that the ISA lives and that's
| changeable.
|
| No, it's not. In modern high-speed CPUs, many instructions
| are decoded directly, without going through the microcode
| engine. In fact, on several modern Intel CPUs, only one of
| the instruction decoders can run microcode ("complex")
| instructions, while all the other decoders can only run
| non-microcode ("simple") instructions.
|
| It would be more precise to say that it's at the "front-
| end" part of the core (where the decoders are) that the ISA
| lives, but even that's not quite true; many ISAs have
| peculiarities which affect beyond that, like flags on x86.
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| It was my understanding that even direct coded
| instructions are still translated by the microcode into
| the actual signals to allow for errata patching since the
| P6 architecture and to maintain a common ISA target
| within a family of processors with diffferent physical
| characteristics.
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| I think I am conflating micro-ops with microcode and your
| above comment is the correct way of thinking about it.
| hajile wrote:
| Intel's fab issues are overstated in my opinion. They were
| stuck on 14nm for a very long time because they bit off too
| much with 10nm. People act like that means ALL research in
| nodes smaller than 10nm must have stopped, but that's simply
| not true as research into tech and materials needed for smaller
| nodes happens in parallel.
|
| It's also noteworthy that GAAFET being a complete redesign of
| major parts of the manufacturing process levels the playing
| field significantly. A big example of this is Japan's Rapidus
| which was founded in 2022 and has managed to invent (and
| license) enough stuff to be prototyping GAA processes.
|
| Intel's 18a process seems to be quite good. It's behind TSMC in
| absolute transistor density (SRAM density seems to be the same
| as N3E), but ahead on hard features like BSPD and maybe on GAA
| too. I suspect that they didn't push transistor density as hard
| as they could because BSPD and GAA tech were already big, risky
| changes.
|
| We'll have a much better idea of Intel's fab future with 14a
| and 10a as they should show a trend of whether Intel's fabs can
| catch up and pass TSMC or if they run out of steam after the
| initial GAA bump.
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| They just farmed out the compute section of Nova Lake to TSMC
| which is a sad statement (probably a good business decision,
| though).
| hajile wrote:
| This isn't very surprising. Intel has already been making
| their GPUs at TSMC for quite a while now (I believe using
| N4). Porting and validating that GPU to Intel fabs would be
| expensive and take a lot of time.
|
| There is talk about the next version of Arc using 18a. If
| it does, I'd expect Intel to move that generation's compute
| tiles to 18a as well.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _They just farmed out the compute section of Nova Lake to
| TSMC which is a sad statement_
|
| Apple farms out its displays to Samsung, a competitor. It's
| just how business is done.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| I'm not even sure you could say Samsung is a competitor
| to Apple anymore in the phone space, at least in the US -
| I doubt there's much switching going on where people are
| frequently enough making a decision to change ecosystems,
| at least for existing customers.
|
| Samsung's competition is Huawei, Xiaomi, Oppo, etc.
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| Apple does not nor have they ever made displays. Intel on
| the other most definitely makes CPUs. That's the
| difference.
|
| Apple just recently moved back into the hardware space
| after farming everything out since the iMac gen2 days.
| Hell, I remember the Mac clones. I miss Power Computing.
| mbreese wrote:
| Has it been confirmed that the compute section is
| exclusively TSMC? My limited searching turned up nothing
| definitive and wasn't clear about if there would be a mix
| of 18A and TSMC N2 in all processors or if this was a
| contingency plan for increased volume or if this was a
| fallback in case 18A falls through.
| roboror wrote:
| Didn't they commit to that quite some time ago?
| dathinab wrote:
| I think their problem is less about material knowledge to
| shrink nodes but about development tooling to make chip
| design more efficient, scalable and allows experimenting with
| more new approaches/allows larger shifts without planing
| years ahead for it.
|
| TSMC by collaborating with many different customers with
| different needs had a lot of insensitive to not just create
| powerful tooling for one kind of CPU design approach but also
| being very flexible to allow other approaches for other
| needs. And AMD has repeatedly interrelated on their whole
| tool chain and dev. processes for many years while Intel was
| somewhat complacent with what they had.
|
| And a bunch of the recent issues with CPUs internally dying
| sound a lot like miss-design issues which tooling should have
| coughed (instead of looking like fundamental tech/production
| issues).
| lotyrin wrote:
| From what I could gather while I was inside (2010-ish, but
| not directly involved with chip product lines) there was
| just incredible hubris company wide. "Intel Architecture is
| the best because we made it and we're the best"
| essentially.
|
| They were wasting a ton of time and effort eagerly trying
| to convince Apple to put IA into phones despite obvious
| failures to deliver power-effective chips (Atom being the
| result of these efforts from what I understand). They were
| spending a lot of time and money trying to start up like a
| junk ware app-store thing for PCs that they could use OEM
| relationships to peddle, as if the PC ecosystem belonged to
| them the way that Android did to Google or Apple's
| ecosystem to Apple, not realizing that if anyone has that
| power it's Microsoft (but they also don't).
|
| It was pretty shocking coming from a hacker/cyberpunk
| culture where everybody had been dunking on Intel designs
| for over a decade. (I personally had been waiting for an
| ARM laptop since around 2000.) A lot of leadership I got to
| interact with were business/people-people types that truly
| seemed to believe that the best product boiled down
| entirely to social perception of status and has zero basis
| in reality. Basically the company seemed to be high on the
| Intel Architecture's accidental monopoly over personal
| computing thanks to PC-WinTel becoming so dominant (and
| Apple's later capitulation) and seemed to believe that it
| was all because of their "genius" Intel Inside marketing
| campaigns (which _were_ pure social status signaling, but
| with an effect of avoiding price competition with lower-
| cost IA rivals AMD,Citrix,VIA and holding power over OEMs
| rather than being responsible for the market situation
| around IA in the first place).
|
| Maybe something in the Hillsboro/Beaverton area's water?
| Both they and Nike seem to entirely consist of a diet of
| their own farts.
| bee_rider wrote:
| It also probably didn't help with that arrogance issued,
| that ARM laptops were tried... more than a couple times,
| and didn't generally work out. I mean, these new
| Snapdragon things might be good. But Intel successfully
| fended off multiple generations of Surface RT devices
| from their pseudo-partner Microsoft, from 2012 until
| recently.
|
| Of course, one could have done an ARM Linux device at any
| point in that timeline, but using efficient software is
| apparently cheating.
| mort96 wrote:
| Didn't it just come out that Intel is considering scrapping
| 18a? That's not a good sign. And all of their current CPUs
| are on TSMC, aren't they?
|
| I would be _very_ surprised if 14a and 10a comes out soon
| enough to be competitive with TSMC.
| hajile wrote:
| The rumor is that Intel might not offer 18a to external
| customers rather than getting rid of 18a itself. A lot of
| this seems to be due to their design libraries still being
| quite proprietary and not much to do with the viability of
| the process itself.
|
| It's not about how soon 14a and 10a come out, but rather
| about how good they are when they arrive. 14a will be
| competing against TSMC A16 in late 2026 and 10a will be
| competing with TSMC A14 in late 2027. The measure of
| Intel's success will be whether they are gaining or losing
| vs TSMC.
|
| On the customer front, I think customers are probably
| necessary to offset the ever-increasing R&D costs and an
| extra year or two to work on making their libraries more
| standardized may be best for everyone.
| BeetleB wrote:
| They're not scrapping 18A. Panther Lake is slated to be
| manufactured on 18A. The rumors are about Intel giving up
| on finding Foundry customers for 18A, and instead targeting
| 14A for Foundry.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I'm not very knowledgeable on all those technical points. How
| does this explain what I see as a consumer? I built a PC last
| year and went with AMD while historically I've gone with
| Intel. For a similarly performing CPU it seemed that AMD was
| cheaper and more power efficient.
| bee_rider wrote:
| On an emotional level I want to root for Intel (like most of
| the nerds here, they fabbed a good chunk of the magical
| elements of my childhood).
|
| It seems difficult to figure out if they are getting back on
| track, though. They always seem to just be a couple years
| from finally catching up to TSMC.
| SlowTao wrote:
| I used to say "Never bet against Intel", it was because
| everytime they seemed to be behind they would pull
| something out and regain the loss in short order.
|
| But so far nothing of the sort has happened for a long
| time. If feels like ever since Ryzen landed, they have been
| desperate to catch up but keep tripping on themselves.
| Losing Apple, while inevitable, has made them look even
| more irrelevant. They still do decent stuff for the most
| part but there isnt anything really exciting.
|
| I do like what they are doing with Arc GPUs but it is clear
| those are loss leaders and it isnt really gaining that much
| traction.
|
| Alas, this is a story where we will have a better
| understanding in five years from now.
| modeless wrote:
| Intel went from three years ahead to three years behind in
| ten years. It's a generational fumble.
|
| 18A is canceled for foundry customers, it's not going to save
| them. If they can't get it together for 14A, they are toast.
| meepmorp wrote:
| Do they have foundry customers? Serious question; I
| remember Gelsinger's IFS announcement and that they had
| some launch partners, but haven't seen much since.
| nomel wrote:
| > Intel's fab issues are overstated in my opinion.
|
| The fact that they _can 't_ use their own fab for 30% of
| their products [1], all of which are those that require power
| efficiency and compute performance [2], suggests it is _not_
| overstated.
|
| [1] https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/intel-will-
| keep-u...
|
| [2] https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/intel-is-using-
| tsmc-4nm-f...
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Intel made mistakes. TSMC can make mistakes. TSMC is also in
| geopolitically risky Taiwan. I'm not counting out Intel yet.
|
| They're also very unpopular online so it's tough to find solid
| unbiased info about them. Like is the stink about 18A true or
| do people just want to hate on Intel?
| klooney wrote:
| Yeah, TSMC reliance may look crazy by 2030
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| 2027-28 is the high danger range. (Davidson Window https://
| www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2021/07/03/closing... )
| preisschild wrote:
| Honestly, I like it. It gives Taiwan revenue to be able to
| defend itself from an aggressor.
| rich_sasha wrote:
| I'm not into hardware but I remember when AMD was sneered at,
| and all real CPUs were Intel. Then Ryzen happened. My meta
| conclusion is that its super hard to tell when someone is done,
| and it can change quickly.
|
| Or not. Sometimes it if looks like terminal decline, it simply
| is terminal decline.
| Arainach wrote:
| These things go in cycles and predate Ryzen by a lot. The
| late-model Pentium 4 chips were overheating power-guzzling
| garbage compared to the Athlon XP, and the Athlon 64 was a
| serious competitor to the Core 2 series. Ryzen is the current
| incarnation of AMD coming into vogue in desktop, but it's not
| like it took them 40 years to get there.
| koverstreet wrote:
| AMD had been gradually working their way up for a long time
| - the K6-III was an excellent CPU for the time.
| cptskippy wrote:
| The K6 line was a functional CPU but I wouldn't call them
| "excellent". The K6-III was basically a K6-2 with
| integrated cache, much the same way the Pentium III was a
| Pentium II with integrated cache. Despite the fact that
| AMD tried to replicate Pentium branding on the K6 line,
| they very much competed with Celerons in terms of market
| place and performance.
|
| Indeed that's how they were marketed where I worked
| (Office Max) and were priced and spec'd comparably to the
| Celeron based offerings from IBM, HP, and Packard Bell.
|
| Another issue with the K6 line was they were always a
| generation behind at a time when Intel was rapidly
| rolling out technologies like MMX and SSE. Intel
| coordinated with software manufacturers and had launch
| day examples that presented significant performance gaps
| between the CPU lines.
|
| The K6 also had a shorter execution pipeline than Pentium
| so it struggled to hit 400mhz when Intel was approaching
| 500mhz. That's why the Athlon was such a shock because it
| arrived at 700mhz and stomped everything.
|
| Looking back at the K6 line now, they likely perform far
| better then they did at the time because software
| eventually got around to supporting the hardware.
| SlowTao wrote:
| Minor correction. Athlon arrived at 500MHz, 550MHz and
| 600MHz. But they were still a big shock when they
| arrived. They were the first chip in a long while to
| really take on Intel and succeed.
|
| The 650MHz came two months after than, and 700MHz another
| two months later. 6 months later 1GHz! It is easy to
| forget just how rapid performance increased in the late
| 90s.
| cptskippy wrote:
| I'm trying to reconcile that with my memory. Pre-launch
| the AMD rep approached the electronics salesmen where I
| worked and offered us a deal to purchase a K7 700mhz for
| like $200. It came with a Biostar motherboard, a brand
| I'd never heard of back then.
|
| I remember it was a K7 700 because it was the first from
| scratch PC that I ever built. Everything before and
| probably since has been a Ship of Theseus.
| alexjplant wrote:
| The last time I built a PC was around a decade ago but I
| always bought AMD simply because they were cheaper for
| equivalent performance in the middle. Getting an adequate
| CPU for hundreds of dollars cheaper than the higher-end
| Intel chips meant that I could afford the second-highest-
| end GPU that NVidia had at the time. This made a lot more
| sense for gaming workloads as $300 towards the GPU had a
| much bigger effect on frame rate than $300 towards the CPU.
|
| These days iGPUs run pretty much any game I care to play so
| it doesn't matter.
| SlowTao wrote:
| My desktop is now about 12 years old with a 1650 GTX GPU.
| Still does everything I need perfectly fine. It is funny
| seeing some lower powered offerings with iGPUs that run
| circles around this thing. It is looking like my next
| machine will probably not have a dedicated GPU, at least
| at first. The intergrated stuff is pretty decent when the
| newest games you have are about 4-5 years old or just
| target lower specs.
| hnuser123456 wrote:
| Athlon 64 competed with first-gen Core, but Core 2 thru
| Sandy Bridge is what left AMD in the dust for 10 years.
| perbu wrote:
| They made the amd64 architecture. Let's not forget that.
| cptaj wrote:
| That has happened like 4 times with AMD already since I've
| been buying PCs
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| Yup, though it's been never such a good run for them by
| far. Granted things were moving much faster back then
| overall, but amd has been dominating for 7 years now.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| The problem for Intel is all the growth since mid 2000s is
| non PC.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Switching to TSMC broke their negative feedback loop,
| though. In the past AMD could be relied on to somehow not
| have the money to invest in their fabs at some point,
| resulting in another Intel era.
|
| Nowadays, there _will_ be another process node from TSMC.
| If AMD doesn't pay for the R &D, TSMC's other customers
| (like Apple and... actually, Intel) will instead.
| babypuncher wrote:
| A big part of AMD's turnaround was going fabless.
|
| I think the big fear here is that if Intel does the same,
| there won't be much competition left in the fab space.
|
| Is Samsung still competitive with TSMC?
| 0x457 wrote:
| > A big part of AMD's turnaround was going fabless.
|
| Part of it, sure, but they were still fabless and in the
| ditch before Zen. Unless you're referring to going with
| TSMC instead of GloFo as going fabless.
| uluyol wrote:
| They had contracts which forced them to buy Global
| Foundries even lasting into Zen 2 (I believe they used it
| with the IO die).
| 0x457 wrote:
| Yes, but that contract was a result of going fabless and
| spinning off GloFo into its own entity longer before Zen.
| AMD went fabless in 2009 during K8 lifecycle. Since then,
| we had an entire dynasty of failed bulldozer CPUs. I fail
| to see how going fabless helped them?
|
| What helped them is putting the right people in charge of
| Zen design and intel fumbling 10nm due to their own
| hubris.
| etempleton wrote:
| Everyone thought AMD was done. Intel is going through a
| difficult transition, but if they can make 18a /14a work and
| keep improving their GPU line we could be having the same
| conversation about AMD in 10 years.
| leptons wrote:
| I used to be a die-hard Intel customer, and recommended to
| everyone that asked me what to but, to buy Intel. That has
| changed. Now it's price/performance that matters more than
| brand. Intel also had a few missteps that made the brand
| lose a bit of its luster.
|
| My most recent computer is AMD Ryzen based, but we just
| bought an Intel-based Dell for my partner because the
| price/performance was better than comparable AMD machines
| at the time, possibly due to a sale. But the Intel chip is
| a lot faster than my laptop, so now I'm a little bit
| jealous of the Intel machine.
| vkazanov wrote:
| Sounds weird.
|
| I have 2 intel/dell laptops and thinkpad/amd 14s laptop.
| Both Dells (a workstation-class 22 core cpu and a more
| power-efficient one) suck massively when compared to amd
| ai-something-something-ryzen.
|
| What's worse, intel drivers are a mess on linux right
| now. Dell xps 13 plus is the worst laptop I had in a
| decade, and that's after owning every Linux-preinstalled
| Dell XPS 13 ever released.
| bee_rider wrote:
| We think of "Ryzen based" as recent, but the first
| generation of Zen was from 2017-2018. If it possible that
| your machine has earned retirement?
| MBCook wrote:
| That's a big if.
|
| "If Intel can just get this next node they'll be sitting
| pretty" is what people have been saying for over a decade
| isn't it?
|
| Just getting the nodes working and producing enough chips
| has been a huge issue for them, let alone having good chip
| designs on top of that.
|
| "No one got fired for choosing Intel" has stopped applying.
| They're even losing server marketshare, which was their
| rock.
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| AMDs fab in Dresden was highly respected as the most
| efficient fab in the world back in it's day. AMD really took
| off after they purchased NexGen and rolled out the K6.
| bigfatkitten wrote:
| AMD has supposedly been on the verge of being done for over
| 40 years now.
| ksec wrote:
| >What I really want to know, from someone who does know: Is
| Intel cooked?
|
| I dont know if I count, but at least I wrote about TSMC before
| most if anyone knew much about TSMC. Which is when Apple
| brought them to spotlight.
|
| It depends on how you define or count as being able to compete
| with TSMC?
|
| If Intel _technically_ leapfrog TSMC and their 18nm is better
| than TSMC 20nm this year but;
|
| It is 30 - 40% more expensive.
|
| It has lower Gross margin, or even negative margin.
|
| It has much lower volume and capacity.
|
| It is slower in ramping up capacity for future capacity
| planning.
|
| It has limited IP range for its foundry.
|
| It has less packaging options.
|
| It does not have other high speed, low power or analog node
| options.
|
| At what point does it count as competing? Because right now
| there isn't a single metric that Intel Foundry is winning. And
| they are feeling _exactly_ the same as Global Foundry or AMD
| when Intel Foundry advancement is getting all the oxygens.
|
| And even if they did, with a magic wand got them to compete
| with TSMC on every single one of the item above, in medium to
| long term there isn't a single chance Intel could compete with
| their current board and management.
|
| TSMC leadership and management team is Nvidia's level great. I
| cant think of any other tech company that could rival them.
| Their only risk is China.
| etempleton wrote:
| They don't really need to be better than TSMC, they need to
| be one node behind and roughly competitive on price /
| performance.
|
| The first year of TSMCs latest process goes to Apple. And the
| second few years are booked completely full. There is room
| for Intel if they can just get in the ballpark of TSMC.
| wbl wrote:
| Price/performance, not node is what matters.
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| _> If Intel technically leapfrog TSMC and their 18nm is
| better than TSMC 20nm this year but;_
|
| Think you mean 1.8nm, aka 18A. We're way past 18nm and 20nm.
| swores wrote:
| How long ago did nm numbers stop being descriptions of size
| of chip and start being purely marketing names? About a
| decade?
| bee_rider wrote:
| While it is true that the nm numbers are bullshit, using
| the same made-up number helps keep the conversation on
| track, haha.
| danparsonson wrote:
| https://www.extremetech.com/computing/296154-how-are-
| process...
|
| "For a long time, gate length (the length of the
| transistor gate) and half-pitch (half the distance
| between two identical features on a chip) matched the
| process node name, but the last time this was true was
| 1997"
| swores wrote:
| Oh wow, I didn't realise it has been that long! Thanks
| for sharing
| rossjudson wrote:
| _Was_ Intel 's board and management great? Like, when did it
| change?
| fidotron wrote:
| Some of us have been pointing out Intel was in a systematically
| impossible situation even back when they had that process
| advantage, now almost a decade ago.
|
| Quite simply imagine being dropped in as CEO of Intel in 2015.
| Could you have prevented the malaise of today?
| grumpy_coder wrote:
| A fine time to cancel Larabee properly and get serious about
| specialized GPU hardware five years earlier.
| dathinab wrote:
| they seem very cooked
|
| I think they have a lot of potential in the dedicated GPU
| space, but that is a consumer market so profit margins are
| smaller and they have potential in the low-to-mid-end market so
| even less margin. It's really sad as the competition there
| would help consumers.
|
| the sad thing is, it was predictable. Wintel and other
| monopoly-like deals/situations had removed the need to
| compete/stay on edge from Intel. They then noticed it too late
| and made mistakes when trying to course correct/having to much
| innovation dept to effectively course correct screwed them up
| big
|
| At the same time AMD again and again re-invented and optimized
| their development flow and experimented with alternative
| approaches and did not shy away from cooperating with TSMC and
| implicitly through that Nivdea and other (sometimes also
| Intel). Intel on the other hand AFIK got stuck on a approach
| where they had a edge over AMD but which was seem to have
| turned out to be somewhat of a dead end.
|
| what is interesting is how TSMC has so far avoided the same
| kind of trap
|
| - by having competing customers and having deep research co-
| operations with all the customers they brought competition and
| innovation back into a monopoly in a round about way like
| position
|
| - having limited capacity of the newest tech which their
| competing customers bit for bring in monetary insensitive to
| innovate
|
| - and them being somewhat of a life line for their country put
| a lot of pressure onto them to not break their own innovation
| machine for greed (e.g. by intentionally not expanding the
| availability of the latest node even when they technically
| could)
| phkahler wrote:
| >> I think they have a lot of potential in the dedicated GPU
| space
|
| I think dedicated GPUs will be dead soon. AMD will beat
| nVidia with APUs that compete with midrange DGPU in
| performance with lower system cost. With AI using GPUs we
| want the shared memory of the APU rather than splitting RAM
| into two mutually exclusive areas - witness boards starting
| to use soldered ram in 64 and 128GB configurations. nVidia
| can't compete without x86 cores and Intel just cant compete
| for now.
| dathinab wrote:
| yeah that might happen
|
| I mean for gaming there is already the Ryzan Max+395 which
| already is beyond the level of low end graphics (at least
| if placed in a desktop where it's not heat/power
| throttled). But it's a bit of a unicorn (especially if you
| look for a system where it can run full throttle).
|
| but I'm not sure about the beat nVidea part, nVidea has
| some experience with putting ARM CPUs on their graphic
| cards and as far as I remember on for their server center
| solutions there is one which pairs up graphic cards (and
| their RAM) over PCIe and mostly cuts out the CPU
| ryao wrote:
| Intel's chances of being a foundry for others are close to 0.
| It does not matter how good their process technology is. The
| problem is that Intel was an IP thief in the 80s and 90s; being
| a foundry requires trusting Intel with the exact IP Intel was
| known for stealing and nobody wants to take the risk.
| gond wrote:
| Never heard of that one. Could you provide sources for the
| argument?
| drcongo wrote:
| As a data point of one, and one that really doesn't know much
| about chip fabs, I tend to see the "Intel Inside" sticker as a
| warning. I have no idea how they ever win back consumer trust.
| honkycat wrote:
| Intel needs to course correct.
|
| I live in the area and know a LOT of intel fab workers.
|
| The issue is not the workers: Intel has been captured by
| corporate raiders and toxic management.
|
| They aren't interested in making chips or an innovative
| company. They just want to squeeze the juice out of the company
| until it is dry.
|
| That is why it is so bad.
| nobodyandproud wrote:
| Does that mean Intel needs to go private?
| phkahler wrote:
| Hahaha that would nail the coffin shut!
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| They were not caught by corporate raiders (feel free to
| provide names of outside investors that caused them to
| stagnate).
|
| Instead of investing in the future and paying top dollar for
| top employees, the Board paid the shareholders (even 20 years
| ago). They never even tried to compete for the best
| employees, and instead let them all go to
| Alphabet/Apple/Amazon/Meta/Microsoft/Nvidia/Netflix.
|
| This includes the employees in management.
| phkahler wrote:
| That became abundantly clear when Jim Keller walked in and
| out so quickly.
| hollerith wrote:
| >Intel has been captured by corporate raiders
|
| Could you explain to those of us who don't understand how
| corporate raiders have influenced Intel's strategy?
| jcalvinowens wrote:
| > Is Intel cooked?
|
| IMHO the whole user-visible p-core/e-core thing on desktop CPUs
| is one of the worst decisions in the history of
| microprocessors. My gaming machines need to do double-duty as
| as build boxes, so they're just utterly unusable for me.
| wtallis wrote:
| Why is the asymmetry a show-stopper for you? It would seem
| like having lots of E-cores would be advantageous for
| compiling, and still having some P-cores means you don't lose
| performance when linking.
| ls612 wrote:
| Because Windows has a pants on head design choice where
| processes that aren't the active window get shunted onto
| the e cores regardless of whether they are doing lots of
| work or not. I halfway suspect that this is intended as a
| market segmentation trick by MS
| benreesman wrote:
| Intel is a great example of the fact that between stupidity and
| low-integrity behavior as a default, the people in charge fuck
| up in ways that the man on the street would get right.
|
| Defense is starting to get a blank check with fairly bipartisan
| support for the first time in at least 30-40 years and it's
| _centered on semiconductor supply chains_. There has never been
| a better time to secure the fucking funding, have ASML send
| twice as many people as they already have, and power through
| it. The market is whatever you want and the margins are
| whatever you want: in a functioning system? _You fucking do
| it_.
|
| And while I will believe that Intel has suffered serious
| attrition in key posts, there's no way that the meta-knowledge
| of how to debug "we don't have the fabs running right, who do
| we hire, what so we need to give them to get it done" has
| evaporated in 5-10 years from _the singular source of this
| institutional muscle memory in the history of the world_.
|
| The failing here is more like a failing in courage, or stamina,
| grit, something. It's a failure of the will to do the right
| thing for both the shareholders and the country.
| Spivak wrote:
| tl;dr Intel desperately needs an activist investor.
| benreesman wrote:
| Only if that activist investor acts with decisiveness,
| vision, long-term goal orientation, and demonstrates
| consistently high-integrity behavior.
|
| What has much more commonly produced good outcomes in such
| situations is robust public-private partnerships like the
| ones that produced the semiconductor industry in the first
| place. Run the list of innovations in strategically key
| technology and what will you find at one remove in every
| instance? The DoD, NASA, the Labs and ATT more broadly, the
| university system.
|
| It's always a public/private partnership during periods of
| explosive value creation when the stakes are high, and it's
| always a private sector capture orgy during periods of
| extractive stagnation like the present.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Bad news. We're exploding NSF, NASA and many parts of
| DoD. Universities are uncertain as those acts are
| digested.
|
| That era of American history has passed. Innovation gives
| way to consolidation and cronyism. Think Mussolini's
| Italy.
| avn2109 wrote:
| If you have any evidence for the claim that "many parts
| of DoD" are being exploded/defunded, it would be really
| interesting to see that. As far as I can see, just the
| opposite is true; the military industrial complex looks
| like it's increasing in size and scope.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| Remember what finally happened to Mussolini?
| benreesman wrote:
| We've had crime season gilded ages before. We've had
| trusts and corruption before. I agree that on present
| course and heading we are not going to make it out of
| this one in anything like the position we're accustomed
| to, but it's not impossible and frankly it wouldn't even
| take that much.
|
| Forums like HN full of senior technologists and future
| founders are disproportionately high impact. If the tone
| around here shifted a little to stop excusing what YC has
| become and start embracing how it all started?
|
| Shit like that adds up. geohotz had that post a few weeks
| ago about this late capitalism internet shit, he was
| pretty deep in with the Effective Altruists and he got it
| together. I said at the time and I'll say again, you get
| a few more people like that to sober up? pmarca and lex
| and people? Maybe even pg?
|
| Real change happens that way.
| dv_dt wrote:
| Imho activist investors are usually about cutting
| investment in the future, maximizing the current accessible
| profits, collecting a wad of cash, then letting the company
| die while moving off to be active on another board.
| rossjudson wrote:
| Intel needs a full-time board that gives a shit about
| whether the company succeeds. You could populate that board
| with nearly any combination of capable founder types and
| you'd get far better results.
|
| The current board is a pack of cargo-culting epitaph
| writers.
| benreesman wrote:
| They're a particularly egregious example of what
| corporate governance has become, but they're cut from
| largely the same cloth as the rest of our leadership
| class. Maybe a little dumber than average, a little more
| short-sighted, but devoid of any notion of obligation?
|
| I forget the name of the speaker guy who has this turn of
| phrase, but whatever the merits of his overall platform
| this hits perfectly: "People doing well today are using
| every means at their disposal to decrease their
| accountability while increasing their compensation. If
| you don't compensate people based on the responsibility
| they are willing to undertake, you will get a world run
| by people like this and it will look like the world you
| live in right now".
| throw0101b wrote:
| > _Defense is starting to get a blank check with fairly
| bipartisan support for the first time in at least 30-40 years
| and it 's_ centered on semiconductor supply chains.
|
| Really? Because:
|
| > _During Donald Trump 's 2025 speech to a joint session of
| Congress, the president asked House Speaker Mike Johnson to
| "get rid" of the subject act.[190]_
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIPS_and_Science_Act#Subsequ
| e...
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| The climate of uncertainty under Trump inhibits long-term
| investment, whether in chip fabs, car factories, or anything
| else. He has reminded us all of something that's really
| always been a problem: whatever one Congress or one POTUS
| supports can be undone by the next.
|
| Usually opposing parties have had the common sense not to
| immediately hit the undo button once they take office. E.g.,
| Biden leaving most of Trump's previous nutty tariffs in
| place. But "common sense" isn't on the agenda these days. We
| are, to all intents and purposes, under attack from within.
| benreesman wrote:
| The decline in what we expect of our leaders has been going
| on my entire life and the contrast between 20 years ago and
| the present is stark.
|
| In 1998 Meriwether and the rest of LTCM nearly crashed the
| economy, needed the Fed to get involved, and they were
| _personally ruined_ , guy never opened a ten thousand
| dollar bottle of wine again and probably never had anything
| again. Shortly thereafter, Jeff Skilling took out offices
| in 9 cities and pension plans all over the country with
| shady accounting. 24 years in prison (reduced later to 14).
| Ebbers/Worldcom 2002: died in prison.
|
| By 2008? Zero prosecutions. Bonuses the next year.
|
| Around the same time Clinton got caught lying about chasing
| (consenting and of age) skirt in the Office: nearly ended
| his presidency, definitely ended his policy agenda, real
| consequences and he caught a shooting star to avoid far
| worse. The public was not going to accept it, Congress was
| not going to let it slide on either side of the aisle.
| Today? Something like that barely makes the press. You have
| to be accused of sex trafficking to even get an
| investigation started and everyone will probably walk.
|
| The idea that this became uniquely bad in January, or even
| 2016 is demonstrably untrue. At some time in the last 30
| years we started accepting leadership who are dishonest,
| nakedly self-interested, lie without consequences, enrich
| themselves via extraction rather than value creation,
| collude with no oversight, and sell out the public.
|
| This is a completely bipartisan consensus on these norms.
| Speaking for myself, I think Trump represents a new low,
| but not by much, he's just the next increment in what
| history will probably call the Altman Era if his ascent to
| arbitrary power on zero substance continues on it's current
| trajectory.
| daymanstep wrote:
| The rot has been going on for a lot more than 30 years.
| Try 70 years more like. LBJ openly cheated on his wife
| Lady Bird while he was in office and he never suffered
| any consequences for it. Eisenhower was the last good
| president.
| Henchman21 wrote:
| Not Carter?
| ffsm8 wrote:
| It's not even centered on the US. I personally think the
| Internet just desensitized us all.
|
| Reasons for that are easy to come up, imo chief among
| them being web2.0 (social media) and the ever increasing
| degree with which people exaggerate everything just to
| get a reaction.
|
| Under that context, what's a little skirt chasing
| compared to what people usually say about the
| politicians? And how are you gonna remember he did
| something a few months ago, when so many more extreme
| things have happened since?
|
| Really, I feel like social media will be considered the
| most destructive force to society in 20-50 yrs
| Volker-E wrote:
| Agreed by all, but one: In 0 years.
| avhception wrote:
| It's like watching the public discourse devolve into ever
| more screaming and posturing. The only winning move is
| not to play.
|
| Sometimes I find myself thinking about that experiment
| with the perfect rat paradise. The overpopulation got so
| bad, the normal social functions of the rats started to
| break down and the rats started acting like sociopaths.
| Sometimes, I think that's what we're doing to ourselves
| by exposing the average human to millions of voices
| through the internet.
|
| Of course, ironically, I'm ignoring my own advice and
| still engage with the Internet. Though I mostly keep to
| HN and some IRC.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| https://old.reddit.com/r/AskScienceDiscussion/comments/q4
| k07...
| NavinF wrote:
| The mouse utopia experiment is mostly fake and
| researchers who reproduced the experiment didn't see any
| of those behaviors: https://gwern.net/mouse-utopia
|
| It was just as wrong as predictions about human
| overpopulation like Malthusianism
| Henchman21 wrote:
| It's almost like the correct action to take would be a
| Luddite-style wrench-in-the-works. Sabotage in service of
| humanity. And as an added bonus, think of all the
| electricity we'd get back!
| johntarter wrote:
| Bring on the Bureau of Sabotage from Frank Herbert's
| ConSentiency universe books!
| drdec wrote:
| > Around the same time Clinton got caught lying about
| chasing (consenting and of age) skirt in the Office:
| nearly ended his presidency, definitely ended his policy
| agenda, real consequences and he caught a shooting star
| to avoid far worse. The public was not going to accept
| it, Congress was not going to let it slide on either side
| of the aisle. Today? Something like that barely makes the
| press. You have to be accused of sex trafficking to even
| get an investigation started and everyone will probably
| walk.
|
| I don't think Al Franken would agree with this
| rossjudson wrote:
| We populate our corporate leadership with non-founders so
| highly compensated that actually succeeding does not
| matter to them. They've already "won" at the game, and
| they spend a lot of time posturing with respect to each
| other. They set the membership criteria for the "club",
| reinforce each others' positions, and use the ability to
| bestow membership to manipulate the political system away
| from regulating or taxing them.
|
| In other words, I completely agree.
| wat10000 wrote:
| I blame Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich.
|
| They heavily pushed the idea that the opposition could
| not have legitimacy. Gingrich did it through the exercise
| of power and Limbaugh did it on the airwaves. It wasn't
| just that the opposition was wrong or bad for the
| country, standard democracy stuff, but that the
| opposition had no right to hold power at all. Once you
| start thinking that legitimacy is based on which side
| you're on rather than who you are or what you do, you
| won't care about bad leadership as long as it's yours.
| tucnak wrote:
| I'm sorry, but to blame Intel's inadequacies on political
| climate is comedic.
| avn2109 wrote:
| Intel's C-suite is gonna pick up this line of reasoning
| soon! "It's not our fault the stock crashed and the fabs
| don't run and TSMC is eating our lunch, blame Trump
| instead!"
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| It has nothing to do with Intel. Would you commit
| billions of dollars to a policy that Cheeto Benito might
| repudiate tomorrow?
| lenerdenator wrote:
| > It's a failure of the will to do the right thing for both
| the shareholders and the country.
|
| They've been doing the exact right thing for the
| shareholders: squeezing the living shit out of an asset
| (x86/64) for decades while cutting anything interesting or
| competitive to the bone to give shareholders more money.
| Money spent on something that could really have been
| competitive is money not sent to the retirement fund that
| keeps John and Jane Q. Public swinging in more ways than one
| at their golf course retirement community in Florida.
|
| The problem is, you can only do that for so long. There is a
| minimum spend to remain a competitive company with regard to
| being able to market products to consumers. Executives don't
| have a fiduciary duty to create the best possible product for
| consumers to look at and potentially buy in the marketplace,
| but they _do_ have a fiduciary duty to shareholders to meet
| an earnings projection. If these two activities can coexist
| peacefully, great. If not, the first activity stops while the
| company gets gutted.
| benreesman wrote:
| It's not actually good for the shareholders unless you have
| a divisor which is effort. Intel is a semiconductor
| company, investors that want to invest in treasuries or
| Exxon or whatever is considered extreme low-beta (ha, maybe
| not Exxon anymore, maybe Visa) have every opportunity to do
| so.
|
| The most expensive, highest-margin, technically advanced
| and risky business in the world is for investors who want
| that in their portfolio. If they wanted to milk a dying
| industry on the way down they would go buy Disney stock.
|
| It is very clearly in the interests of long-term investors
| in Intel to maintain a commanding position in fabrication:
| it's been the secret sauce of the company since the very
| beginning, it's never been more in demand.
|
| This idea that companies are obligated to do what will
| deliver some little bump in the stock price in 90-180 days
| is everything from not how the rules work to just a lazy
| meme for people who don't want to earn their princely
| salaries.
|
| Don't make excuses for weakness at the top.
| kortilla wrote:
| That's a bullshit meme. One glance at the stock history
| shows that they haven't been doing anything for
| shareholders for over a decade.
| DiabloD3 wrote:
| Yes. I can give you a non-technical answer, since HN is
| ostensibly business as well.
|
| Intel fired the one CEO that spoke both engineer and business,
| and Gelsinger could have been their Lisa Su. They fired the
| only talented CEO they've had for years.
|
| This will be fatal.
|
| Gelsinger was the scapegoat for 20+ years of inability to
| compete with foreign companies, no matter how much money was
| poured into them. They used American exceptionalism as a cover
| to defraud shareholders and any government that invested in
| them. They used the relationship of AIPAC and Congress to build
| a fab and R&D lab in Israel (inserting yourself into global
| politics to make a buck is _always_ spicy) at low cost to them.
|
| Taiwan became the capitol of electrical engineering in the
| world, and is a shining example of how to survive and thrive in
| a post-war era, and it absolutely shows. They caught up to
| Intel and zoomed right past.
|
| Gelsinger's crime was try to do what AMD did: they didn't have
| a fab that could make their chip BUT they had a fab that made
| chips that people wanted AND the foundry could take that work
| and survive if they legally split. GloFo is now the third
| largest semi foundry in the world today, and when it was part
| of AMD, it very much wasn't; I can't quite remember, but 5th or
| 6th? Something like that. GloFo is #3, TSMC is #1, Samsung is
| #2, and Intel could very well be that #4, and push out UMC (#4)
| and SMIC (#5) in the secondary chip foundry market.
|
| Gelsinger could have split Intel into Intel and IFoundry or
| something, and Intel could have profited on IFoundry taking off
| and taking external work. Right now, IFoundry can't compete on
| top nodes, but _could_ steal work from all other fabs for
| secondary larger nodes. Having a working 12 nm competitor as
| well as a working 7nm competitor is big business, which Intel
| currently has _ZERO_ of (since they don't take external
| contracts). Gelsinger was big on this potential revenue stream.
|
| Gelsinger's other crime was being part of the negotiation
| between TSMC and the Biden administration for the CHIPs act
| money: part of what built the TSMC fab right next door to
| Intel's in Arizona was Biden and Intel money. Intel was
| investing in it's future by playing the American exceptionalism
| card again, but now in _everybody 's_ favor. We _all_ benefit
| from this. Gelsinger wanted to have _somebody_ fab the chips,
| and if its good enough for AMD, Apple, and Nvidia, its good
| enough for Intel.
|
| There is zero indication that GAA 20A is ready, and Intel has a
| history of having leadership that says such-and-such is ready
| for it to either come out several gens later, or just vanish
| off the roadmap. Gelsinger's other OTHER crime is admitting to
| this and changing the direction of the Titanic before it hits
| the iceberg, for the CEO that replaced him just to steer right
| back into the iceberg.
|
| I have _zero_ faith in Intel's leadership if they can't bring
| Gelsinger back. Tan, Gelsinger's replacement, is a former board
| member. I have no reason to think he is not just going to
| further poison the company. Tan has not spoken about any plan
| that indicates he understands Intel is not competitive, Intel
| cannot competitively make 100% of the tiles, that Intel's
| Foveros tech stack is extremely valuable because the only truly
| comparative alternative is TSMC's CoWoS tech family _and_
| superior to it _and_ people are willing to throw money at that
| problem but they can 't license it as long as IFoundry is part
| of Intel.
|
| Intel is cooked imnsho.
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| Intel has been in Israel since 1974. Intel Fab 8 was built in
| 1980 in Jerusalem... There's over 30,000 chip engineers and
| nearly 200 semiconductor companies there, now.
| DiabloD3 wrote:
| AIPAC was founded in 1954.
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| Intel came to Israel mostly because Dov Frohman (one of
| Intels first employees who had worked with all the
| founders at Fairchild and also the inventor of EPROMs)
| pushed to establish an Intel dev center there when he
| moved back home.
|
| At the time, EPROM tech was Intels most profitble product
| until the 8088 and 8087, which were designed in Israel at
| the dev center (along with many of their chip designs).
| DiabloD3 wrote:
| Yep, Dov Frohman's contribution to tech is well known and
| very appreciated.
| isthatafact wrote:
| I am no expert in Intel, but in my view, Gelsinger lost the
| faith of many by being unrealistically optimistic. Of course
| a CEO needs to be optimistic, but he promised (in 2021)
| zettaflop systems by 2027 (the worst example I remember). Did
| anyone believe that could happen?
|
| His over-optimism gave the whole "5 nodes in 4 years"
| supposed path to leadership a weird flavor, like it must be
| somehow a bit of a con even if it gets technically achieved.
| hawflakes wrote:
| I find it somewhat ironic that many years ago HP's PA-RISC
| chips were fabbed at Intel because contractually they had to
| supply chips due Itanium not yet taping out.
|
| But maybe it was more of an early foreshadowing. I had a
| housemate that worked on their internal CAD tools and it also
| sounded like a bit of a mess with NIH syndrome. (20+ years ago)
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Their market cap is $100B. A bunch of smart people who study
| this don't think it is fully cooked
| phkahler wrote:
| >> Their market cap is $100B. A bunch of smart people who
| study this don't think it is fully cooked
|
| nVidia market cap is 4T or about 40x Intels. Im not sure who
| those smart people are.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I see them the same as GE, Boeing, etc. They culture from the
| top down is screwed. It will take years to undo what has been
| ingrained in the corporate machine. They will likely survive
| but as a shell of their former self. They'll probably spin off
| some promising business related to AI or embedded.
|
| I was disappointed with their offerings and went with AMD for
| my latested build. I don't know too many people who have built
| PCs recently, but the few I do know who have or are planning
| to, everyone is planning to use AMD. Similar to the GE example,
| it seems many people would recommend LG or Samsung appliances
| over GE.
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| Intel Financial Engineering & Operational Missteps is what led
| to this.
|
| "Over the past 10 years, Intel engaged in financial
| engineering, primarily through significant stock buybacks ($53
| billion in 2011-2015) and stock-based executive compensation,
| which diverted resources from innovation and contributed to its
| lag in semiconductor fabrication. This financialization, as
| critiqued in the 2021 report, is a long-term factor in Intel's
| weakened competitive position"
|
| https://semianalysis.com/2024/12/09/intel-on-the-brink-of-de...
|
| https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/how-intel-fi...
|
| https://www.intc.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1726/...
| bgnn wrote:
| Yes, Intel is cooked. I think they won't recover anymore. Their
| fab business' fate will be similar to Global Foundaries: a
| second tier supplier of old tech nodes.
| johngalt wrote:
| Intel has been cooked for years. Observable back in 2017, but
| more visible today.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14588429
|
| _The top of the market will go GPU and the bottom will go ARM,
| and the middle will be an ever shrinking x86 market share. The
| few places that will need heavy CPU resources will be the same
| people who can apply pressure to Intel 's margins._
|
| _The process of chip making will look very similar in the
| future, but the brand of the CPU will matter less every year.
| Intel 's not "dead in five years", but Intel will definitely
| cross the point of no return in that timeframe. Shifting a big
| company's focus is more difficult than growing another company
| who already has the right focus._
| jbm wrote:
| Apparently this happening was well telegraphed by people in the
| industry.
|
| A friend used to send me articles regularly from Semiaccurate
| in the mid 2010s. I thought it was "alternative truth" but it
| turns out to have been more, uh, accurate than I thought.
| elorant wrote:
| Intel announced new GPUs back in December and seven months
| later they're nowhere to be found. I'm pretty convinced at this
| point that the company has some systemic issues that prevent
| them from being competitive at any level.
| brianzelip wrote:
| Here's (one of) a recent Oxide & Friends podcast episode on
| Intel, https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/lip-bu-
| tans....
| linuxftw wrote:
| This is why tariffs matter. Despite the US having much higher
| wages, and likely property and infrastructure costs,
| manufacturing is only 5-20% more for these high tech products.
|
| Corporations outsourced not because they couldn't compete, but
| because why leave 10% on the table when we can reward the
| executives with that cash instead of the labor?
| impossiblefork wrote:
| Same thing with Nokia. They still had factories in Finland in
| the 2010s. They were profitable, but margins were better on the
| factories in Asia.
| dagmx wrote:
| These plants have nothing to do with tariffs though? They were
| in development prior to any tariffs and were partially funded
| by the CHIPS act. If anything, that's the opposite of
| tariffs...
| linuxftw wrote:
| My point is, the cost of goods being produced in the US is
| not dramatically higher, as outlined in the article. Even
| very basic tariffs would level the playing field and bring
| economic benefits domestically, without a major impact to the
| consumer.
| dagmx wrote:
| That assumes you have the means to bring the production
| domestically first.
|
| This is a confluence of the previous administration having
| the forethought to do this, before the current
| administration tried to kill the CHIPS act.
|
| If they hadn't done that, you likely wouldn't have seen
| domestic production able to satisfy the needs.
|
| Tariffs alone are a misguided cudgel.
|
| Also your comment about a "major impact to the consumer"
| ignores that this is an increase in cost just for the
| silicon. There's a lot of tariffs on different parts of the
| actual product.
| runako wrote:
| Context is important here: a 20% increase in price to
| consumer is not going to be perceived as "not dramatically
| higher". Focusing on tech for a moment, we are discussing
| this in the context of a good that normally decreases in
| price annually suddenly getting more expensive.
|
| For the sake of argument, if all goods increase in price by
| 20%, Americans are going to have the experience of being
| worse off than they were before.
|
| This is the largest tax hike on Americans in modern times
| (possibly ever?). While it may take a while for people to
| understand the impact of policy, people generally do not
| like large tax hikes. I don't think it's a stretch to think
| people will not like this tax increase, either.
| xyst wrote:
| Blaming tariffs when it was the greed of Wall Street, private
| equity, hedge funds, "corporate raiders" that ultimately
| shipped manufacturing overseas. All of this under decades of
| psuedo-economic theory called neoclassical economics. Then this
| is taken further under neoliberal economic policy --
| "reagonomics" and "trickle down economics".
|
| These greedy fucks in the 1970s sold out current generations so
| they could min/max profit for themselves and billionaire
| buddies. All of this at the expense of decimating: local
| manufacturing industries, environment, public safety nets, and
| sustainable living.
| linuxftw wrote:
| I'm assigning blame to the greedy corporations. If consumers
| have $100 to spend on an item, corporations can either make
| it domestically for $90, or move production overseas and make
| it for $80. The consumer is going to pay $100 in either
| scenario. Lowering the tariffs ensured that the products
| would be made overseas so the executives can profit on the
| slave labor.
|
| I'm not attempting to assign blame to one political party or
| another. Reasonable tariffs to protect domestic labor should
| be a bi-partisan issue.
| sebstefan wrote:
| Tariffs don't work to bring manufacturing back home if they
| change every 2 weeks and are sure to disappear in 4 years
|
| You need to have reasonable certainty that your factory is
| going to be profitable on a 20+ year horizon to commit into
| building a production line.
|
| I don't understand how MAGAs don't get that.
| DSingularity wrote:
| You think a CPU factory won't be profitable for 20 years?
| MAGA movement won't listen to you here if we can't even agree
| on basic facts.
| sebstefan wrote:
| The thought took a shortcut. Profitable wasn't the right
| word
|
| When you offshore a production facility, it's not about
| being profitable, it's that it can be more profitable
| elsewhere.
|
| If you have no guarantee that the tariffs will still be
| there to artificially maintain your profitability so high,
| then you don't build.
|
| I think we can agree on the facts there
| tensor wrote:
| A CPU factory may (because of high margins), but, for
| example, a car factory may not. A factory isn't just the
| labour, it also requires inputs, and tariffs that change
| weekly means that you can't rely on being able to source
| the inputs reliably. When your margins are smaller, random
| input costs can easily sink you.
|
| If you want to bring back manufacturing you need to
| consider the entire supply chain, and make sure that inputs
| for whatever factory you are bringing in are secure and
| will be equal or cheaper in 20 years. These things need to
| be predictable.
|
| Also, let's not pretend the MAGA movement listens to
| anything other than the propaganda.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| My son-in-law works for a domestic truck manufacturer
| (semis, not pickups). Orders are down because nobody
| knows how much the order will cost, because of tariff
| uncertainty.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| Yes, nothing kills business activity more than
| uncertainty. High prices can be planned for and dealt
| with. Constantly fluctuating ones with no upper bound
| cannot.
| whatevertrevor wrote:
| And lower activity creates more uncertainty, as people
| get laid off, banks start adjusting mortgage rates
| upwards and borrowing becomes more expensive. Leading to
| even less activity and more uncertainty. It's a scary
| road to go down toying with this house of cards at the
| level Trump has been doing.
| hajile wrote:
| When Biden came into office, he kept MOST of Trump's tariffs
| on China and even added a bunch of his own.
|
| Despite the marketing, the tariffs are fairly bi-partisan
| among the congress.
| sebstefan wrote:
| The ones on Chinese EVs to protect the local car industry
| maybe, the blanket 10% he puts on your allies and the 25%
| if the allies are too woke maybe not.
| Alupis wrote:
| Reciprocal tariffs have been something many people (on
| both sides of the isle) have been wishing for forever...
| It's not normally a D vs. R thing, except right now where
| the D's feel a need to play the opposition role.
|
| On the other hand... most of the tariffs you hear about
| aren't real and never had/will-have an impact, and are
| clearly being weaponized as a way to get trading partners
| in-line. Few actual tariffs have been realized as-of
| yet... but if you read the news you'd be led to believe
| everything you buy is tariffed all to hell.
| linuxftw wrote:
| "Tariffs won't work because we won't actually use them" is
| not an argument against tariffs, that's an argument against
| corporate control of the economic levers.
| Alupis wrote:
| > and are sure to disappear in 4 years
|
| I wouldn't be so sure about that. The Biden Admin left in-
| place a lot of Trump foreign policy, and Democrats (the
| likely next admin-party) have been wishing for tariffs for
| years. Currently they're playing their part as the
| "opposition" but I'd bet money most of the tariffs stay
| during the next admin.
|
| Your point about changing every 2 weeks is sound, however.
| nottorp wrote:
| So are they going to try and spread this extra cost to customers
| worldwide?
|
| I'm fine with chips made in Taiwan.
| jajuuka wrote:
| Yeah this reads like an attempt to push the "made in America"
| narrative the admin wants. "Things will cost more but it's made
| in the US" And this is good because...why? It's not about
| broadening the supply chain to the consumers benefit. It's
| about avoiding the disaserous tariff strategy which the company
| isn't even paying in the first place.
| tensor wrote:
| What would be good for the rest of the world is if there were
| SOTA chips that were not produced by the US nor Taiwan.
| Frankly, even the ones produced in Taiwan are under US
| control.
|
| The world needs a healthy diversified CPU/GPU chip market. At
| least there is ARM on the CPU side, but it's not nearly
| enough.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Where could it be? The places with abundant energy are
| where these things establish. US is about at the lower
| limit. Korea, Taiwan, Japan. China has SMIC and Huawei. But
| Europe doesn't have enough energy to run air conditioning.
| They'd struggle to add more industry. India has power
| shortages. Africa isn't reliable. Australia? South America
| too unstable.
| jajuuka wrote:
| That's a good point. I don't think it's a good idea for
| corporations to come in and set up stable energy sources
| to then hoard it themselves. Would be similar to Amazon
| setting up shop in Cartolandia. And long time investment
| plans like China's Belt and Road Initiative don't
| necessarily benefit the host country as much as it
| benefits the builder.
|
| Branching out supply chains and industry is a big problem
| to solve effectively because it touches so many different
| pieces.
| ginko wrote:
| >But Europe doesn't have enough energy to run air
| conditioning.
|
| That's just silly.
| ggreer wrote:
| It's not that dire, but energy costs in the EU are quite
| high compared to the US. US retail prices for electricity
| average 13 cents per kWh.[1] The EU's average is around
| 28 cents per kWh.[2] The only EU countries with advanced
| fabs are Germany and Ireland. In Germany, retail
| electricity is 35 cents per kWh. Ireland is almost as bad
| at 31 cents per kWh. Industrial plants tend to pay lower
| rates and can supplement their grid consumption with
| things like on site solar, but that's also true in the
| US.
|
| 1. https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grap
| her.ph...
|
| 2. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-
| news/w/d...
| jajuuka wrote:
| To a degree sure. I think a common architecture should be
| prioritized to ensure software portability. Similar to
| x86/x64. Where anyone can make hardware for the platform
| and porting software is much easier. Returning to the old
| days of every computer have their own unique architechture
| is not a good idea. Just caused insane fragmentation and
| nobody could truely invest in a computer without being
| worried about not getting certain products or software.
|
| CPU space is definitely easier to disrupt but the GPU space
| requires a HUGE investment and you're fighting uphill
| against proprietary technology like CUDA that has become
| industry standards. Intel, Qualcomm, Samsung and Google
| have made inroads with budget to mid range which is the
| highest selling segment. But to compete with Nvidia or AMD
| on the high end you either need a whole datacenter or many
| years of R&D with very little return for a long time. Apple
| would be on this list but they have siloed off themselves
| entirely.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| The US cost of stationing forces, patrols, and readiness in the
| pacific is probably 20-40 billion USD per year. cut that huge
| subsidy and Taiwan ceases to exist within several years. 5%? we
| should really evaluate if we need a long term dependency on
| taiwan. It would probably be better to evacuate them all.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| There's a lot more to the American defensive posture in the
| Pacific than threatening PRC with MAD if they invade Taiwan.
| DSingularity wrote:
| American defensive posture can center around Hawaii and
| mainland USA will be just fine.
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| Sure if we just compelety ignore our treaty partners in
| Japan, Philipines, India, Korea and US territories in Guam,
| Samoa, Marianas... or bases like Diego Garcia.
| criddell wrote:
| That certainly doesn't sound as unlikely as it once
| did...
| tencentshill wrote:
| But what have they done for Trump lately?
| latchkey wrote:
| I run an AMD NeoCloud. People are extremely price sensitive and
| due to the competitive nature of the industry, I'll likely be the
| one absorbing this increased cost.
| okasaki wrote:
| Your rent is now 20% higher but it's worth it because the
| landlord is an American.
| jabjq wrote:
| This comparison is quite absurd.
| msgodel wrote:
| You don't import apartments or even the materials used to
| manufacture them. Arguing tariffs drive rent prices rather than
| the cost of luxury consumption and corporate capex any more
| than the progressive income tax does is absurd.
| rozap wrote:
| I feel like covid was only yesterday, yet it seems people have
| already forgotten the lessons we learned about lack of supply
| chain resilience. Resilience comes at a cost, and that cost is
| efficiency. That is the tradeoff being made here. It's not just
| that people want to light money on fire, or some misguided maga
| "buy american" nonsense.
|
| Especially silly when the chance of China invading Taiwan is
| very nonzero.
| reverendsteveii wrote:
| If they were worth it you'd already have been buying them. With
| that being said, glad to hear a CEO say "we have to consider the
| resiliency of the supply chain" because JIT as a manufacturing
| philosophy is revealing itself to be what it always was:
| exceedingly fragile, barely adequate when everything is working
| perfectly and subject to massive, multiplicative disruptions when
| everything is not working perfectly.
| elcritch wrote:
| Funny, it's not that different to programming in Node or
| browsers. The JIT is awesome, but theres so many stories of
| fragile performance pits.
| reverendsteveii wrote:
| the concept is the same: do you do work in advance and bear
| the cost of storing it and maybe not using it, or do you do
| work as-needed and hope that the additional cost of trying to
| deliver immediately is less than the cost of storage and
| overrun? the answer seems to be the same, too, "depends on
| whether you have resources to spare and whether the
| environment is stable enough to count on immediate delivery"
| yapyap wrote:
| Of course the AMD CEO would say that, they need to remain in a
| positive light of the mob boss President otherwise they will be
| taxed and or sued.
|
| You see it with Columbia university and that network television
| network that got sued
| knorker wrote:
| 5%-20% sounds like a MUCH lower premium than I expected.
|
| And yes, no matter what you think of America First (I'm not even
| American), that sounds very much worth it.
| dathinab wrote:
| You can get much more then a 5%-20% higher price from the kind of
| customers which really care about US production (I mean like
| government, CIA, NSA, which also get stuff like AMD systems with
| hyper threading disabled or special treatment wrt. management
| units in a CPU etc. I don't mean people caring for the US, for
| that target group, from what I have seen over the years, I guess,
| 5% can work 20% is tricky).
| aylmao wrote:
| I see the point being made here, and yeah 5%-20% extra for what
| amounts to insurance against geopolitics isn't too bad, but
| doesn't this all fall apart when China catches up?
|
| That 5%-20% is worth it now because no one else can fabricate
| competing chips. In a competitive market, 5%-20% can be the
| difference between having the price edge or not. I understand why
| the USA wants TSMC to manufacture outside of Taiwan, but perhaps
| it makes sense to move it not the USA but, say, Mexico?
|
| Chinese car companies seem to be slowly but surely rolling
| American car companies in international markets with great value
| at low prices. The move in this market evidently isn't to move
| manufacturing away from Mexico at a 5%-20% increase in price.
|
| In the chip market there's less immediate competition, but I can
| only imagine it'll come. Hopefully economies of scale would have
| removed this extra 5%-20% by the time China catches up?
| ergocoder wrote:
| With China, the issue isn't really the quality of the product.
| It's the geopolitical issues.
|
| Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and other countries even Philippines and
| Vietnam don't want to depend too much on China. A lot of island
| disputes and so on and so forth.
|
| My guess right now is that China will never catch up because
| Europe, US, Australia, and many other developing countries will
| avoid depending on China critically. This doesn't mean 0% would
| buy from China but it'll never become a critical dependency.
| zeroCalories wrote:
| It's a real shame that the U.S is alienating it's allies
| through aggressive economic policy. Maybe we'll find
| ourselves on the wrong side of that economically resilient
| policy.
| dathinab wrote:
| > My guess right now is that China will never catch up
| because [..]
|
| The problem China is big enough to catch up just by it
| depending on itself + some cheap mass consumer market outlets
| to even further scale production.
|
| Like they have 1408 Million people ~3times the US and their
| education system tries (at least of paper) to give everyone a
| chance to reach silence excellence iff (and only iff) they
| are noticeable above average (but also due to the form of
| their education system for people which certain kinds of
| approaches to thinking which is a major handicap they gave
| themself accidentally). Like either way with that population
| size, priority on catching up on chip production, willingness
| to steal science (through it's not like the US doesn't have a
| habit for that, too) it's just a matter of time until they
| have some truly genius people put into the right kind of
| position with the right kind of resources which will close
| the gap step by step.
| bgnn wrote:
| Oh they will catch up as TSMC amd Samsung are running out of
| steam and Intel is imploding. There's nothing better than
| motivating China to take on this monumental effort than thd
| tariffs and export controls.
| righthand wrote:
| Where will they get the water in Mexico?
| proee wrote:
| Capital expenditures are the dominant cost for semi fabs. Labor
| is actually relatively small. For example, "just" a tester
| machine, which tests parts before final, cost $5-10M each, and
| there are usually rows of these machines as far as the eye can
| see.
| viktorcode wrote:
| I see what she did here. That's just for silicone, not for the
| ready to use product. I expect the final US-made CPU available
| for sale cost to jump significantly higher than 20%
| jt2190 wrote:
| > "I think the economics of it are we have to consider the
| resiliency of the supply chain, I think we learned that during
| the pandemic -- the idea that you think about your supply chains
| not just by the lowest cost, but also about reliability, about
| resiliency, and all those things. I think that's how we're
| thinking about U.S. manufacturing," [AMD CEO Lia Su] said to
| Bloomberg's Ed Ludlow.
|
| This almost sounds verbatim what U.S. Secretary of the Treasury
| Scott Bessent told Bloomberg yesterday, so take the headline
| phrase "worth it" in that context.
| tehjoker wrote:
| Worth remembering that in the medium term, chip manufacturing
| will become so expensive only one leading edge provider will
| remain and they will require the entire world market to remain
| profitable.
| mmmBacon wrote:
| The article doesn't say why the chips have a cost difference. The
| wafer cost of advanced nodes is ~$30k per wafer. Is the wafer
| cost different or is the yield different and hence the reason for
| the variance of 5-20%? All else being equal (same die size/design
| on same process) I suspect that a large part of the cost
| difference is yielded cost due to maturity of operations at the
| Arizona fab. Taiwan has had many years to optimize operations.
| You see this for any product initially when it moves to a new
| production site.
| zhobbs wrote:
| The article quotes the CEO saying yield is comparable:
|
| >TSMC's new Arizona plant is already comparable with those in
| Taiwan when it comes to the measure of yield -- the amount of
| good chips a production run produces per batch -- Su told the
| audience at the forum.
| mmmBacon wrote:
| The overhead cost of a fab is fixed. So hard to understand
| why that would have such a wide variance. It may be true that
| the facility hasn't been fully amortized so in principle it's
| more expensive to make chips there. I can understand it being
| more expensive for many reasons. However I wouldn't expect
| the cost difference to have a large variance. 5-20% is a very
| large range if the yields are comparable.
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| I would have to think personnel cost, no? I'm assuming American
| pay rates are higher than Taiwan's.
|
| More cynically, perhaps the DoD is getting a sweetheart deal
| and TSMC is passing the cost onto customers.
| ethan_smith wrote:
| The 5-20% range likely reflects TSMC's yield learning curve in
| Arizona, with costs trending toward the lower end as the fab
| matures and defect densities approach those of Taiwan's
| established facilities.
| bgnn wrote:
| They brought in a bunch of process engineers from Taiwan to set
| up thr same processes.
|
| It's the limited and expensive talent pool, construction costs
| etc. resulting in a difference. Americans do earn at least 2-3x
| more than someone in Taiwan for a given role.
| alexnewman wrote:
| This is a crazy article. Its title is gonzo . She was clearly
| spitballing. All of Bloomberg is dumber by reading this title
| ranger_danger wrote:
| And the machines that makes these "US" chips... where do they
| come from?
| trynumber9 wrote:
| It's international but I wonder how many people know that about
| third of ASML scanners and steppers are made in Connecticut.
| And all their light sources are made by ex-Cymer in San Diego.
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| > "What I really like about the AI action plan is that it's quite
| actionable," [AMD's CEO] said.
|
| I couldn't help but laugh. And they say software engineers are
| replaceable by AI.
| aiauthoritydev wrote:
| Hard to tell. In this hardware space, there is a lag of few
| years. We would know for certain in 5 years.
| asdfman123 wrote:
| It's funny that this is why "we can't build things here" and also
| why the world's two biggest powers are at a standoff:
|
| 5-20% more expensive prices for just one type of thing
| Seanambers wrote:
| This is from the All in session? ;
|
| https://youtu.be/9WkGNe27r_Q?si=w5BE2tZKdFcI6aC1&t=812
| avhception wrote:
| If that is the cost of keeping the value within the western
| economies, we should pay. Plain and simple. I'd even argue it's
| cheap.
| fishsticks89 wrote:
| If something happens to Taiwan, we won't regret being able to
| produce these chips domestically. If AI keeps growing like it
| does, it might even trigger a conflict.
| kulahan wrote:
| Ah yes, Taiwan - that famously stable nation with no
| existential threats to its very existence.
|
| I don't think this is an "if" situation, but rather a "when".
| There is no question in my mind - it's simply too attractive
| to China. It may not come through all out war, but they will
| eventually claim what they feel is theirs. They operate on
| much more manageable time scales.
| Gee101 wrote:
| What is interesting is if the world is not that reliant on
| Taiwan chips anymore would China really care that much
| about Taiwan?
| Zaiberia wrote:
| Yes, they would. However, if Taiwan wasn't as important
| to the world because of their chips then the world would
| probably not care as much about what communist China
| wants to do to them.
| kortilla wrote:
| Probably, my understanding is that the primary reason
| China cares about Taiwan is internal pressure about the
| separatism. The power Taiwan has is the only reason they
| haven't acted.
| 2muchcoffeeman wrote:
| China is not interested in Taiwan for the chips. They
| want it back since they believe Taiwan is part of China.
| usefulcat wrote:
| Wasn't China already pissed about Taiwan long before
| Taiwan was doing a lot of semiconductor manufacturing?
| internet2000 wrote:
| No, I am absolutely not going to pay a 20% premium on the
| market. I'm sorry but I won't. If this is really crucial to
| national security then the government can subsidize the
| premium. And I know I'm not alone, price speaks louder.
| EA-3167 wrote:
| The government doesn't pay for things, we do through our
| taxes that they spend. So... instead of paying a markup on
| just your own consumption, you want to be taxed to pay for
| the subsidy on EVERYONE'S consumption?
| kulahan wrote:
| Surely we could just move a subsidy around. Do we really
| need ALL of those corn fields? It's not even a particularly
| nutritious crop.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| We are the government. It's us doing the spending. You can
| vote to change it. And if we ever outlaw paid lobbying then
| voting will be even more effective.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| Wait until you learn who the government gets its money from.
| XorNot wrote:
| I love all the people showing up to tell other people
| they'll be sorry if they don't pay more for the same
| product now, but are absolutely opposed to subsidies by the
| government.
|
| I already own a perfectly adequate computer for my needs.
| In every possible way this won't affect me, and infact so
| long as the cheaper product is available for purchase it
| still won't affect me. If I'm a business I'll be 20% better
| off then other local businesses by continuing to not buy
| local anyway. If I'm consumer...well I'll just have more
| stuff I want.
|
| And so on in this way you might want to go read up on The
| Tragedy of the Commons in economic theory and then reflect
| on what one of the primary roles of government actually is.
| avhception wrote:
| This is not about national security. This is about being more
| than a simple consumer. If all your society does is consume,
| eventually, the money runs out.
|
| We need to have know-how, talent and all that stuff to create
| some value. We're bleeding all these things by the minute,
| and I don't want to be around when the critical point is
| reached.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| Enjoy not buying _any_ chips next time there is a supply
| chain hiccup. If COVID didn 't teach you this lesson, I don't
| think you're teachable.
|
| If you're making a product one of the considerations you make
| is how robust your supply chain is. If you fail to make that
| consideration you will get eaten by the organizations that
| do, on a long enough timescale.
| jongjong wrote:
| Yes and surely it's a cost which can be reduced over time by
| improving automation and/or by cutting back on regulations.
| brikym wrote:
| The US also needs to build up more talent which will come
| over the years.
| jychang wrote:
| I doubt that, unless you're willing to pay USA workers Taiwan
| salaries.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| err.. its not crazy after a few years of recession, or even
| pressure on the workforce from AI.
| acchow wrote:
| USA workers will not accept Taiwan salaries.
|
| Numbeo shows the cost of living (including rent) is 45%
| higher in Phoenix than in Hsinchu (where TSMC's 2N is)
|
| Rent is 176% higher.
| wg0 wrote:
| American. Not Western. West and America are drifting apart.
| Icathian wrote:
| I think you're mistaking the name of a cardinal direction for
| a cohesive set of political ideologies.
| esaym wrote:
| Oh I'll have to pay $330 instead of $300 for my CPU. The horror!
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| That's all? No way.
| uses wrote:
| Doesn't this type of thing prove that we can just... start
| manufacturing things domestically if we really wanted to? Which
| would presumably be when it actually makes sense to do so? But it
| mostly doesn't right now, so we mostly don't.
|
| There are certainly benefits to being able to make something down
| the block and quickly iterate. But that's a different thing from
| industrial scale production. And if we really wanted that benefit
| wouldn't we just... do it?
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