[HN Gopher] Apple is fighting for TSMC capacity as Nvidia takes ...
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Apple is fighting for TSMC capacity as Nvidia takes center stage
Author : speckx
Score : 487 points
Date : 2026-01-15 15:02 UTC (7 hours ago)
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(TXT) w3m dump (www.culpium.com)
| outside1234 wrote:
| Ha! Well if it isn't karma that has come for Apple.
|
| (Apple is well known for shoving "lesser vendors" out of the way
| at TSMC)
| ericmay wrote:
| Is it _karma_ or is it just normal business activities? When
| you 're a large player like this you get pricing power. If
| another large player moves in and also has pricing power then
| negotiations and things like that take place. Business deals,
| profits, &c. all ebb and flow and this is no different.
| outside1234 wrote:
| It is just normal business. At the end of the day money talks
| -- and only Nvidia has more money than Apple -- for now.
| cowsandmilk wrote:
| Apple doesn't operate the fab, TSMC does. Apple doesn't shove
| anyone out of the way, TSMC makes those decisions. It is weird
| to blame Apple.
| landl0rd wrote:
| Weird take. If you want to undertake approximately a bajillion
| dollars in capex to prove out and scale up a new node, it is
| extremely to have one massive, anchor customer who will promise
| well in advance to offtake basically the entire thing for a bit
| and who has creditworthiness exceeded by few non-sovereign
| entities, and thus is able to write contracts against which it
| is easy to lend. Also this customer makes little chips (when
| your defect rate is higher) and bigger chips (when your defect
| rate is lower). Of course you don't try to synthesize this
| profile out of a bajillion tiny customers.
| knowitnone3 wrote:
| so if you win an ebay auction, did you shove "lesser people"
| out of the way?
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Hey Apple, how does it feel?
| knowitnone3 wrote:
| feels pretty good. thanks for asking
| hu3 wrote:
| customers will pay the bill so it doesn't matter
| mikelitoris wrote:
| How the turn tables
| webdevver wrote:
| applesisters...
| linkage wrote:
| You could at least link to a Satania pic
| Fiveplus wrote:
| Calling Nvidia niche feels a bit wild given their status-quo
| right now, but from a foundry perspective, it seems true. Apple
| is the anchor tenant that keeps the lights on across 12 different
| mature and leading-edge fabs.
|
| Nvidia is the high-frequency trader hammering the newest node
| until the arb closes. Stability usually trades at a discount
| during a boom, but Wei knows the smartphone replacement cycle is
| the only predictable cash flow. Apple is smart. If the AI capex
| cycle flattens in late '27 as models hit diminishing returns,
| does Apple regain pricing power simply by being the only customer
| that can guarantee wafer commits five years out?
| rafterydj wrote:
| I tend to agree with you, feels to me like the root of this is
| essentially whether foundries will "go all in" on AI like the
| rest of the S&P 500. But why trade away one trillion-dollar
| customer for another trillion-dollar customer if the first one
| is never going away, and the second one might?
| Fiveplus wrote:
| I think it is less of a trade and more of a symbiotic capital
| cycle, if I can call it that?
|
| Nvidia's willingness to pay exorbitant prices for early 2nm
| wafers subsidizes the R&D and the brutal yield-learning curve
| for the entire node. But you can't run a sustainable gigafab
| solely on GPUs...the defect density math is too punishing.
| You need a high-volume, smaller-die customer (Apple) to come
| in 18 months later, soak up the remaining 90% of capacity and
| amortize that depreciation schedule over a decade.
| alex43578 wrote:
| Isn't the smaller die aspect more valuable early in the
| node's maturity, where defects are less punishing?
| Fiveplus wrote:
| That is the traditional textbook yield curve logic, if
| I'm not wrong? Smaller area = higher probability of a
| surviving die on a dirty wafer. But I wonder if the sheer
| margin on AI silicon basically breaks that rule? If
| Nvidia can sell a reticle-sized package for 25k-30k USD,
| they might be perfectly happy paying for a wafer that
| only yields 30-40% good dies.
|
| Apple OTOH operates at consumer electronics price points.
| They need mature yields (>90%) to make the unit economics
| of an iPhone work. There's also the binning factor I am
| curious about. Nvidia can disable 10% of the cores on a
| defective GPU and sell it as a lower SKU. Does Apple have
| that same flexibility with a mobile SoC where the thermal
| or power envelope is so tightly coupled to the battery
| size?
| genocidicbunny wrote:
| I am curious about the binning factor too since in the
| past, AMD and Intel have both made use of defect binning
| to still sell usable chips by disabling cores. Perhaps
| Apple is able to do the same with their SoCs? It's not
| likely to be as granular as Nvidia who can disable much
| smaller areas of the silicon for each of their cores. On
| the other hand, the specifics of the silicon and the
| layout of the individual cores, not to mention the spread
| of defects over the die might mitigate that advantage.
| ricw wrote:
| They do bin their chips. Across the range (A- and
| M-series) they have the same chip with fewer / disabled
| cpu and gpu cores. You pray a premium for ones with more
| cores. Unsure about the chip frequencies - Apple doesn't
| disclose those openly from what I know.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| I thought they binned CPUs for things like AppleTV and
| lower cost iPads?
| jsheard wrote:
| Yeah, most of their chips have two or more bins with
| different core configs, and the lower bins probably use
| salvaged dies.
|
| For example the regular M4 can have 4 P-cores / 6 E-cores
| / 10 GPU cores, or 3/6/10 cores, or 4/4/8 cores,
| depending on the device.
|
| They even do it on the smaller A-series chips - the A15
| could be 2/4/5, 2/4/4, or 2/3/5.
| alex43578 wrote:
| With current AI pricing for silicon, I think the math's
| gone out the window.
|
| For Apple, they have binning flexibility, with
| Pro/Max/Ultra, all the way down to iPads - and that's
| after the node yields have been improved via the
| gazillion iPhone SoC dies.
|
| NVIDIAs flexibility came from using some of those binned
| dies for GeForce cards, but the VRAM situation is clearly
| making that less important, as they're cutting some of
| those SKUs for being too vram heavy relative to MSRP.
| wtallis wrote:
| > For Apple, they have binning flexibility, with
| Pro/Max/Ultra, all the way down to iPads
|
| The Pro and Max chips are _different dies_ , and the
| Ultra currently isn't even the same generation as the
| Max. And the iPads have never used any of those larger
| dies.
|
| > NVIDIAs flexibility came from using some of those
| binned dies for GeForce cards
|
| NVIDIA's datacenter chips don't even have display
| outputs, and have little to no fixed-function graphics
| hardware (raster and raytracing units), and entirely
| different memory PHYs (none of NVIDIA's consumer cards
| have ever used HBM).
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| There are levels inside pro, max, and ultra that might be
| the product of binning?
| sgjohnson wrote:
| "Ultra" isn't even binned - it's just 2x "Max" chips
| connected together.
|
| Otherwise, yes, if a chip doesn't make M4 Max, it can
| make M4 Pro. If not, M4. If not, A18 Pro. If not that,
| A18.
|
| And even all of the above mentioned marketing names come
| in different core configurations. M4 Max can be 14 CPU
| Cores / 32 GPU cores, and it can also be 16 CPU cores and
| 40 GPU cores.
|
| So yeah, I'd agree that Apple has _extreme_ binning
| flexibility. It's likely also the reason why we got A19 /
| A19 Pro / M5 first, and we still don't have M5 Pro or M5
| Max yet. Yields not high enough for M5 Max yet.
|
| Unfortunately I don't think they bin down even lower
| (say, to S chips used in Apple Watches), but maybe in the
| future they will.
|
| In retrospect, Apple ditching Intel was truly a
| gamechanging move. They didn't even have to troll
| everyone by putting an Intel i9 into a chassis that
| couldn't even cool an i7 to boost the comparison figures,
| but I guess they had to hedge their bet.
| wtallis wrote:
| > yes, if a chip doesn't make M4 Max, it can make M4 Pro.
| If not, M4. If not, A18 Pro. If not that, A18.
|
| No, that's entirely wrong. All of those are different
| dies. The larger chips wouldn't even _fit_ in phones, or
| most iPad motherboards, and I 'm not sure a M4 Max or M4
| Pro SoC package could even fit in a MacBook Air.
|
| As a general rule, if you think a company might ever be
| selling a piece of silicon with _more than half_ of it
| disabled, you 're probably wrong and need to re-check
| your facts and assumptions.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| No, I think you have it wrong.
|
| There are two levels of Max Chip, but think of a Max as
| two pros on die (this is simplification, you can also
| think of as pro as being two normal cores tied together),
| so a bad max can't be binned into a pro. But a high-spec
| Max can be binned into a low-spec Max.
| alex43578 wrote:
| They're binning within those product lines - both NVIDIA
| and Apple.
|
| Not binning an M4 Max for an iPhone, but an M4 Pro with a
| few GPU or CPU cores disabled is clearly a thing.
|
| Same for NVIDIA. The 4080 is a 4090 die with some SMs
| disabled.
| wtallis wrote:
| > The 4080 is a 4090 die with some SMs disabled.
|
| The desktop 4090 uses the AD102 die, the laptop 4090 and
| desktop 4080 use the AD103 die, and the laptop 4080 uses
| the AD104 die. I'm not at all denying that binning is a
| thing, but you and other commenters are exaggerating the
| extent of it and underestimating how many separate dies
| are designed to span a wide product line like GPUs or
| Apple's computers/tablets/phones.
| atq2119 wrote:
| Datacenter GPU dies cannot be binned for Geforce because
| they lack fixed function graphics features. Raytracing
| acceleration in particular must be non-trivial area that
| you wouldn't want to spend on a datacenter die. Not to
| mention the data fabric is probably pretty different.
| alex43578 wrote:
| I'm not saying their binning between data center and
| 3060s, but within gaming and between gaming and RTX Pro
| cards, there's binning.
|
| As you cut SMs from a die you move from the 3090 down the
| stack, for instance. That's yield management right there.
| touisteur wrote:
| The A40, L40S and Blackwell 6000 Pro Server have RT
| cores. 3 datacenter GPUs.
|
| If you want binning in action, the RTX ones other than
| the top ones, are it. Look for the A30 too, of which I
| was surprised there was no successor. Either they had
| better yields on Hopper or they didn't get enough from
| the A30...
| alt227 wrote:
| Why are foundries going 'All In' on AI? They fab chips for
| customers, doesnt matter what chips they are and who the
| customer is.'Who will pay the most for us to make their chips
| first' is the only question TMSC will be asking. The market
| of the customer is irrelevant.
| epolanski wrote:
| Regardless of that, fab industry is based on a short and mid
| term auction-like planning.
|
| If Nvidia pays more, Apple has to match.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| > Regardless of that, fab industry is based on a short and
| mid term auction-like planning
|
| Not a system that necessarily works all that well if one
| player has a short-term ability to vastly outspending all the
| rest.
|
| You can't let all your other customers die just because
| Nvidia is flush with cash this quarter...
| xp84 wrote:
| > die
|
| Is the argument that Apple will go out of business? AAPL?
|
| Wait,
|
| > one player has a short-term ability to vastly outspending
| all the rest.
|
| I assure you, Apple has the long-term and short-term
| ability to spend like a drunken sailor all day and all
| night, indefinitely, and still not go out of business. Of
| course they'd _prefer_ not to. But there is no 'ability to
| pay' gap here between these multi-trillion-dollar
| companies.
|
| Apple will be forced to match or beat the offer coming from
| whoever is paying more. It will cost them a little bit of
| their hilariously-high margins. If they don't, they'll have
| to build less advanced chips or something. But their
| survival is not in doubt and TSMC knows that.
| bigyabai wrote:
| > Not a system that necessarily works all that well if one
| player has a short-term ability to vastly outspending all
| the rest.
|
| Well yeah, people were identifying that back when Apple
| bought out the entirety of the 5nm node for iPhones and
| e-tchotchkes. It was sorta implicitly assumed that any
| business that builds better hardware than Apple would boot
| them out overnight.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| > It was sorta implicitly assumed that any business that
| builds better hardware than Apple would boot them out
| overnight
|
| It's not "build better hardware" though, it's "continue
| to ship said hardware for X number of years". If someone
| buys out the entire fab capacity and then goes under next
| year, TSMC is left holding the bag
| bigyabai wrote:
| It's not that, either. Low-margin, high-volume contracts
| are the worst business you can take. It devalues TSMC's
| work and creates an unnatural downward force on the price
| of cutting-edge silicon. By ignoring Apple's demands
| they're creating natural competition that raises the
| value of their entire portfolio.
|
| It really is about making better hardware. Apple _would_
| be out-bidding Nvidia right now, but only if the iPhone
| had equivalent value-add to Nvidia hardware. Alas,
| iPhones are overpriced and underpowered, most people will
| agree.
| epolanski wrote:
| That's exactly how it is supposed to work and Apple has
| outspent competitors for ages getting prio.
|
| TSMC isn't running a charity, it sells capacity to the
| highest bidder.
|
| Of course customers as big as Apple will have a
| relationship and insane volumes that they will be
| guaranteed important quotes regardless.
| michaelt wrote:
| Why should it be short term, though?
|
| If it takes 4 years to build a new fab and Apple is
| willing to commit to paying pay the price of an entire
| fab, for chips to be delivered in 4 years time - why not
| take the order and build the capacity?
| epolanski wrote:
| I mean, these things are likely already written down and
| Apple still gets lots of capacity for the reasons you
| mention.
|
| But Nvidia has also spent billions/year in TSMC for more
| than a decade and this just keeps increasing.
| Bombthecat wrote:
| I doubt that we will hit diminishing returns in AI. We still
| find new ways to make them faster or cheaper or better or even
| train themselves...
|
| The flat line prediction is now 2 years old...
| aaronblohowiak wrote:
| Feels like top of s curve lately
| eikenberry wrote:
| I thought the prediction was that the scaling of LLMs making
| them better would plateau, not that all advancement would
| stop? And that has pretty much happened as all the
| advancements over the last year or more have been
| architectural, not from scaling up.
| sfn42 wrote:
| You say that, but to me they seem roughly the same as they've
| been for a good while. Wildly impressive technology, very
| useful, but also clearly and confidently incorrect a lot.
| Most of the improvement seems to have come from other avenues
| - search engine integration, image processing (still blows my
| mind every time I send a screenshot to a LLM and it gets it)
| and stuff like that.
|
| Sure maybe they do better in some benchmarks, but to me the
| experience of using LLMs is and has been limited by their
| tendency to be confidently incorrect which betrays their
| illusion of intelligence as well as their usefulness. And I
| don't really see any clear path to getting past this hurdle,
| I think this may just be about as good as they're gonna get
| in that regard. Would be great if they prove me wrong.
| anoojb wrote:
| So let's say TMSC reciprocated Apple's consistency as a
| customer by giving them preferential treatment for capacity.
| It's good business after all.
|
| However, everyone knows that good faith reciprocity at that
| scale is not rewarded. Apple is ruthless. There are probably
| thousands of untold stories of how hard Apple has hammered it's
| suppliers over the years.
|
| While Apple has good consumer brand loyalty, they arguably
| treat their suppliers relatively poorly compared to the Gold
| standard like Costco.
| bethekidyouwant wrote:
| Agreed TSMC can do whatever they want. in 2027 no other fabs
| will match what tsmc has today, anything that requires the
| latest process node is going to get more expensive, so your
| apple silicone and your AMD chips
| high_na_euv wrote:
| As of today Intel is very around leading node
| girvo wrote:
| I'll believe it when I see it (at scale). I _hope_ 18A is
| good enough as competition is good, and a weak Intel is
| bad for us all.
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| > they arguably treat their suppliers relatively poorly
| compared to the Gold standard like Costco.
|
| I'm not saying you're wrong but you're previous paragraph
| sounding like you were wondering if it was the case vs. here
| you're saying it's known. Is this all true? Do they have a
| reputation for hammering their suppliers?
| xp84 wrote:
| Apple is so notoriously ravenous for profit margin that
| they can't not be that way.
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| It felt like a more confident statement and I was
| legitimately asking. I have little love for Apple.
| Ditched my Mac Studio earlier this year for a Linux only
| build after 20 years of being on Macs. I say this because
| I think folks think I am trying to sealion/"just ask
| questions:tm:" or some nonsense, when I am legitimately
| asking if this is a documented practice and what the
| extent is. I am not finding it easy to find info on this.
| bigyabai wrote:
| Apple dealt exclusively with Chinese labor prices until
| they were directly threatened by the POTUS. You tell me.
| yurishimo wrote:
| I got a bridge to sell you if you think that Apple is
| going to bring any of their manufacturing to the US...
| bigyabai wrote:
| I've seen the leaked BOMs, I'm not dumb enough to think
| that Americans can match it.
| savorypiano wrote:
| Where do you find the leaked BOMs?
| bigyabai wrote:
| RedNote usually, before it's deleted.
| godzillabrennus wrote:
| It would be a $6000 phone if they built it in America.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c86jx18y9e2o
|
| Apple has responded and has started moving a lot of
| manufacturing out of China. It just makes sense for risk
| management.
| mullingitover wrote:
| Well, from your article:
|
| > China will remain the country of origin for the vast
| majority of total products sold outside the US, he added.
|
| And international sales are a solid majority of Apple's
| revenue.
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| From your article:
|
| > Meanwhile, Vietnam will be the chief manufacturing hub
| "for almost all iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and AirPods
| product sold in the US".
|
| > We do expect the majority of iPhones sold in US will
| have India as their country of origin," Mr Cook said.
|
| Still not made in the US and no plan to change that. They
| will be selling products made in India/Vietnam
| domestically and products made in China internationally.
|
| The tariffs are not bringing these jobs home.
| boringg wrote:
| Counter argument is that is NVIDIA friendly to their supply
| chain? I have to think that maybe they are with their massive
| margins because they can be - their end buyer is currently
| willing to absorb costs at no expense. But I don't know, and
| that will change as their business changes.
|
| Your underlying statement implies that whoever is replacing
| apple is a better buyer which I don't think is necessarily
| true.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| If your customers are known to be antagonistic to business
| partners, the correct answer is to diversify them as much
| as you can, even at reasonable costs from anything else.
|
| That means deprioritizing your largest customer.
| boringg wrote:
| Fair I feel like that also speaks to nation+states trade
| policy.
|
| Also theres the devil you know and the devil you dont
| know.
| simonh wrote:
| Yep, you can be close allies with a nation and have many
| shared interests, and even a trade deficit with them as
| we in Britain did, and then they stab you in the back
| with tariffs.
| Y-bar wrote:
| > EVGA Terminates Relationship With Nvidia, Leaves GPU
| Business
|
| > According to Han, Nvidia has been difficult to work with
| for some time now. Like all other GPU board partners, EVGA
| is only told the price of new products when they're
| revealed to everyone on stage, making planning difficult
| when launches occur soon after. Nvidia also has tight
| control over the pricing of GPUs, limiting what partners
| can do to differentiate themselves in a competitive market.
|
| https://www.gamespot.com/articles/evga-terminates-
| relationsh...
| boringg wrote:
| So not favorable to apple as a buyer.
| Y-bar wrote:
| Funnily enough Apple and Nvidia has old beef with one
| another, this especially led them to sever ties:
|
| https://www.semiaccurate.com/2010/07/11/investigation-
| confir...
| philistine wrote:
| Nvidia is famously a pain to work with. Apple vowed never
| to use their chips, Microsoft and Sony can't get them to
| make any GPU for their consoles.
|
| The only complete package integrator that manages to make a
| relationship work with Nvidia is Nintendo.
| randall wrote:
| I think that works out tremendously well for Nintendo,
| especially when you look at the Wii-U vs the Switch.
|
| I shot a video at CNET in probably 2011 which was a
| single touchscreen display (i think it was the APX 2500
| prototype iirc?) and it has the precise dimensions to the
| switch 1.
|
| Nintendo was reluctantly a hardware company... they're a
| game company who can make hardware, but they know they're
| best when they own the stack.
| 7speter wrote:
| > The only complete package integrator that manages to
| make a relationship work with Nvidia is Nintendo.
|
| And thats probably because Nintendo isn't adding any
| pressure to neither TSMC nor Nvidia capacity wise; iirc
| Nintendo uses something like Maxwell or Pascal on really
| mature processes for Switch chips/socs.
| Macha wrote:
| And also the Switch 1 was just the hardware for a nvidia
| shield tablet from nVidia's perspective, without the
| downside of managing the customer facing side and with
| the greater volume from Nintendo's market reach. (Not
| that it wasn't more than that for consumers or Nintendo,
| just talking nvidia here)
| Aurornis wrote:
| At this scale and volume, it's not really about good faith.
|
| Changing fabs is non-trivial. If they pushed Apple to a point
| where they had to find an alternative (which is another
| story) and Apple did switch, they would have to work extra
| hard to get them back in the future. Apple wouldn't want to
| invest twice in changing back and forth.
|
| On the other hand, TSMC knows that changing fabs is not
| really an option and Apple doesn't want to do it anyway, so
| they have leverage to squeeze.
|
| At this level, everyone knows it's just business and it comes
| down to optimizing long-term risk/reward for each party.
| CodeWriter23 wrote:
| Apple is the company that just over 10 years ago made a
| strategic move to remove Intel from their supply chain by
| purchasing a semiconductor firm and licensing ARM. Managing
| 'painful' transitions is a core competency of theirs.
| wtallis wrote:
| Which acquisition are you referring to? Apple bought PA
| Semi in 2008 and Intrinsity in 2010.
| Zafira wrote:
| I think you're correct that they're good at just ripping
| the band-aid off, but the details seem off. AFAIK, Apple
| has _always_ had a license with ARM and a very unique one
| since they were one of the initial investors when it was
| spun out from Acorn. In fact, my understanding is that
| Apple is the one that insisted they call themselves
| Advanced RISC Machines Ltd. because they did not want
| Acorn (a competitor) in the name of a company they were
| investing in.
| philistine wrote:
| Apple has used both Samsung and TSMC for its chips in the
| past. Until the A7 it was Samsung, A8 was TSMC, and the A9
| was dual-sourced by both! Apple is used to switching
| between suppliers fairly often for a tech company; it's not
| that it's too hard for them to switch fab, it's that TSMC
| is the only competitive fab right now.
|
| There are rumours that Intel might have won some business
| from them in 2 years. I could totally see Apple turning to
| Intel for the Mac chips, since they're much lower volume. I
| know it sounds crazy, we just got rid of Intel, but I'm
| talking using Intel as a fab, not going back to x86. Those
| are done.
| lukan wrote:
| But wasn't the reason they split with Samsung because
| they copied the iphone in the perspective of Jobs (to
| which he reacted with thermonuclear threats)?
|
| They did had the expertise building it after all. What
| would happen, if TSMC now would build a M1 clone? I doubt
| this is a way anyone wants to go, but it seems a implied
| threat to me that is calculated in.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| Job's thermonuclear threats were about Android & Google,
| not Samsung because Schmidt was on Apple's board during
| the development of Android.
|
| > "I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I
| will spend every penny of Apple's $40 billion in the
| bank, to right this wrong. I'm going to destroy Android,
| because it's a stolen product. I'm willing to go
| thermonuclear war on this."
|
| The falling out with Samsung was related, but more about
| the physical look of the phone
| fragmede wrote:
| Doesn't seem likely, TBH. Nevermind the legal agreements
| they would be violating, TSMC fabs Qualcomm's Snapdragon
| line of ARM processors. The M1 is good, but not _that_
| good (it 's a couple generations old by this point, for
| one). Samsung had a phone line of their own to put it in
| as well. TSMC does not.
| chippiewill wrote:
| I thought Intel was too far behind on their process
| nodes?
| wtallis wrote:
| At the end of the month, laptops with Intel's latest
| processors will start shipping. These use Intel's 18A
| process for the CPU chiplet. That makes Intel the first
| fab to ship a process using backside power delivery.
| There's no third party testing yet to verify if Intel is
| still far behind TSMC when power, performance and die
| size are all considered, but Intel is definitely making
| progress, and their execs have been promising more for
| the future, such as their 14A process.
| 7speter wrote:
| I would imagine they could split their orders between
| different fabricators; they can put in orders for the most
| cutting edge chips for the latest Macs and iPhones at TSMC
| and go elsewhere for less cutting edge chips?
| fsckboy wrote:
| presumably they already do that (since non cutting edge
| chip fab is likely to be more competitive and less
| expensive) so, given they are already doing that, this
| problem refers to the cutting edge allocations which are
| getting scare as exemplified at least by Nvidia's growth
| MBCook wrote:
| Not all of Apple's chips need to be fabbed at the smallest
| size, those could certainly go elsewhere. I'm sure they
| already do.
|
| Is there anyone who can match TSMC at this point for the
| top of the line M or A chips? Even if Intel was ready and
| Apple wanted to would they be able to supply even 10% of
| what Apple needs for the yearly iPhone supply?
| jongjong wrote:
| It's ridiculous that a trillion dollar company feels
| beholden to a supplier. With that kind of money, it should
| be trivial to switch. People forget Nvidia didn't even
| exist 35 years ago. It would probably take like 3 to 5
| years to catch up with the benefit of hindsight and
| existing talent and tools?
|
| And anyway consumers don't really need beefy devices
| nowadays. Running local LLM on a smartphone is a terrible
| idea due to battery life and no graphics card; AI is going
| to be running on servers for quite some time if not
| forever.
|
| It's almost as if there is a constant war to suppress
| engineer wages... That's the only variable being affected
| here which could benefit from increased competition.
|
| If tech sector is so anti-competitive, the government
| should just seize it and nationalize it. It's not
| capitalism when these megacorps put all this superficial
| pressure but end up making deals all the time. We need more
| competition, no deals! If they don't have competition,
| might as well have communism.
| cgio wrote:
| It can be interpreted a different way too. Apple is just
| a channel for TSMCs technology. Also the cost to build a
| fab that advanced, in say a 3 year horizon, let alone
| immediately available, is not one even Apple can commit
| to without cannibalising its core business.
| weslleyskah wrote:
| I know you are maybe joking but I don't think the
| government nationalizing the tech sector would be a good
| idea. They can pull down the salaries even more if they
| want. It can become a dead end job with you stuck on
| archaic technology from older systems.
|
| Government jobs should only be an option if there are
| enough social benefits.
| jongjong wrote:
| I'm joking yes but as an engineer who has seen the
| bureaucracy in most big tech companies, the joke is
| getting less funny over time.
|
| I've met many software engineers who call themselves
| communists. I can kind of understand. This kind of
| communist-like bureaucracy doesn't work well in a
| capitalist environment.
|
| It's painful to work in tech. It's like our hands are
| tied and are forced to do things in a way we know is
| inefficient. Companies use 'security' as an excuse to
| restrict options (tools and platforms), treat engineers
| as replaceable cogs as an alternative to trusting them to
| do their job properly... And the companies harvest what
| they sow. They get reliable cogs, well versed in
| compliance and groupthink and also coincidentally full-
| blown communists; they're the only engineers remaining
| who actually enjoy the insane bureaucracy and the social
| climbing opportunities it represents given the lack of
| talent.
| weslleyskah wrote:
| I understand completely.
|
| I'm going through a computer engineering degree at the
| moment, but I am thinking about pursuing Law later on.
|
| Looking at other paths: Medicine requires expensive
| schooling and isn't really an option after a certain age
| and law, on the other hand, opened its doors too widely
| and now has a large underclass of people with third-tier
| law degrees.
|
| Perhaps you can try to accept the realities of the system
| while trying to live the best life that you can?
|
| Psyching yourself all the way, trying to find some sort
| of escape towards a good life with freedom later on...
| dheera wrote:
| No public company will be loyal or nice to their suppliers.
| That is just not in the playbook for public companies. They
| have "fiduciary duty", not human duty.
|
| Private companies can be nice to their suppliers. Owners can
| choose to stay loyal to suppliers they went to high school
| with, even if it isn't the most cost-efficient.
| hinkley wrote:
| Apple loaned TSMC money in order to build manufacturing
| capacity back around the M1 era. They've done that for a
| number of suppliers and the "interest payments" were priority
| access to capacity. Everyone was complaining about how Apple
| got ARM chips while others had to wait in line.
|
| That said, they did that for a sapphire glass supplier for
| the Apple Watch and when their machines had QC problems they
| dropped them like a rock and went back to Corning.
|
| But is that really any different from any other supplier? And
| who tf do you think they're going to drop TSMC _for_ right
| now? They are the cock of the walk.
| bigyabai wrote:
| > And who tf do you think they're going to drop TSMC for
| right now?
|
| Don't look now: https://www.macrumors.com/2025/11/28/intel-
| rumored-to-supply...
| leoc wrote:
| Even if Apple isn't very good at reciprocating faithful
| service from its suppliers, there's also the matter of how it
| treats suppliers who cause it problems instead.
| boplicity wrote:
| Suppliers really hate working with Costco. They're slow to
| pay, allow for only small margins, and often need too high of
| a percentage of a businesses revenue, all of which is not
| friendly towards suppliers.
| sellmesoap wrote:
| About 17 years ago I worked at a company that was clamoring
| to get products into Costco, when we did I was shocked at the
| fees they charged us for returns. If they're the gold
| standard for supplier relations it's a wonder anyone bothers
| being a supplier.
| apercu wrote:
| "Apple is smart. If the AI capex cycle flattens in late '27 as
| models hit diminishing returns, does Apple regain pricing power
| simply by being the only customer that can guarantee wafer
| commits five years out?"
|
| That's the take I would pursue if I were Apple.
|
| A quiet threat of "We buy wafers on consumer demand curves.
| You're selling them on venture capital and hype"
| bigyabai wrote:
| Nvidia is not a venture capital outlet. They are a self-
| sustaining business with several high-margin customers that
| will buy out their whole product line faster than any iPhone
| or Mac.
|
| From TSMC's perspective, Apple is the one that needs
| financial assistance. If they wanted the wafers more than
| Nvidia, they'd be paying more. But they don't.
| toasterlovin wrote:
| > several high-margin customers
|
| This is the "venture capital and hype" being referred to,
| not Nvidia themselves.
| apercu wrote:
| Thanks. I didn't think my comment was super nuanced.
| bigyabai wrote:
| But Nvidia has had high-profile industry partners for
| decades. Nintendo isn't "venture capital and hype" nor is
| PC gaming and HPC datacenter workloads.
|
| That line is purified cope.
| toasterlovin wrote:
| But Nvidia wasn't able to compete with Apple for capacity
| on new process nodes with Nintendo volumes (the concept
| is laughable; compare Apple device unit volumes to game
| console unit volumes). What has changed in the
| semiconductor industry is overwhelming demand for AI
| focused GPUs, and that is paid for largely with
| speculative VC money (at this point, at least; AI
| companies are starting to figure out monetization).
| Tuna-Fish wrote:
| Why should that change TSMC decision making even a little?
|
| The reality is that TSMC has no competition capable of
| shipping an equivalent product. If AI fizzles out completely,
| the only way Apple can choose to not use TSMC is if they
| decide to ship an inferior product.
|
| A world where TSMC drains all the venture capital out of all
| the AI startups, using NVidia as an intermediary, and then
| all the bubble pops and they all go under is a perfectly
| happy place for TSMC. In these market conditions they are
| asking cash upfront. The worst that can happen is that they
| overbuild capacity using other people's money that they don't
| have to pay back, leaving them in an even more dominant
| position in the crash that follows.
| apercu wrote:
| Because apple can play hard(er) ball in 12 or 18 or 24
| months when this (likely) irrational spend spree dies?
|
| Business is a little more nuanced than this audience
| thinks, and it's silly to think Apple has no leverage.
| 827a wrote:
| I would also bet significant money that Apple's unique market
| position will give them the confidence to invest in in-house
| fabrication before 2030.
| eschneider wrote:
| Very much this.
| paulmist wrote:
| Would it be feasible for them to buy Intel instead? Starting
| your own foundry would likely take over a decade.
| 827a wrote:
| Yup; or potentially just purchasing a fab from them, given
| that Intel has signaled they want to leverage TSMC more,
| and much of Intel's remaining value is wrapped up in
| server-grade chips that Apple wouldn't be interested in.
|
| But also; Apple is one of the very few companies at their
| size that seems to have the political environment to make,
| and more importantly succeed, at decade investments. The
| iPhone wasn't an obvious success for 5 or 6 years. They
| started designing their own iPhone chips ~the iPhone 4
| iirc, and pundits remarked: this isn't a good idea; today,
| the M5 in the iPad Pro outperforms every chip made by
| EVERYONE else in the world, by 25%, at a tenth the power
| draw and no active cooling (e.g. 9950X3D). Apple Maps
| (enough said). We're seeing similar investments today,
| things we could call "failures" that in 10 years we'll
| think were _obviously_ going to be successful (cough vision
| pro).
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Apple has to price in the risk of the US government forcing
| their hand in various ways. They have a negotiating
| disadvantage.
| onion2k wrote:
| Nvidia have been using TSMC since the Riva 128. That's before
| Apple started making any of their own silicon. GPUs are easily
| as predictable as mobile phones.
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| > _GPUs are easily as predictable as mobile phones_
|
| They really, absolutely, are not.
|
| It's not about "will there be a new hardware", it's about "is
| their order quantity predictable"
| kelnos wrote:
| On the other hand, it's not like Apple can just switch fabs
| without any cost or difficulty. Sure, TSMC is undoubtedly happy
| to have a customer with predictable needs, but Apple is also
| subject to some level of lock-in.
| jonas21 wrote:
| AI capex may or may not flatten in the near future (and I don't
| necessarily see a reason why it would). But smartphone capex
| already has.
|
| Like smartphones, AI chips also have a replacement cycle. AI
| chips depreciate quickly -- not because the old ones go bad,
| but because the new ones are so much better in performance and
| efficiency than the previous generation. While smartphones
| aren't making huge leaps every year like they used to, AI chips
| still are -- meaning there's a stronger incentive to upgrade
| every cycle for these chips than smartphone processors.
| chuckadams wrote:
| > AI chips depreciate quickly -- not because the old ones go
| bad
|
| I've heard that it's exactly that, reports of them burning
| out every 2-3 years. Haven't seen any hard numbers though.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Lifetime curve is something they can control. If they can
| predict replacement rate, makes sense to make chips go bad
| on the same schedule, saving on manufacturing costs.
| WD-42 wrote:
| Karma's a bit.
| knowitnone3 wrote:
| not a word?
| etempleton wrote:
| Explains why Apple is looking to diversify their fabs with Intel.
| If Intel can stay on their current trajectory and become a
| legitimate alternative they will do very well as a fab with
| additional available capacity.
| bilekas wrote:
| Maybe I missed something but aren't Intel looking to wind down
| some of their production ?
| alex43578 wrote:
| The key here is Intel is expanding the idea of operating
| their fab for an external customer (foundry services). What
| they're doing with specific fabs or processes is less
| important relative to their bigger emphasis on working for a
| client like Apple.
| coder543 wrote:
| Not that I've heard. I searched and I see nothing. Where has
| Intel said they are winding down chip fabrication?
| bilekas wrote:
| I'm thinking back to over the summer, they were reducing
| their work force and changing the previous CEO's direction.
|
| https://www.manufacturingdive.com/news/intel-
| layoffs-25-perc...
| etempleton wrote:
| In some areas they may be shifting resources. But a lot
| has happened since last summer. They have received some
| cash infusions and 18a is in full production with yields,
| apparently, at acceptable levels. Rumors are Apple has
| already signed on.
| bilekas wrote:
| Ah okay, that's good news actually, would love to see
| Intel growing more. I know I'm rooting for their GPU
| range too.
| BeetleB wrote:
| New CEO said he'll continue with Foundry provided he gets
| significant customers to justify the cost. In a recent
| comment/press release, Intel said they are continuing
| production on 14A. Ergo, they have external customers (or
| Trump is bullying him into it, but I suspect it's mostly
| the former).
| 01100011 wrote:
| That's great! Apple has the resources to incentivize and invest
| in alternate production capacity(Intel, Samsung, or others).
| Sure, it will take years, but a thousand mile journey begins with
| one step...
| SecretDreams wrote:
| Apple is actually a big reason why TSMC is the king of fabs
| today. They were a reliable cash source for years before TSMC
| was even ahead of Intel.
|
| Apple can and should do it again!
| nonethewiser wrote:
| Fabs are in kind of a catch 22. They need big business to
| improve and to get lots of business they need to be
| competitive. Im mostly familiar with that narrative in terms
| of Intel's current uphill battle - was it really the same for
| TSMC? I guess maybe there was a similar dynamic except the
| playing field was more even at that time, so it was a bit
| less of a catch 22.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| ...and then China invades Taiwan, and nobody ain't getting
| nothing.
| Antibabelic wrote:
| I feel like China invading Taiwan isn't happening in our
| lifetimes. Yes, they stand to benefit from it, but I doubt any
| of the people in charge of decision making are that interested
| in rocking the boat. There's nobody forcing their hand and the
| country is doing great without needing to invade anyone.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| They are 100% going to force the issue.
|
| It will likely be a naval plus air blockade to force a
| political solution to avoid the messiness of an invasion, but
| time is on China's side there.
| alex43578 wrote:
| Is time on their side?
|
| Long term: demographics are worsening for China relative to
| now or 5 years ago.
|
| Short term: China doesn't yet have viable homegrown
| replacements for ASML, TSMC, etc.
|
| Really short term: China blockading Taiwan and suffering
| the economic fallout would be much more painful than US
| blockading Cuba/Venezuela/etc.
|
| A decisive kinetic action or a very soft political action,
| rather than a blockade seems more viable in the current
| state.
| redhed wrote:
| There's some intersection point between long term
| decreasing in China's ability (demographic collapse) and
| long term increase in China's ability (their current
| build up of military hardware in air, land, and sea that
| is currently outpacing America's). Maybe somewhere in
| 10-20 years where their regional military power is much
| higher than America can project across the Atlantic but
| they still have a lot of military aged men.
| alex43578 wrote:
| Atlantic? IDK if China even has aspirations to play World
| Police like the US. Military protection of things like
| their interests and the stability of Belt and Road, sure,
| but I don't see China trying something like the Gulf War
| or OEF.
|
| It's very possible that they will be able to dominate
| South China Sea and their zone of the Pacific, even now,
| given the proximity advantages and ship/missile
| production; and I think that would be satisfactory to
| them.
|
| 20 years from now, China's sphere and America's sphere
| are separate, with China having a lead in competing for
| Africa, and Europe in a very weird place socially,
| economically, demographically, and WRT Russia/US
| competition.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| My point is that China can sustain a naval blockade of
| Taiwan nearly indefinitely, and at some point Taiwan will
| have to decide whether they want to live under siege
| forever (poor, cold, getting everything via scarce and
| expensive air freight), or give up come to a political
| solution.
|
| I'm not like, rooting for this, I'm just trying to be
| realistic.
| erxam wrote:
| That's exactly what the USA has been doing to Cuba since
| 1959 and they're still (barely) hanging around. If we go
| by that example, it'll only end with with an actual
| invasion (which is what will happen to Cuba within one to
| two years).
| bpodgursky wrote:
| It's not even slightly the same?
|
| The US has an embargo that doesn't impact other countries
| that want to trade with Cuba. China is going to put an
| _actual cordon_ around Taiwan.
|
| Also, the US has no historical reason for claiming Cuba
| and has no real domestic pressure to do so (nobody in
| either party is asking for it). China has been very clear
| they see Taiwan as a part of China and will reunite with
| it not for economic or strategic reasons, but for
| nationalistic ones.
| pjmlp wrote:
| That depends on a certain administration, and it isn't
| looking good, "if they can, we also can".
| rob74 wrote:
| Let's hope China doesn't get a leader like Donald Trump in
| our lifetimes, then I think your prediction will apply.
| Despite the political tensions, China and Taiwan are so
| deeply integrated economically that an invasion would hurt
| not only Taiwan and the global economy, but also China
| (directly and indirectly). The EU and the US are making
| efforts to re-shore some semiconductor manufacturing, but
| TSMC and others will probably still keep a sizable amount of
| manufacturing in Taiwan, so I don't think this
| interconnectedness will change anytime soon...
| elcritch wrote:
| It seems that their leaders are and have been planning to
| take over Taiwan for decades. At least according to most of
| what I've read on the topic from all the various sources.
|
| If or when China's economic and/or demographics issues
| become problematic is exactly when the CCP likely would
| want to strike. At least seems to me like it'd be a good
| time to foment national pride.
|
| Of course hopefully I'm wrong and you're right.
|
| Many of these larger geopolitical things are decades in the
| making. Even Trump's Venezuela action has been a long time
| brewing. So much so that "US troops in Venezuela" has
| become a trope in military sci-fi. The primary change with
| Trump is how he presents and/or justifies it, or rather
| doesn't.
| pixl97 wrote:
| I mean who would have put 'US talks about invading Greenland'
| on the list of bullshit we have to deal with.
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| 2027 is the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party
| and they have publicly disclosed they want Taiwan re-united
| by then.
| tim-tday wrote:
| The leader of China literally publicly told his military to
| have "all options for reunification of Taiwan ready by 2027"
|
| What options do you suppose the military might be working on?
| Training to surround, and blockade? (Check) Information
| warfare? (Check) Building high numbers of landing craft?
| (Check) Building high numbers of modular weapon systems that
| can rapidly increase the number of offensive ships? (Check)
| Building numerous high volume drone warfare ships and
| airborne launchers? (Check)
|
| Keep in mind that there are public language cues that
| preceded invasion such as declarations of the invalidity of
| the other country's sovereignty, declarations that the other
| country is already part of the invading country. Have you
| seen any signs of that?
|
| Your persistent doubts require ignorance of strong evidence.
| Antibabelic wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China's_final_warning
| alt227 wrote:
| Wow, I knew China were full of it but 900 final
| warnings?!
| maxglute wrote:
| This retarded meme gets posted about PRC bluffing but
| context behind it illustrates the opposite. The warnings
| were against US/TW based U2s overflights, which PRC was
| both warning and doing - actively attempting to shoot
| down despite having inferior capabilities. The chefs kiss
| that this is an USSR meme is that PRC shot down more U2s
| using modified soviet hardware than USSR herself. Even
| more so when consider PRC issued actual final warning to
| USSR that ended up in border skirmishes. PRC's actual
| final warning is "don't say we didn't warn you" which
| historically predicts PRC kinetic action with high
| certainty. USSR, India border skirmishes. Korean war
| against UN. PRC also has directly supported North Vietnam
| against the French, and threatened UK when they hinted at
| granting HK independence under Thatcher. That's every NPT
| nuclear state over territorial / security issues less
| important than TW. It doesn't always lead to immediate
| action, but has consistently been prelude to it.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > Yes, they stand to benefit from it
|
| They would benefit in what way?
|
| Because their government seems to benefit a lot from Taiwan
| existing and being an enemy.
| dartharva wrote:
| "They stand to benefit from it" how!? The only thing they'll
| get is immediate geopolitical scorn which could very well
| escalate to mass military action considering how much TSMC
| now means for the world's economy. A single temporary
| shutdown of the fabs would mean a global economic apocalypse.
| They'd be inviting all powers of the world to attack them for
| no upside whatsoever, because it will all be over by the time
| they figure out how to leverage the fabs themselves.
| adventured wrote:
| The US has its own TSMC supply (insert comments about it not
| being cutting edge). And the US will stand-down and let China
| take Taiwan with no serious conflict in exchange for supply
| agreements. Not more than 5-10 years out at this point.
|
| The US can't even remotely come close to stopping China in its
| own backyard today, in another 5-10 years they'll just have
| that much larger of a Navy. The US knows that's the situation.
| The US can supply a large one week bombing campaign against
| China and that's it, based on inventory levels. The US will
| exhaust its cruise missile supply instantly and the US has
| almost no meaningful drone-bomb supply. China can build cheap
| missiles by the tens of thousands perpetually, train them to
| the coast, and flatten Taiwan and any opponents as necessary.
| China is the only country that can sustain a multi-year WW2
| style bombing campaign today, thanks to its manufacturing
| capabilities. Imagine them on a full war footing.
| petcat wrote:
| > The US has its own TSMC supply (insert comments about it
| not being cutting edge)
|
| USA has been strategically re-homing TSMC to the US mainland
| for a long time now. 30% of all 2nm and better technologies
| are slated to be produced in Arizona by 2030.
|
| The real loser in all of this will be the EU which will be
| completely without the ability to produce or acquire chips.
| They'll just end up buying from China and USA, which will
| only further deepen their dependence on those countries.
| rob74 wrote:
| Just because you haven't heard of it doesn't mean that the
| EU isn't doing anything: https://overclock3d.net/news/softw
| are/bringing_advanced_semi...
| kyboren wrote:
| That's announcing 40k WSPMs of eventual capacity spread
| across 28nm and 16nm nodes. I mean, it's a start, and I'm
| sure automakers are totally stoked given the Nexperia
| debacle, but the EU will remain completely dependent on
| foreign advanced node semiconductors.
|
| Compare to TSMC's Arizona project, which will supply 30%
| of TSMC's 2nm and smaller process output. Already just
| one of the six planned TSMC fabs in Arizona is pumping
| out ~30k WSPMs at 5nm or smaller.
|
| And that doesn't even get into CoWoS packaging, which is
| essential for all the highest-performance and highest-
| margin parts.
|
| The fact is: In semiconductors, Europe is getting left in
| the dust. Sure they can fab some mature node chips for
| industrial uses--and that's not nothing--but Smartphone
| SoCs, "AI" accelerators, DRAM, even boring CPUs simply
| cannot be made any more in Europe, and to the limited
| extent that they can, they will be horrendously
| uncompetitive on the market and outclassed in every
| performance metric by Chinese and American chips.
|
| EU is on a big sovereignty kick right now, which makes
| sense given that their foreign dependencies keep blowing
| up in their faces. So it's strange that EU is so
| complacent about their foreign dependency on advanced
| node semiconductors.
| alex43578 wrote:
| Has the Ukraine situation not shown that the EU has
| relegated itself to second fiddle?
|
| It's too old, too complacent, and too broke. Even compared
| to the US and our level of discord, there's no unity across
| divisions.
|
| The US absurdly threatens Greenland, but Denmark/EU's
| response is "Sanction US tech or kick out US military bases
| on Europe", rather than be able to rattle a saber back and
| show some credible backbone.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| > rather than be able to rattle a saber back and show
| some credible backbone.
|
| They sent warships to Greenland. What level of saber
| rattling do you expect?
| NonHyloMorph wrote:
| ASML...
| petcat wrote:
| ASML is a critical component, but they don't actually
| build the chips. And a significant part of their
| technology is developed in California anyway.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| Without San Diego based Cymer they can't move forward on
| their latest and greatest. As far as I know they still do
| R&D in San Diego even after purchase.
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| xLight is coming up quickly... https://www.xlight.com/
| NonHyloMorph wrote:
| "Our system produces 4X more power that enables better
| lithographic patterning, which is necessary to
| manufacture chips with smaller and more efficient feature
| sizes. In addition to being more powerful, our FEL system
| has programmable light characteristics that improve
| current capabilities and enable next-generation
| lithography (e.g., shorter wavelengths) - uniquely
| enabling the extension of Moore's Law for decades.
| Connecting existing ASML scanners to an xLight FEL
| significantly improves the tool's capabilities,
| delivering next-version scanner performance without the
| cost and complexities."
|
| Is it supposed to work independently of other technology
| at some point?
|
| Then anyways: multilateral cooperation is at the heart of
| scientific progress anyways. It's fitting that ASML is in
| a country that is culturally strongly influenced by its
| history of seafaring and trade. Will see how the
| braindrain caused by people not wanting to live their
| lifes in a society taht doesn't share values like these
| will influence that whole technological armsrace thing.
|
| Some people in Japan are coming up with a successor to
| EUV as far as I remember, what was their name again?
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| There's Canon with nanoimprint [1] and Rapidus [2] may be
| working on something
|
| [1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/nanoimprint-lithography [2]
| https://www.rapidus.inc/en/
| NonHyloMorph wrote:
| Thank you, Rapidus is what I was looking for!
| alex43578 wrote:
| Yeah, I just don't know that there's the will to blow up the
| world economy for which flag flies over Taiwan.
|
| China absorbing Taiwan (especially to Americans) just doesn't
| seem like a radical, terrifying concept.
|
| A Hong Kong style negotiated transfer might be best for the
| world - Taiwanese that want to leave can, the US can build up
| a parallel source of semiconductors, China gets Taiwan
| without firing a shot.
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| That didn't work out so well for Hong Kong.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| Better than it has for Ukraine.
| alex43578 wrote:
| Is it better than the alternative? Do you think TSMC
| wants to see a Dongfeng or ATACMS headed for their fab,
| if the alternative is a negotiated handover?
| znpy wrote:
| I think Taiwan invasion by China will happen after foundries
| are built in the UI.
|
| My conspiracy theory is that there is some kind of "gentleman
| agreement" on this topic between the US and China.
|
| As soon as Taiwan is not needed anymore by the US for chip
| fabrication, the US will at the very least loose their grip on
| it.
|
| Note to commenters: that's my theory, does not mean I endorse
| it in any way.
| ndr42 wrote:
| I dislike this dramatization in reporting of mundane facts.
|
| So report the facts but sentences like "What Wei probably didn't
| tell Cook is that Apple may no longer be his largest client" make
| it personal, they make you take sides, feel sorry for somebody,
| feel schadenfreude... (as you can observe in the comments)
| weslleyskah wrote:
| I hate this writing as well. Is not about technology and
| finance? The reporter writes as if it is a novel.
| alephnerd wrote:
| It's written in "HBS case study" tone. You might not like it,
| but frankly, ICs aren't the target demographic _anyhow_.
| achr2 wrote:
| They didn't tweak their prompt styling request enough... The
| ChatGPT world is depressing.
| webstrand wrote:
| Doesn't seem like LLM generated text to me. Even prior to
| ChatGPT some journalists preferred to write in a novel-
| style with extraneous fluff like that.
| afavour wrote:
| The sheer number of em dashes in the text suggest to me that
| the reporter didn't write anything, ChatGPT did.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| You know posh schools teach people to write with em dashes
| too, right?
| progbits wrote:
| Not to use them excessively. Good human writing has
| variety and style. AI articles are the same boring
| template, doesn't matter if it's emdash or not.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| A lot of people don't actually learn good writing at
| their fancy schools - but they do they learn the
| stylistic quirks that signal one went to the fancy
| school.
|
| How do you think it got in the LLM training set in the
| first place?
| zengineer wrote:
| The other day I read some old blog posts of mine (~2016)
| and they contain "em dashes". According to you they were
| all written by AI.
| bee_rider wrote:
| If we give up every bit of punctuation that ChatGPT uses,
| written language will become much worse.
| dartharva wrote:
| For the last time.. Word (the program very popularly used
| by many reporters across the world to write articles)
| automatically autocorrects hyphens to em-dashes according
| to the default loaded grammar rules for En-US. The
| existence of em-dashes in an article does NOT immediately
| imply GenAI slop.
| indymike wrote:
| Clickbait permeates all things. Next thing you know they'll be
| adding ____ (insert favorite controversial world leader)
| enraged to the headline.
| ai-x wrote:
| The most important signal is actually that demand is far
| exceeding supply and there is no AI Bubble
| Afforess wrote:
| Except this makes no sense. There isn't enough power to run
| all these new chips, so the demand must be speculative, not
| growth.
| basscomm wrote:
| > I dislike this dramatization in reporting of mundane facts.
|
| Okay, but this isn't a news article, it's an opinion piece on
| some guy's substack.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| "PopFi"
| boxed wrote:
| Tim Cook failing on the Cook doctrine ("We believe that we need
| to own and control the primary technologies behind the products
| that we make") is ironic.
| dangus wrote:
| Owning a leading edge fab is not practical for most companies,
| even huge some ones like Apple.
|
| Intel has even struggled with it since they traditionally
| didn't sell capacity to other buyers. It worked for Intel
| because they traditionally had a near-monopoly over the laptop,
| desktop, and server chip market.
|
| Apple certainly has the money to spin up their own chip
| fabricator, but there's no guarantee it would be as good as
| TSMC, it would cost billions, and they would have less of an
| ability to sell capacity to other customers.
|
| At the end of that effort they could be left with a chip fab
| that produces chips that still cost the same or more than what
| TSMC manufactures them for. It might just be cheaper to try and
| outbid Nvidia for priority.
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| Apple already is in the process of moving "most" chip
| production to Texas Instruments in Sherman, TX.
|
| https://appleinsider.com/articles/25/08/22/apple-chips-to-
| be...
| btown wrote:
| Per that very article, Sherman will be for support chips
| for power and peripherals, on legacy 45nm+ nodes.
|
| Apple's investing heavily in the TSMC fab in Arizona, due
| to open in 2027, to have 3nm capabilities for its flagship
| chips, but it's unlikely that would ever cover a majority
| of that chipmaking.
|
| https://www.aztechcouncil.org/tucson-chipmaker-tsmc-
| arizona-...
|
| https://wccftech.com/tsmc-plans-to-bring-3nm-production-
| to-t...
| runjake wrote:
| I'm sure if Apple could manage to run a fab with the quality
| and costs they get with TSMC, they would. I have little doubt
| they've been pushing forward on that mission.
| j4uie wrote:
| pft Emotional intelligence damage ,, instant karma pov: apple be
| like
| pjmlp wrote:
| Well, someone is tasting a bit of their own medicine.
| 2025codecracker wrote:
| It used to be ,,don't use Wikipedia as an academic source" now
| it's the same wit ChatGPT
| ezst wrote:
| Quite the opposite actually, way too many people treat LLMs as
| oracles, all the while they are fundamentally unreliable at
| knowledge storage and retrieval. If there was legitimate doubt
| in the early days as to whether a collaborative encyclopedia
| could self organise and self censor into a reliable source, the
| engineering of LLMs makes the opposite a certainty.
| YmiYugy wrote:
| It seems a bit odd that data center operators aren't willing to
| put their money where their mouth is. Data center operators say:
| expand more quickly. TSMC says: we need long term demand to
| justify that. And all the data center guys say is: don't worry
| that won't be an issue, trust us. I would think that if they were
| serious they would commit to cofinancing new foundries or signing
| long term minimum purchasing agreements.
| re-thc wrote:
| > I would think that if they were serious they would commit to
| cofinancing new foundries or signing long term minimum
| purchasing agreements.
|
| That would ruin TSMC and others' independence.
|
| Nvidia already did buy Intel shares so it is a thing.
|
| Nvidia did discuss with TSMC for more capacity many times. It's
| not about financing or minimum purchasing agreements. TSMC
| played along during COVID and got hit.
| cezart wrote:
| What happened during COVID? Could you please explain shortly
| what they agreed to, and how it bit them?
| tim-tday wrote:
| How do you figure? Demand for electronics skyrocketed when
| everyone working from home bought new laptops webcams,
| tablets. There was a fire on a TSMC manufacturing line that
| caused a shortage early on but capacity recovered, demand
| stayed strong throughout and there was a massive spike at the
| end when car manufacturers needed to ramp back up to handle
| all the paused orders.
|
| As far as I know there was never a demand dip at any point in
| there.
| re-thc wrote:
| > there was a massive spike at the end when car
| manufacturers
|
| Which barely impacts TSMC. Most of their revenue and focus
| is on the advanced nodes - not the mature 1s.
|
| > As far as I know there was never a demand dip at any
| point in there.
|
| When did I imply there was a demand dip? I said they built
| out too much capacity.
| weslleyskah wrote:
| And what of the natural resources sustaining all of this? This
| conglomerate of data centers, gpus and other chips will surely
| have to push manufacturers to the maximum in other industries.
| I don't think sustainable energy, recycling and carbon credits
| will be enough to cover for it.
| jlarocco wrote:
| The data center builders are hesitant, too.
|
| https://youtu.be/K86KWa71aOc?t=483
| ip26 wrote:
| If the long term demand disappears, there may not be anyone
| left for TSMC to collect from on those MPA. This somewhat
| undermines their utility as a security.
| bgnn wrote:
| Semiconductors is extremely cyclical. One of the reasons TSMC
| survived the previous boost-boom cycles is their caution. If
| you overexpand, you risk going out of business in the next
| downturn.
|
| AFAIK only Apple has been commiting to wafers up to 3 years in
| the future. It would be a crazy bet for NVidia to do the same,
| as they don't know how big will be the business.
| captain_coffee wrote:
| Legit question - what is the current status of the construction
| of chip production factories in the US?
|
| I know about the existence of the initiative but I don't know how
| it is progressing / what is actually going on on that front.
| jobs_throwaway wrote:
| TMSC's Arizona fab is up and running producing 4nm chips
|
| There's ~a dozen in the works or under construction
|
| TMSC plans to have 2-3nm fabs operational in the next 2-3 years
|
| So we're 2-3 years behind the standard (currently 2nm), and
| further behind on the bleeding edge sub-2nm fabs
| techgnosis wrote:
| Don't forget Intel. They are producing chips on 18A right
| now, with 14A up next.
| alt227 wrote:
| > TMSC's Arizona fab is up and running producing 4nm chips
|
| Are the majority of the staff still shipped in from Asia?
| jpk2f2 wrote:
| No. It was originally 50%, unclear what the current numbers
| are (it was supposed to decrease over time as they train
| local replacements).
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| TSMC is already producing at their first one in Arizona (N4
| process), second one comes online for N3 in 2028, and third one
| (N2) broke ground in April 2025 (online date 2029-30)
|
| https://www.tsmc.com/static/abouttsmcaz/index.htm
| tim-tday wrote:
| The projects seem to go well and then union bosses threaten to
| shut the whole thing down.
|
| Then the essential skilled personnel can't come train people
| because the visa process was created by and is operated by the
| equivalent of four year olds with learning disabilities.
| Sometimes companies say fuck it we're doing it anyway and then
| ice raids their facility and shuts it down.
|
| I'd post the news articles about th above, but your googling
| thumbs work as well as mine.
| engineer_22 wrote:
| I find that my cell phone which is 4 generations old and my
| desktop computer which is 2 generations old are totally adequate
| for everything I need to do, and I do not need faster processing
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| We have data, people are buying phones in aggregate about every
| 2.5 - 3 years. Especially in the US where almost no one pays
| for a phone outright
| Lio wrote:
| I used to think that.
|
| I really don't care about most new phone features and for my
| laptop the M1 Max is still a really decent chip.
|
| I do want to run local LLM agents though and I think a Mac
| Studio with an M5 Ultra (when it comes out) is probably how I'm
| going to do that. I need more RAM.
|
| I bet I'm not the only one looking at that kind of setup now
| that was previously happy with what they had..
| tim-tday wrote:
| Apple has made some good progress on memory sharing over
| thunderbolt. If they could get that ironed out you maybe
| could run a good LLM on a cluster of Mac minis. Again you
| cannot today but people are working on it. One guy might have
| gotten it to work but it's not ready for prime time yet.
| bigyabai wrote:
| > Apple has made some good progress on memory sharing over
| thunderbolt
|
| The only reason that Thunderbolt exists is to expose DMA
| over an artificial PCI channel. I'd _hope_ they 've made
| progress on it, Thunderbolt has only been around for
| fourteen years after all.
| ai-x wrote:
| You are anecdote, not data.
|
| Data is saying demand >>>>> supply.
| tim-tday wrote:
| But do you use any ai services like chat gpt, Claude, Gemini?
| If so you're offloading your compute from a local stack to a
| high performance nvidia gpu stack operated by one of the big
| five. It's not that you aren't using new hardware, it's that
| you shifted the load from local to centralized.
|
| I'm not saying this is bad or anything, it's just another
| iteration of the centralized vs decentralized pendulum swing
| that has been happening in tech since the beginning (mainframes
| with dumb terminals, desktops, the cloud, mobile) etc.
|
| Apple might experience a slowdown in hardware sales because of
| it. Nvidia might experience a sales boom because of it. The
| future could very well bring a swing back. Imagine you could
| run a stack of Mac minis that replaced your monthly Claude code
| bill. Might pay for itself in 6mo (this doesn't exist yet but
| it theoretically could happen)
| kouteiheika wrote:
| > Imagine you could run a stack of Mac minis that replaced
| your monthly Claude code bill. Might pay for itself in 6mo
| (this doesn't exist yet but it theoretically could happen)
|
| You don't have to imagine. You can, today, with a few (major)
| caveats: you'll only match Claude from roughly ~6 months ago
| (open-weight models roughly lag behind the frontier by ~half
| a year), and you'd need to buy a couple of RTX 6000 Pros
| (each one is ~$10k).
|
| Technically you could also do this with Macs (due to their
| unified RAM), but the speed won't be great so it'd be
| unusable.
| sib wrote:
| Wonderful!
|
| I wish I were in that situation, but I find myself able to use
| lots more compute than I have. And it seems like many others
| feel the same.
| tonyplee wrote:
| Here's what G AI estimates when asked about "base on public data,
| estimate how many mm^2 of apple/Nvdia silicon are produce in TSMC
| for the past 3 years." Apple: 2023 A16, A17
| Pro, M2, M3 ~330M ~135 ~4,455M 2024 A17 Pro, A18, M3, M4
| ~350M ~150 ~5,250M 2025 A18, A19 (pre-launch), M4 ~415M
| ~200 ~8,300M NV: 2023 Ada (RTX 40), Hopper ~60M
| ~280 ~1,680M 2024 Hopper (H100), Blackwell ~85M ~450
| ~3,825M 2025 Blackwell (B200), Rubin ~105M ~775 ~8,135M
| BugsJustFindMe wrote:
| If people want an AI to hallucinate for them they can do it
| themselves, thanks.
|
| Also, https://aramzs.xyz/thoughts/dont-post-ai-at-me/
| JanSolo wrote:
| I'm surprised that Apple is not considering opening up its own
| fabs. Tim Cook is all about vertical-integration and they have a
| mountain of cash that they could use to fund the initial startup
| capex.
| xnx wrote:
| $20 billion for a new fab is a lot of money, even to Apple.
| HardCodedBias wrote:
| If it were only 20B then Apple would jump at the chance.
|
| As would almost innumerable others.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Well, if the future of your company depends on a fab, twice
| $20B is cheap.
| DetroitThrow wrote:
| Closer to $40b for a new fab for an established company to do
| it all correctly. It's a much more major investment to open a
| fab without ever doing it before, then continually use the
| brain power/institutional knowledge you've built up to stay
| near the forefront of fab tech, and then basically have weird
| incentives to build a foundry for only your products rather
| than the world at large.
|
| You're setting yourself up for making a huge part of your
| future revenue stream being set aside for ongoing chipfab
| capex and research engineering. And that's a huge gamble,
| since getting this all setup is not guaranteed to succeed.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Is that true? I guess what I mean is, is it $40B if you are
| trying to replicate the scale of a TSMC fab? Or could you
| do it for considerably less if the fab is initially
| designed to the needs of single customer (Apple)?
| bob1029 wrote:
| Semiconductor manufacturing is not an incremental step for
| Apple. It's an entirely new kind of vertical. They do not have
| the resources to do this. If they could they would have by now.
| zvqcMMV6Zcr wrote:
| Designing CPUs also wasn't their core business and they did
| it anyway. Apple probably won't care that much about price
| hikes but if they ever feel TSMC can't guarantee steady
| supply then all bets are off.
|
| I wonder what will happen in future when we get closer to the
| physical "wall". Will it allow other fabs to catch up or the
| opposite will happen, and even small improvements will be
| values by customers?
| boredatoms wrote:
| They could buy global foundaries and pour in a pile of cash,
| 5 years later they'd have something useful
|
| Or they could buy out Intel and sell off their cpu design
| division
| alt227 wrote:
| If it was that simple, they would have done it.
| bgnn wrote:
| In that case they would have just burnt cash for 5 years
| and didn't have anything to show for it.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| How do they not have the resources? Certainly they have the
| cash resources.
|
| At this point it would be corporate suicide if they were
| _not_ outlining a strategy to own their own fab(s).
| bob1029 wrote:
| > Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. plans to spend a
| record of up to $56 billion this year to feed the world's
| insatiable appetite for chips, as it grapples with pressure
| to build more factories outside Taiwan, especially in the
| U.S. [0]
|
| Apple has less cash available than TSMC plans to burn this
| year. TSMC is not spending 50 billion dollars just because
| it's fun to do so. This is how much it takes just to keep
| the wheels on the already existing bus. Starting from
| _zero_ is a non-starter. It just cannot happen anymore. So,
| no one in their right mind would sell Apple their leading
| edge foundry at a discount either.
|
| There was a time when companies like Apple _could_ have
| done this. That time was 15+ years ago. It 's way too late
| now.
|
| [0]: https://www.wsj.com/business/earnings/tsmc-
| ends-2025-with-a-...
| cmgbhm wrote:
| Apple has very much been wanted absolute flexibility to adopt
| major technology changes so much they've tried hard to not be
| the sole customer of a supplier and deal with political
| ramifications (source: Apple in China/Patrick McGee)
| HardCodedBias wrote:
| Nvidia direct silicon revenue is higher.
|
| Also Nvidia's margins are higher which means that they will be
| willing to pay a higher unit price.
|
| This seems like an open and closed case from TSMC's side.
| Squarex wrote:
| It also means that we will have a trouble buying new laptops
| for a few next years.
| HardCodedBias wrote:
| They will simply be more expensive.
|
| More likely they will not use leading the leading edge fab
| process, which TBH is fine for the vast majority.
| tim-tday wrote:
| Sneak preview of the TSMC shortage that will sweep the world in
| 2027 when China takes Taiwan and the TSMC scuttles their chip
| fabs on the island.
|
| I don't know the hedge to position against this but I'm pretty
| sure China will make good on its promise.
| fauigerzigerk wrote:
| Alternatively, China could make progress fabricating and
| exporting its own chips and designing its own GPUs. The entire
| chip sector could go the way of solar panels and EVs with
| prices dropping and margins collapsing to near zero.
| Jackpillar wrote:
| Yup, they're also like 5-10 years out from their own
| lithography machines as well. China wanted Taiwan before TSMC
| was a thing, by the time they take Taiwan back they won't
| need TSMC.
| ajross wrote:
| > I don't know the hedge to position against this
|
| Buy in-demand fab output today, even at a premium price and
| even if you can't install or power it all, expecting shortages
| tomorrow. Which is pretty much the way the tech economy is
| already working.
|
| So no, no hedge. NVIDIA's customers already beat you to it.
| edm0nd wrote:
| I'm not sure how true it is or not but I heard that TSMC has
| the ability to remotely destroy all of their main fab equipment
| in the event the Chinese are invading Taiwan.
| schainks wrote:
| This is correct:
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-21/asml-
| tsmc...
|
| The most advanced ASML machines also cost something like
| $300-400M each and I am willing to bet if configured wrong
| can heavily damage themselves and the building they are in.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| I'm about 100% positive America would consider that an act of
| war and respond accordingly.
| strangegecko wrote:
| There is no "promise".
|
| The 2027 date was a guideline for their military to be "ready",
| which they may not be either. That is a far cry from the
| decision to actually make a move. They will only do that if
| they're certain it will work out for them, and as things stand,
| it is very risky for Xi.
| qwertox wrote:
| How about they take a break and focus on their software for the
| next 2 years?
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| Are you suggesting their semiconductor engineers should down
| tools and start fixing bugs in macOS?
| sib wrote:
| One would think (hope / pray?) that a $4T company could walk
| and chew gum at the same time. But, apparently not.
| bflesch wrote:
| Software quality is just canary in the coal mine that the
| company culture has changed and they will continue to
| enshittify their products.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| This piece provides a fair bit of insight:
|
| > Apple-TSMC: The Partnership That Built Modern Semiconductors
|
| In 2013, TSMC made a $10 billion bet on a single customer. Morris
| Chang committed to building 20nm capacity with uncertain
| economics on the promise that Apple would fill those fabs. "I bet
| the company, but I didn't think I would lose," Chang later said.
| He was right. Apple's A8 chip launched in 2014, and TSMC never
| looked back.
|
| https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/apple-tsmc-the-partner...
| roughly wrote:
| This article repeatedly cites revenue growth numbers as an
| indicator of Nvidia and Apple's relative health, which is a very
| particular way of looking at things. By way of another one, Apple
| had $416Bn in revenue, which was a 6% increase from the prior
| year, or about $25Bn, or about all of Nvidia's revenue in 2023.
| Apple's had slow growth in the last 4 years following a big bump
| during the early pandemic; their 5 year revenue growth, though,
| is still $140Bn, or about $10Bn more than Nvidia's 2025 revenues.
| Nvidia has indeed grown like a monster in the last couple years -
| 35Bn increase from 23-24 and 70Bn increase from 24-25. Those
| numbers would be 8% and 16% increases for Apple respectively,
| which I'm sure would make the company a deeply uninteresting
| slow-growth story compared to new upstarts.
|
| I get why the numbers are presented the way they are, but it
| always gets weird when talking about companies of Apple's size -
| percent increases that underwhelm Wall Street correspond to raw
| numbers that most companies would sacrifice their CEO to a
| volcano to attain, and sales flops in Apple's portfolio mean they
| only sold enough product to supply double-digit percentages of
| the US population.
| bombcar wrote:
| US tech companies aren't built to be like 3M is/was and able to
| have their hands in infinite pies.
|
| The giant conglomerates in Asia seem more able to do it.
|
| Google has somewhat tried but then famously kills most
| everything even things that could be successful if smaller
| businesses.
| roughly wrote:
| I think there's something about both the myth of the unicorn
| and of the hero founder/CEO in tech that forces a push
| towards legibility and easy narratives for a company - it
| means that, to a greater degree than other industries, large
| tech companies are a storytelling exercise, and "giant
| corporate blob that sprawls into everything" isn't a sexy
| story, nor is "consistent 3% YoY gains," even when that's
| translating into "we added the GDP of a medium-sized country
| to our cash pile again this year."
|
| Every time a CEO or company board says "focus," an
| interesting product line loses its wings.
| flyinglizard wrote:
| It's because the storytelling needed for Wall Street. It's
| the only way to get sky high revenue multiples, selling a
| dream, because if you're a conglomerate all you can do is
| to sell the P&L - it's like selling an index. If you have a
| business division that's does exceedingly well compared to
| the rest, you make more money by spinning it off.
|
| I think Asian companies are much less dependent on public
| markets and have as strong private control (chaebols in
| South Korea for example - Samsung, LG, Hyundai etc).
|
| If you look at US companies that are under "family control"
| you might see a similar sprawl, like Cargill, Koch, I'd
| even put Berkshire in this class even though it's not
| "family controlled" in the literal sense, it's still
| associated with two men and not a professional CEO.
| m4rtink wrote:
| Yeah, it is insane what areas and products companies like
| Mitsubishi, Samsung, IHI or even Suntory are involved in.
| eldenring wrote:
| I think this is more of a result of big US tech being
| extremely productive (with their main competency)
| sharkjacobs wrote:
| It might matter that Nvidia sells graphics cards and Apple
| sells computers and computer-like devices with cases and
| peripherals and displays and software and services. TSMC is
| responsible for a much larger proportion of Nvidia's product
| than Apple's.
| _the_inflator wrote:
| I agree. People confuse relative for absolute numbers.
|
| And ironically Apple acts like being a small contender the
| moment they feel some heat after a decade of relatively easy
| wins everywhere it seemed.
|
| So finally there is a company that gives Apple some much needed
| heat.
|
| That's why I in absolute terms side with NVIDIA, the small
| contender in this case.
|
| PS: I had one key moment in my career when I was at Google and
| a speaker mentioned the unit "NBU". It stands for next billion
| units.
|
| This is ten years ago and started my mental journey into large
| scale manufacturing and production including all the processes
| included.
|
| The fascination never left. It was a mind bender for me and
| totally get why people miss everything that large.
|
| At Google it was just a milestone expected to be hit - not one
| time but as the word next indicates multiple times.
|
| Mind blowing and eye opening to me ever since. Fantastic
| inspiration thinking about software, development and marketing.
| zvorygin wrote:
| How did you get into large scale manufacturing and
| production? Was it a career switch? Downsides? It too
| fascinates me. Any book recommendations?
| markhahn wrote:
| oh, darn. my least favorite walled garden / vertical monopoly /
| rentseeker will have to raise prices. I'm sure they can spin this
| as a quality improvement.
| api wrote:
| How much new capacity is under construction? Seems like it should
| be a lot, but other than Arizona and Ohio and a few other places
| I'm not reading about a ton of cutting-edge node fab construction
| happening.
| sylware wrote:
| It seems PC(mostly dx11/12)+console gaming is niche compared to
| mobile gaming (mostly on android which support
| linux/wayland/vulkan)
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| Taiwan's TSMC foundries are their nuclear currency: they must
| keep them to remain protected by others, and yet the others
| didn't completely build interchangeable and resilient capacity
| elsewhere to do what essential for them that they had the money
| to do.
|
| So now Apple, Nvidia, AMD (possibly), and most car manufacturers
| will be up a creek without a paddle when China invades in 1-2
| years. That is unless China's Xi is bluffing to mollify domestic
| war hawks and reunification zealots by going through the motions
| of building an army of war machines without intent to use them,
| but I don't think that's probable. It's possible that Trump
| already made agreements with Xi to cede "Oceania" if they allow
| the US to take Greenland and South America for empire-building
| neocolonialism.
| mitjam wrote:
| As a heavy user of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google AI APIs, I'm
| increasingly tempted to buy a Mac Studio (M3 Ultra or M4 Pro) as
| a contingency in case the economics of hosted inference change
| significantly.
| mohsen1 wrote:
| the thing is GLM 4.7 is easily doing the work Opus was doing
| for me but to run it fully you'll need a much bigger hardware
| than a Mac Studio. $10k buys you a lot of API calls from z.ai
| or Anthropic. It's just not economically viable to run a good
| model at home.
| mitjam wrote:
| True -- I think local inference is still far more expensive
| for my use case due to batching effects and my relatively
| sporadic, hourly usage. That said, I also didn't expect
| hardware prices (RTX 5090, RAM) to rise this quickly.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| You can cluster Mac Studios using Thunderbolt connections and
| enable RDMA for distributed inference. This will be slower
| than a single node but is still the best bang-for-the-buck
| wrt. doing inference on very-large-sized models.
| pram wrote:
| FWIW the M5 appears to be an actual large leap for LLM
| inference with the new GPU and Neural Accelerator. So id wait
| for the Pro/Max before jumping on M3 Ultra.
| mitjam wrote:
| Thanks, that helps me keep things in perspective.
| boredatoms wrote:
| If theres a market crash, there could be a load cheap H100s
| hitting ebay
| wmf wrote:
| You can't run those at home.
| SoKamil wrote:
| Why?
| wmf wrote:
| Because they are extremely loud, consume 8-10 kW, and
| probably cost $20K used.
| kccqzy wrote:
| The 8-10kW isn't a big deal anymore given the prevalence
| of electric vehicles and charging them at home. A decade
| ago very few homes have this kind of hookup. Now it's
| reasonably common, and if not, electricians wouldn't bat
| an eye on installing it.
| alt227 wrote:
| But the cost of running them is.
| MandieD wrote:
| In the winter in northern Europe or the colder parts of
| North America, as part of a radiator system? Kind of
| works!
|
| Any other time and place? The power to run it, plus the
| power to cool it.
| mifreewil wrote:
| You'd want to get something like a RTX Pro 6000 (~ $8,500 -
| $10,000) or at least a RTX 5090 (~$3,000). That's the easiest
| thing to do or cluster of some lower-end GPUs. Or a DGX Spark
| (there are some better options by other manufacturers than just
| Nvidia) (~$3000).
| mitjam wrote:
| Yes, I also considered the RTX 6000 Pro Max-Q, but it's quite
| expensive and probably only makes sense if I can use it for
| other workloads as well. Interestingly, its price hasn't gone
| up since last summer, here in Germany.
| storus wrote:
| I have MacStudio with 512GB RAM, 2x DGX Spark and RTX 6000
| Pro WS (planing to buy a few of those in Max-Q version
| next). I am wondering if we ever see local inference so
| "cheap" as we see it right now given RAM/SSD price trends.
| clusterhacks wrote:
| Good grief. I'm here cautiously telling my workplace to
| buy a couple of dgx sparks for dev/prototyping and you
| have better hardware in hand than my entire org.
|
| What kind of experiments are you doing? Did you try out
| exo with a dgx doing prefill and the mac doing decode?
|
| I'm also totally interested in hearing what you have
| learned working with all this gear. Did you buy all this
| stuff out of pocket to work with?
| storus wrote:
| Yeah, Exo was one of the first things to do - MacStudio
| has a decent throughput at the level of 3080, great for
| token generation and Sparks have decent compute, either
| for prefill or for running non-LLM models that need
| compute (segment anything, stable diffusion etc). RTX
| 6000 Pro just crushes them all (it's essentially like
| having 4x3090 in a single GPU). I bought 2 sparks to also
| play with Nvidia's networking stack and learn their
| ecosystem though they are a bit of a mixed bag as they
| don't expose some Blackwell-specific features that make a
| difference. I bought it all to be able to run local
| agents (I write AI agents for living) and develop my own
| ideas fully. Also I was wrapping up grad studies at
| Stanford so they came handy for some projects there. I
| bought it all out of pocket but can amortize them in
| taxes.
| clusterhacks wrote:
| Very cool - thanks for the info.
|
| That you are writing AI agents for a living is
| _fascinating_ to hear. We aren 't even really looking at
| how to use agents internally yet. I think local agents
| are incredibly off the radar at my org despite some
| really good additions as supplement resources for
| internal apps.
|
| What's deployment look like for your agents? You're
| clearly exploring a lot of different approaches . . .
| PlatoIsADisease wrote:
| There is a reason no one uses Apple for local models. Be
| careful not to fall for marketing and fanboyism.
|
| Just look at what people are actually using. Don't rely on a
| few people who tested a few short prompts with short
| completions.
| mitjam wrote:
| yes, I'm using smaller models on a Mac M2 Ultra 32GB and they
| work well, but larger models and coding use might be not a
| good fit for the architecture, after all.
| storus wrote:
| M3 Ultra with DGX Spark is right now what M5 Ultra will be in
| who knows when. You can just buy those two, connect them
| together using Exo and have M5 Ultra performance/memory right
| away. Who knows what M5 Ultra will cost given RAM/SSD price
| explosion?
| utopiah wrote:
| Don't buy anything physical, benchmark the models you could run
| on your potential hardware on (neo) cloud provider like
| HuggingFace. Only if you believe the quality is up to your
| expectation then do it. The test itself should take you $100
| and few hours top.
| lysace wrote:
| My main takeaway: TSMC's gross profit margin in Q4 was 62.3%.
| (Net profit margin about 48%, supposedly.)
|
| I mean this is pretty fantastic.
| lencastre wrote:
| what a strange world, guess iPhones will cost a million bucks now
| flenserboy wrote:
| Of course they did stock buybacks instead of using their
| mountains of cash to lock out the competition or keeping their
| powder in reserve. Brilliant!
| neuroelectron wrote:
| Pepperidge Farm remembers when stock buy backs were illegal
| stock manipulation
| avadodin wrote:
| Stock buy-backs can be part of an illegal scheme but, in
| general, they are one of the few mechanisms in corporate
| actions through which the regular joe shareholder doesn't get
| the short end of the stick.
|
| How is owning a larger share of a company with proportionally
| less cash and a higher price per share than what you could
| have sold it for before bad.
|
| Have you looked at precious metal charts as of late? Do 1/x
| and that's the value of the cash these companies are trading
| for a valuable business.
| testfrequency wrote:
| Prayers for Apple
| nottorp wrote:
| Apple could afford building their own fab couldn't they?
| shevy-java wrote:
| I am very unhappy with the increased RAM prices - and now general
| increase in prices for hardware. To me this is collusion, a de-
| facto monopoly. Governments that don't stop this practice are
| also part of the mafia.
|
| We really need many more smaller, more independent manufacturers.
| All the big guns, from NVIDIA, Apple, Intel, AMD, etc... have
| massively disappointed about 99.9% of us here now.
| exabrial wrote:
| Hopefully this makes them think twice about I dunno, putting
| chips into cables.
| aalimov_ wrote:
| I think you are referring to thunderbolt cables with their
| signal conditioning chips, and if that's the case then I would
| like to say that TSMC isn't making those chips. Afaik Intel and
| maybe some others make the chips that go into thunderbolt
| cables.
| alt227 wrote:
| Putting computers into cars was the real killer.
| tomconder wrote:
| ugh dark mode
| drob518 wrote:
| Am I the only one who is excited about the AI bubble bursting?
| BugsJustFindMe wrote:
| "Am I the only one" posts are pure engagement farming.
| neuroelectron wrote:
| Apple fabs?
| thenaturalist wrote:
| Laughs in Intel.
| dcchambers wrote:
| The real loser in all of this is consumers. Pricing on software
| and hardware is going to continue to rise and rise.
| chao- wrote:
| I look forward to Intel announcing that Apple is the major
| customer they hinted at having for their 14A process.
| wewewedxfgdf wrote:
| I thought this got sorted out with giant piles of cash several
| years ago, didn't it?
| hu3 wrote:
| someone has a larger pile of cash now
| jlarocco wrote:
| This isn't really news. Apple has to pay market price like
| everybody else.
|
| NVidia gets the capacity because they're willing to pay more. If
| Apple wants to, they can pay more to get it back.
| caycep wrote:
| the sad part of this is that volume/priority at TSMC shifting
| from consumer chips that get sold to you and me, to corporate
| chips which likely will get sold to OpenAI/Amazon/MS or some
| other corporate datacenter, means that the un-democratization of
| computing power is well underway....
|
| mirroring, come to think of it, the movement to un-democratize of
| modern governments...
|
| (I would be happier if the news behind Nvidia's strength was
| sales of good, reasonably priced consumer GPU cards...but it's
| clearly not. I can walk down the street and buy anything from Tim
| Cook, but 9 out of 10 times, I cannot buy a 5080/5090 FE card
| from Jenson Huang).
| amelius wrote:
| Apple, now you know how it feels to be kicked out of the
| FabStore.
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