It seems to me that long term having fabs in the IS is net positive for the economy: more jobs, more localized supply chains, more local expertise, etc etc
I have no idea what is the manufacturing cost of a 800 mm^2 die is, but I am sure it is lower than the development cost.
> Particularly for GPUs, the high bandwidth memory and manufacturing costs are a significant portion of the product price.
HBM is not manufactured by the GPU vendor, it is an off-the-shelf component that AMD buys like any other company can. Thus, the cost of HBM is tallied in the BOM and integration costs (interposer, packaging, etc).
[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/spitballing-...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-23/amd-ceo-s...
It is potentially worth pointing out that container ships going back to Asia are basically empty, so that return shipping trip is basically free.
However, talking about chips that are hundreds of watts each the pollution produced by them is a lot higher than any transport.
https://www.stg-online.org/onTEAM/shipefficiency/programm/06...
TSMC alone accounts for 12% of Taiwan's electricity demand, and growing fast:
https://spectrum.ieee.org/taiwan-semiconductor ("TSMC’s Energy Demand Drives Taiwan’s Geopolitical Future" (2024))
What’s positive is that we have state of the art domestic manufacturing with potential to onshore more and more of the required supply chains, building/educating local expertise, etc etc.
It’s silly to focus on shipping.
The extra transport cost might not matter for these precious chips. A tray full of Epyc or Blackwell dies is an insane number of potential revenue per kg.
Another interesting point:
> AMD and larger rival Nvidia Corp. recently gained a reprieve on restrictions imposed on shipments of some types of artificial intelligence accelerators to China. It’s still not clear how many licenses will be granted — or how long the companies will be allowed to ship the chips to the country, the biggest market for semiconductors.
It sounds like they’re trying to give China some chips but not as many as American allied countries. I wonder if they’re trying to get China “addicted” to western AI chips to hurt Chinese chip manufacturing development?
It’s wild the same administrations would argue for restricting access to the US market for tariffs to strengthen domestic production, would not believe that severely restricting exports to the Chinese market would strengthen their domestic production
This has nothing to do with that. It was part of the deal made with China recently in Geneva. The U.S. needs what China has (rare metals), and China needs what the U.S. has (SOTA chips).
There - that's a little more accurate.
This is all assuming you can get past the NIMBYs to build the plants in the first place.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_ultraviolet_lithogra...
What this administration is doing is not a recipe for success: trade wars with everyone, immigration crackdowns, and unpredictable tariff policy.
EDIT: Oh and hinting at invasion (Greenland, Canada) doesn't help either
But Taiwan or the rest of Asia is still a problem given the tensions in the area. If China did something it could seriously effect supply even if it wasn’t an attack on whichever country was supplying us.
We need friends making things in Canada or the rest of the Americas or Europe or Africa or some other place that isn’t China or directly under their thumb.
Even without action by man. The wrong tsunami or whatever could effectively wipe enough out everyone would be screwed.
We need geographical diversity too. The existing alliances we’re burning to the ground don’t solve that.
'Most all of which falls square into your "low tech and low profit", from a right-thinking* American company's PoV.
Not to say that a saintly American company could do much better, if it tried to swim uphill against America's vastly-higher cost of living (vs. the countries where most of that stuff's manufactured). And other problems beyond its control.
*profit-obsessed, generally
Even if it was just motherboards in particular and not others, that seems like a necessary step in securing the supply chain and if we only do that for national defense the benefits of competition likely won't extend to consumers that are still exposed to trade taxation.
There's all kinds of stuff like this in supply chains. Low profit, high barrier to entry critical items.
I haven't been to Asia in a while, but at one time, Hyundai made both computer chips and bulldozers.
Mitsubishi once made computer chips, and had a bank, and an art museum.
There are companies that own both department stores and subway systems.
America used to have a fair amount of this, but it was more common during the Industrial Revolution. Companies that owned both railroads and summer resorts. Oil wells and banks.
Even as recently as the 1990's there were companies that owned both pipelines and fiber optic networks. Toasters and television networks.
- https://www.ajinomoto.com/innovation/our_innovation/buildupf...
Hyundai makes cars and military weapons and probably thousands of other things that aren’t even related to each other, don’t know if they still make computers.
20% more expensive and 99.9% of people buy the $500 one instead of the $600 one.
Never make the mistake of falling for people's virtue signalling and pay attention instead to how they actually apply those virtues (spoiler: saving money is the #1 acted upon virtue, being far stronger than any other).
Taiwan is in a precarious position, which is a huge liability for "western" powers. And a liability for us is effectively also a liability for Taiwan, considering we are their protectorate. North America and western Europe are comparatively safe.
Cost increase in a single part doesn’t necessarily mean the cost of the device needs to go up. If a CPU costs 120$ instead of 100$ like that of a competing device 300$ device you can always sell yours for 310$ and make less margins. Things have to get subsidized in the short term if we are going to get domestic production up.
Seems other agree with me on that:
> And while many companies fear that moving their manufacturing to the U.S. would cost significantly more, some experts estimate that wafer production at the Arizona site is only about 10% more expensive compared to Taiwan. Despite that, the company says that its customers are willing to pay a higher price, with production already sold out until late 2027.
Also interesting that many of the new tariffs settle down to around 10%. That seems like a good balance for the US, and also similar to what European tariffs have been for many industries.
IMHO, the idea of entirely free trade is as dumb as excessive trade barriers. It's like trying to model people as purely rational agents. We're not. It's a decent starting point but we need perturbative models based on empirical information of human biases.
The ideal solution for tariffs is likely a distribution function with a peak around 5-15% with a steep drop off toward 0% and a longer tail for higher tariffs. Because 0% just leaves you open to any market manipulations of malicious foreign actors and corporations looking to offshore for a few cents of profits while higher tariffs lead to increasing protectionism and local companies becoming lax and inefficient.
That would just so happen to align well with these extra cost to manufacture in the USA in this instance.
_Never_ make the mistake of assuming a market is perfectly efficient and any corporate savings along the way will be passed along to the consumer.
When Apple or Google comes along and buys out next year's total TMSC output, that 80% of people will just have to buy whatever is on the shelf at the time.
Whether or not AMD is motivated to eat that cost is another question, of course.
They used to be a crown-jewel of US tech. But it seems like every time I read the news, they are announcing a delay or shutting down some product.
Regardless, it seems like the company leadership should be gutted (the same could be said of Boeing) and the company given over to a new technically-grounded leadership team.
But I guess "too much socialism"
The problem is that they are far too incompetent and have zero clue about tech, and only understand real estate, that simplest of business that can be executed with mere lizard-brain intelligence.
Tech is also about small startups disrupting large giants, which is completely antithetical to current Republican leadership ideals, where the wealthiest get all gains, regardless of who does the work.
It will take many years of full-on Democratic leadership to reconfigure the Republican Party back to a somewhat innovation-friendly business party. Meanwhile the Democrats, under Biden, were by far some of the most business-friendly politicians we have seen in perhaps a century, spurring massive investment in factories and industry, mostly across red states. But because it's a politically incorrect fact, it never gets reported.
This neat little dichotomy between "free market capitalism" and "centrally planned socialism" is a cute story but also complete fiction. In "capitalist" countries the government basically always runs R&D during any period of time when the stakes are high, and in "communist" countries there are always markets, and they are always sanctioned to some degree.
All of the foundational progress for American leadership in high technology was centrally planned and administered, all of it one way or another: through ATT, through NASA, through the DoD, through the universities. Value creation occurs under the watchful eye of the DoD.
Once in a while we go on an orgy of extractive wealth transfer like now, instead of creative innovation like usually, and the top industry guys always fuck it up. And on cue, yeah this is going great.
Betting some on Intel is very wise when the alternatives are, as I see it: 1) investing in TSMC building fabs and creating more of an employee knowledge base and skill base on shore, 2) hoping a US-based startup gets enough traction to grow.
Agreed on leadership. But selecting leadership teams, especially technically-grounded leadership teams is extremely difficult. Which is why companies revert to non-technical leadership so often.
TSMC is making fabs in the US, but they are not SOTA fabs. Those are kept in Taiwan.
Building a fab is no mean feat and loss of infra is a major blow, but it's certainly not impossible to build these fabs in the West, just not economical. You are not starting from scratch.
Since Intel has been mismanaged for so long I don’t know how many good lower level employees they managed to retain, I doubt much would be left if they properly cleaned house.
There wasn't any bailout on them, what do you mean?
google://Intel chips act billions
Intel was looking bad but not the dire state they’re in now.
>The CHIPS Act primarily benefits semiconductor manufacturers and related industries by providing substantial funding for domestic chip production and research. Companies like Intel, TSMC, Samsung, and Micron have received significant grants and loans to expand or establish new manufacturing facilities in the United States.
>The act authorizes roughly $280 billion in new funding to boost domestic research and manufacturing of semiconductors in the United States, for which it appropriates $52.7 billion
>The act includes $39 billion in subsidies for chip manufacturing on U.S. soil along with 25% investment tax credits for costs of manufacturing equipment, and $13 billion for semiconductor research and workforce training, with the dual aim of strengthening American supply chain resilience and countering China
That being said the government will likely not allow them to fail completely out of the foundry business for geopolitical reasons
That is the political calculation, not "throw good money after bad" kind of economics 101.
They don't want to be competitive they want to bleed the company dry.
Intel is doing the same. IDK if they are working on new fabs at this point, but the last few generations of chips from intel have used TSMC.
My expectation is that Intel might still run fabs, but they'll be mostly contracting them out to people who want cheap ASICs and 10 year old fab tech.
Yes, they are.
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/in...
Definitely struggling, but still in the game.
In this case...TSMC is holding all the cards, not Nvidia
Samsung comes in a close second in terms of tech. GloFo is also still floating around though lagging pretty bad AFAIK. Micron has it's own fabs that they are actively developing (in fact, they are building new facilities right now).
What TSMC is is cutting edge. That's why everyone that needs top performance uses them.
Intel fabs have never had to be as cost effective as others. They were selling top end chips for top dollar for decades. I bet there are 10 other companies that can make 45nm chips cheaper than Intel can on their old equipment. I could be wrong.
global* foundry
If everyone chases higher margin and ditches their fabs what kind of industry are we left with? One giant fab company like TSMC? That sounds healthy!
How many of them develop high performance x64-64 cores?
But if Intel joins the fabless club, all of the sudden the playing field gets much more level.
AMD would disagree?
Maybe if you ignore they're the only player with remotely competitive discrete GPU IP for graphics and AI, after the Nvidia and AMD duopoly.
Intel outsourcing their core product line is also a massive liability. It's just a different kind of liability.
I personally think the world's reliance on TSMC indicates that fabs are critically important infrastructure. And operating a world class one provides a company with a ton of leverage with governments and other businesses.
Intel's fab would be doing much better if it spun it out a while ago and was making Intel, Nvidia, and Apple chips right now.
What Intel process from the last decade would have been enticing to Nvidia or Apple?
The problem with Intel is that they are so short sighted and they change direction and focus very quickly. Intel will adopt these seemingly great ideas that require 10-20 year strategies, invest heavily in them, and then abandon them 5 years later. They always measure initiatives against their core CPU line and if they don't show similar profitability in the short term then they defund and eventually cut the programs entirely.
That's the precious leader. The new CEO is not from a semiconductor manufacturing background. His main claim to success is leading a company that built EDA tools.
So we're just going to hand control of the US supply of semiconductors completely over to TSMC, Samsung, and the Chinese fabs in the works? That seems incredibly short sighted and reckless.
I feel like x86 itself is kinda legacy tech. So while AMD has made advancements, they're somewhat in the same boat as Intel.
It seems like NVIDIA and Micron are the real "crown jewels" of US tech
Intel could make exciting RISC-V relatively quickly if they wanted to; what stops them and other companies like this is the strategic asset they perceive their existing ecosystem as.
https://www.computerenhance.com/p/an-interview-with-zen-chie...
It's like saying that programming language syntax/keywords are better than the other.
Everything is about compiler, lib, runtime, etc.
https://chipsandcheese.com/p/arm-or-x86-isa-doesnt-matter
Also some people say that RISC-V is the way to go
But let's be clear: Of course ISA matters. It's just as trivial to make a bad ISA as it is a bad syntax. But does the ISA of modern superscalar processors matter? Probably a bit, but certainly not a whole lot.
In this particular case: ia64 leaned hard into wide VLIW in an era where growing transistor budgets made it possible to decode and issue traditional instructions in parallel[1]. The Itaniums really were fine CPUs, they just weren't particularly advantageous relative to the P6 cores against which they were competing, so no one bought them.
[1] In some sense, VLIW won as a matter of pipeline architecture, it only lost as a design point in ISA specs. Your Macbook is issuing 10 arm64 instructions every cycle, and it doesn't need to futz with the instruction format to do it.
Isn't having fixed-size naturally-aligned instructions (like on 64-bit ARM) enough to get that advantage?
Really VLIW is a fine idea. It's just not that great an idea, and in practice it wasn't enough to save ia64. But it's not what killed it, either.
And by the way that's why open source makes such migrations much cheaper.
ld r1, [r2 + 10]
st [r3 + 4], r4
Either have a stupid ISA and do all the work ahead-of-time with way more compute time to optimize or don't optimize and have a higher level ISA, that also hs concepts like pointer provenance.
The current state seams like a local minima with both having ahead-of-time optimization, but the ISA does it's thing anyways and also the compiler throwing much of the information away with OoO analysis being time-critical.
When people say "ISA doesn't matter", they mean that the "legacy cruft" in x86 doesn't matter (that much) and that x86 remains competitive with other similar ISAs. It doesn't mean that the difference between VLIW and traditional ISAs doesn't matter. ISA paradigm still matters, just not the "syntax".
The impact of ISA is overrated, it's much more important that the ISA continues to grow and adapt as CPUs get larger.
No, it's not. In modern high-speed CPUs, many instructions are decoded directly, without going through the microcode engine. In fact, on several modern Intel CPUs, only one of the instruction decoders can run microcode ("complex") instructions, while all the other decoders can only run non-microcode ("simple") instructions.
It would be more precise to say that it's at the "front-end" part of the core (where the decoders are) that the ISA lives, but even that's not quite true; many ISAs have peculiarities which affect beyond that, like flags on x86.
It's also noteworthy that GAAFET being a complete redesign of major parts of the manufacturing process levels the playing field significantly. A big example of this is Japan's Rapidus which was founded in 2022 and has managed to invent (and license) enough stuff to be prototyping GAA processes.
Intel's 18a process seems to be quite good. It's behind TSMC in absolute transistor density (SRAM density seems to be the same as N3E), but ahead on hard features like BSPD and maybe on GAA too. I suspect that they didn't push transistor density as hard as they could because BSPD and GAA tech were already big, risky changes.
We'll have a much better idea of Intel's fab future with 14a and 10a as they should show a trend of whether Intel's fabs can catch up and pass TSMC or if they run out of steam after the initial GAA bump.
There is talk about the next version of Arc using 18a. If it does, I'd expect Intel to move that generation's compute tiles to 18a as well.
Apple farms out its displays to Samsung, a competitor. It's just how business is done.
Samsung's competition is Huawei, Xiaomi, Oppo, etc.
Apple just recently moved back into the hardware space after farming everything out since the iMac gen2 days. Hell, I remember the Mac clones. I miss Power Computing.
TSMC by collaborating with many different customers with different needs had a lot of insensitive to not just create powerful tooling for one kind of CPU design approach but also being very flexible to allow other approaches for other needs. And AMD has repeatedly interrelated on their whole tool chain and dev. processes for many years while Intel was somewhat complacent with what they had.
And a bunch of the recent issues with CPUs internally dying sound a lot like miss-design issues which tooling should have coughed (instead of looking like fundamental tech/production issues).
They were wasting a ton of time and effort eagerly trying to convince Apple to put IA into phones despite obvious failures to deliver power-effective chips (Atom being the result of these efforts from what I understand). They were spending a lot of time and money trying to start up like a junk ware app-store thing for PCs that they could use OEM relationships to peddle, as if the PC ecosystem belonged to them the way that Android did to Google or Apple's ecosystem to Apple, not realizing that if anyone has that power it's Microsoft (but they also don't).
It was pretty shocking coming from a hacker/cyberpunk culture where everybody had been dunking on Intel designs for over a decade. (I personally had been waiting for an ARM laptop since around 2000.) A lot of leadership I got to interact with were business/people-people types that truly seemed to believe that the best product boiled down entirely to social perception of status and has zero basis in reality. Basically the company seemed to be high on the Intel Architecture's accidental monopoly over personal computing thanks to PC-WinTel becoming so dominant (and Apple's later capitulation) and seemed to believe that it was all because of their "genius" Intel Inside marketing campaigns (which were pure social status signaling, but with an effect of avoiding price competition with lower-cost IA rivals AMD,Citrix,VIA and holding power over OEMs rather than being responsible for the market situation around IA in the first place).
Maybe something in the Hillsboro/Beaverton area's water? Both they and Nike seem to entirely consist of a diet of their own farts.
Of course, one could have done an ARM Linux device at any point in that timeline, but using efficient software is apparently cheating.
agreed, but that was often not necessary a hardware issue but a ecosystem issue and Intel executives maybe not seeing/realizing that is pretty incompetent
On one side you had the whole windows was absolute garbage on ARM until very recently, and needed Apple to show them how to have a low friction support extension/transition. And if you instead shipped it with Android or Chrome OS it supposedly didn't count anymore (except a lot of non tech afine consumers have replaced home desktop/laptop with a tablet anyway (cheaper and does everything they need)).
On the other side there was a best technical fit/best customer fit mismatch. Best customers where tech enthusiasts which want to try out new things and can live with a bit of friction (if it's small enough) and are also often willing to pay _slightly_ more. But the best price/product fit is the low (initially, then to mid) end devices except they aren't really that interesting for enthusiasts and due to low (initial) production quantity also not necessary that cheap either and for the people which normally buy this devices buying a similar priced android tablet is most times just better and with a bit of effort you can get an even better x86 PC, through with many 2nd hand/hand me down parts.
and outside of 1) means to pressure MS for better deals, 2) Steam Deck/OS, there just weren't any meaningful large/well known hardware producers shipping with Linux (yes Lenovo and Dell do care (do they still? idk.) for Linux compatibility in _some(few)_ of there expensive business focused lines. But outside of exceptions in 1) don't ship with it so no "normal" consumer pics it up, and Linux shipping ORMs are on the larger consumer market picture just too small to make a big difference. So ARM Linux stayed relegated to niche, too.
I would be very surprised if 14a and 10a comes out soon enough to be competitive with TSMC.
It's not about how soon 14a and 10a come out, but rather about how good they are when they arrive. 14a will be competing against TSMC A16 in late 2026 and 10a will be competing with TSMC A14 in late 2027. The measure of Intel's success will be whether they are gaining or losing vs TSMC.
On the customer front, I think customers are probably necessary to offset the ever-increasing R&D costs and an extra year or two to work on making their libraries more standardized may be best for everyone.
It seems difficult to figure out if they are getting back on track, though. They always seem to just be a couple years from finally catching up to TSMC.
But so far nothing of the sort has happened for a long time. If feels like ever since Ryzen landed, they have been desperate to catch up but keep tripping on themselves. Losing Apple, while inevitable, has made them look even more irrelevant. They still do decent stuff for the most part but there isnt anything really exciting.
I do like what they are doing with Arc GPUs but it is clear those are loss leaders and it isnt really gaining that much traction.
Alas, this is a story where we will have a better understanding in five years from now.
18A is canceled for foundry customers, it's not going to save them. If they can't get it together for 14A, they are toast.
The fact that they can't use their own fab for 30% of their products [1], all of which are those that require power efficiency and compute performance [2], suggests it is not overstated.
[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/intel-will-keep-u...
[2] https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/intel-is-using-tsmc-4nm-f...
They're also very unpopular online so it's tough to find solid unbiased info about them. Like is the stink about 18A true or do people just want to hate on Intel?
Or not. Sometimes it if looks like terminal decline, it simply is terminal decline.
Indeed that's how they were marketed where I worked (Office Max) and were priced and spec'd comparably to the Celeron based offerings from IBM, HP, and Packard Bell.
Another issue with the K6 line was they were always a generation behind at a time when Intel was rapidly rolling out technologies like MMX and SSE. Intel coordinated with software manufacturers and had launch day examples that presented significant performance gaps between the CPU lines.
The K6 also had a shorter execution pipeline than Pentium so it struggled to hit 400mhz when Intel was approaching 500mhz. That's why the Athlon was such a shock because it arrived at 700mhz and stomped everything.
Looking back at the K6 line now, they likely perform far better then they did at the time because software eventually got around to supporting the hardware.
The 650MHz came two months after than, and 700MHz another two months later. 6 months later 1GHz! It is easy to forget just how rapid performance increased in the late 90s.
I remember it was a K7 700 because it was the first from scratch PC that I ever built. Everything before and probably since has been a Ship of Theseus.
"AMD Athlon 500-600MHz (bulk) price display. The product is scheduled to arrive in mid-July, and reservations are being accepted. However, there is no specific arrival schedule for compatible motherboards yet."
"the K7 revised "Athlon" has been given a price and reservations have also started. The estimated price is 44,800 yen for 500MHz, 69,800 yen for 550MHz, and 89,800 yen for 600MHz."
Those were Pentium 3 450-550MHz prices.
A week before official AMD shipping date retail Athlons arrive in Japan https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/990813.html
"AMD's latest CPU "Athlon" will be sold in Akihabara without waiting for the official release date on the 17th is started. All products on the market are imported products, and 3 models of 500MHz/550MHz/600MHz are on sale. The sale of compatible motherboards has also started, and it is possible to obtain it alone, including Athlon"
https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/990813/p_cpu.ht...
~$380-800 depending on speed.
https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/990813/newitem....
Picture of one of the Akihabara stalls full of CPUs being sold retail before official AMD launch date :) https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/990813/image/at...
For reference in US 4 days later on August 17 Alienware was merely teasing pictures of Athlon system https://www.shacknews.com/article/1019/wheres-my-athlon According to Anand "OEMs will start advertising Athlon based systems starting August 16, 1999" https://www.anandtech.com/show/355/24
By January 2000 prices corrected to saner bus still delusional levels https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/20000108/p_cpu....
K6-III/450 14,550 $140
K6-III/400 8,980 $85
Celeron 300A $57
First time Duron shows up in Akihabara is June 17 2000 https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/20000617/p_cpu....
Celeron 533A 10,570 $100
Duron 600MHz 9,990 $95
K6-III/450 24,800 $236 haha whats up with that price? Either AMD stopped shipping already and its leftovers or its a sucker tax for ss7 owners wanting to max out.
K6-III/400 14,800 $140
K6-2/550 7,949 $76
K6-2/533 5,970 $57
K6-2/500 5,350 $50
Week later https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/20000624/p_cpu....
Celeron 533A 9,980 $95
Duron 600MHz 9,480 $90
K6-III/450 24,800 $230 AHAHAHAHAHA
K6-III/400 15,800 $150
K6-2/550 7,940 $76
K6-2/533 6,700 $63
K6-2/500 5,300 $50
Looks like by the time Durons showed up nobody was bothering to stock K6-3, only 3 vendors in Akihabara had them. Those crazy prices werent limited to Japan, Poland September 1999:
Pentium III 450MHz 1260 $308
Pentium II 400MHz 943 $231
Celeron 366MHz 348 $85 (300A missing from the list, but was still available and selling cheaper)
K6-III/450 1108 $271 HAHA
K6-III/400 877 $215
K6-2/400 397 $97 haha
K6-2/350 230 $56
For a brief moment in 1999 AMD pretended K6-3 was equal to Pentium 2/3 and tried to price it accordingly but market corrected them swiftly. There was a 1/3 performance gap between K6-3 and overclocked Celeron.
https://web.archive.org/web/20080418185205/http://arstechnic...
https://web.archive.org/web/20070918073530/http://arstechnic...
https://web.archive.org/web/20070918135927/http://arstechnic...
These days iGPUs run pretty much any game I care to play so it doesn't matter.
Now we are in a different situation. There are several big competitors using ARM instead of x86. The software world is actually transitioning away from x86 in masses. Apple does their own CPUs better than Intel. AMD outsourced production already. Everybody is pumping money into TSMC who are are already ahead of Intel and they are moving faster.
Either Intel gets a really really lucky run with their new technology or they need to split off the foundry business. The government may put it on life support until TSMC themselves may run into serious problems.
The better way into the future may be to split up TSMC in multiple redundant and competing companies.
Nowadays, there will be another process node from TSMC. If AMD doesn’t pay for the R&D, TSMC’s other customers (like Apple and… actually, Intel) will instead.
I think the big fear here is that if Intel does the same, there won't be much competition left in the fab space.
Is Samsung still competitive with TSMC?
Part of it, sure, but they were still fabless and in the ditch before Zen. Unless you're referring to going with TSMC instead of GloFo as going fabless.
What helped them is putting the right people in charge of Zen design and intel fumbling 10nm due to their own hubris.
AMD was fine with having GloFo as a fab until 20nm process. They were already behind, but not terribly.
AMD even used TSMC for their CPUs and GPUs before Zen. Ontario was fabbed at TSMC in 2011.
Point is AMD as free to shop around. Only in 2016 the agreement was amended that GloFo would be preferred for 14nm and 7nm, but since they decided not to work on 7nm, it freed up AMD.
Zen 2 is also where Ryzen went from "exciting and competitive, but not top of the line" to actually giving Intel a run for their money in more than just highly multithreaded workloads.
Improved architecture put AMD within striking distance of Intel and the move to TSMC allowed them to pull ahead.
My most recent computer is AMD Ryzen based, but we just bought an Intel-based Dell for my partner because the price/performance was better than comparable AMD machines at the time, possibly due to a sale. But the Intel chip is a lot faster than my laptop, so now I'm a little bit jealous of the Intel machine.
I have 2 intel/dell laptops and thinkpad/amd 14s laptop. Both Dells (a workstation-class 22 core cpu and a more power-efficient one) suck massively when compared to amd ai-something-something-ryzen.
What's worse, intel drivers are a mess on linux right now. Dell xps 13 plus is the worst laptop I had in a decade, and that's after owning every Linux-preinstalled Dell XPS 13 ever released.
Not really sure what you mean by that.
Both our Intel and AMD computers are doing great. Nothing "weird" about it.
No problems at all. YMMV.
FWIW, Apple M4 Max 16 Core scores 43,818 on passmark and runs at 90 Watts TDP, so Intel certainly is competing on speed, as well as TDP.
it's almost apples to oranges in most cases.
Maybe it is just bad luck on my end, but I have not had those issues with Intel in the past or currently.
“If Intel can just get this next node they’ll be sitting pretty” is what people have been saying for over a decade isn’t it?
Just getting the nodes working and producing enough chips has been a huge issue for them, let alone having good chip designs on top of that.
“No one got fired for choosing Intel” has stopped applying. They’re even losing server marketshare, which was their rock.
Intel as a brand may survive in some shape or form but it's not looking good for the foundry.
He later noped out of Intel shortly after joining. Whatever he saw, either in leadership or product, had to be pretty bad in my opinion. AFAIK there's been speculation, but nothing really concrete.
Yes, building top-of-the-line CPUs is hard and it's impressive that we saw the dominance flip in the course of just a few years.
But I think frontier chip fabrication is a bigger juggernaut than "mere" CPU design.
(Your conclusion could still be correct, but I don't know if I buy the high-level reasoning).
I dont know if I count, but at least I wrote about TSMC before most if anyone knew much about TSMC. Which is when Apple brought them to spotlight.
It depends on how you define or count as being able to compete with TSMC?
If Intel technically leapfrog TSMC and their 18nm is better than TSMC 20nm this year but;
It is 30 - 40% more expensive.
It has lower Gross margin, or even negative margin.
It has much lower volume and capacity.
It is slower in ramping up capacity for future capacity planning.
It has limited IP range for its foundry.
It has less packaging options.
It does not have other high speed, low power or analog node options.
At what point does it count as competing? Because right now there isn't a single metric that Intel Foundry is winning. And they are feeling exactly the same as Global Foundry or AMD when Intel Foundry advancement is getting all the oxygens.
And even if they did, with a magic wand got them to compete with TSMC on every single one of the item above, in medium to long term there isn't a single chance Intel could compete with their current board and management.
TSMC leadership and management team is Nvidia's level great. I cant think of any other tech company that could rival them. Their only risk is China.
The first year of TSMCs latest process goes to Apple. And the second few years are booked completely full. There is room for Intel if they can just get in the ballpark of TSMC.
Think you mean 1.8nm, aka 18A. We're way past 18nm and 20nm.
"For a long time, gate length (the length of the transistor gate) and half-pitch (half the distance between two identical features on a chip) matched the process node name, but the last time this was true was 1997"
Quite simply imagine being dropped in as CEO of Intel in 2015. Could you have prevented the malaise of today?
I think they have a lot of potential in the dedicated GPU space, but that is a consumer market so profit margins are smaller and they have potential in the low-to-mid-end market so even less margin. It's really sad as the competition there would help consumers.
the sad thing is, it was predictable. Wintel and other monopoly-like deals/situations had removed the need to compete/stay on edge from Intel. They then noticed it too late and made mistakes when trying to course correct/having to much innovation dept to effectively course correct screwed them up big
At the same time AMD again and again re-invented and optimized their development flow and experimented with alternative approaches and did not shy away from cooperating with TSMC and implicitly through that Nivdea and other (sometimes also Intel). Intel on the other hand AFIK got stuck on a approach where they had a edge over AMD but which was seem to have turned out to be somewhat of a dead end.
what is interesting is how TSMC has so far avoided the same kind of trap
- by having competing customers and having deep research co-operations with all the customers they brought competition and innovation back into a monopoly in a round about way like position
- having limited capacity of the newest tech which their competing customers bit for bring in monetary insensitive to innovate
- and them being somewhat of a life line for their country put a lot of pressure onto them to not break their own innovation machine for greed (e.g. by intentionally not expanding the availability of the latest node even when they technically could)
I think dedicated GPUs will be dead soon. AMD will beat nVidia with APUs that compete with midrange DGPU in performance with lower system cost. With AI using GPUs we want the shared memory of the APU rather than splitting RAM into two mutually exclusive areas - witness boards starting to use soldered ram in 64 and 128GB configurations. nVidia can't compete without x86 cores and Intel just cant compete for now.
I mean for gaming there is already the Ryzan Max+395 which already is beyond the level of low end graphics (at least if placed in a desktop where it's not heat/power throttled). But it's a bit of a unicorn (especially if you look for a system where it can run full throttle).
but I'm not sure about the beat nVidea part, nVidea has some experience with putting ARM CPUs on their graphic cards and as far as I remember on for their server center solutions there is one which pairs up graphic cards (and their RAM) over PCIe and mostly cuts out the CPU
https://www.nytimes.com/1997/05/14/business/suit-by-digital-...
There were much more discussion of Intel stealing things in the 90s than today.
I live in the area and know a LOT of intel fab workers.
The issue is not the workers: Intel has been captured by corporate raiders and toxic management.
They aren't interested in making chips or an innovative company. They just want to squeeze the juice out of the company until it is dry.
That is why it is so bad.
Listed companies are too vulnerable to short-term thinking, thanks to the meaningless “fiduciary duty”.
Instead of investing in the future and paying top dollar for top employees, the Board paid the shareholders (even 20 years ago). They never even tried to compete for the best employees, and instead let them all go to Alphabet/Apple/Amazon/Meta/Microsoft/Nvidia/Netflix.
This includes the employees in management.
Could you explain to those of us who don't understand how corporate raiders have influenced Intel's strategy?
IMHO the whole user-visible p-core/e-core thing on desktop CPUs is one of the worst decisions in the history of microprocessors. My gaming machines need to do double-duty as as build boxes, so they're just utterly unusable for me.
Defense is starting to get a blank check with fairly bipartisan support for the first time in at least 30-40 years and it's centered on semiconductor supply chains. There has never been a better time to secure the fucking funding, have ASML send twice as many people as they already have, and power through it. The market is whatever you want and the margins are whatever you want: in a functioning system? You fucking do it.
And while I will believe that Intel has suffered serious attrition in key posts, there's no way that the meta-knowledge of how to debug "we don't have the fabs running right, who do we hire, what so we need to give them to get it done" has evaporated in 5-10 years from the singular source of this institutional muscle memory in the history of the world.
The failing here is more like a failing in courage, or stamina, grit, something. It's a failure of the will to do the right thing for both the shareholders and the country.
What has much more commonly produced good outcomes in such situations is robust public-private partnerships like the ones that produced the semiconductor industry in the first place. Run the list of innovations in strategically key technology and what will you find at one remove in every instance? The DoD, NASA, the Labs and ATT more broadly, the university system.
It's always a public/private partnership during periods of explosive value creation when the stakes are high, and it's always a private sector capture orgy during periods of extractive stagnation like the present.
That era of American history has passed. Innovation gives way to consolidation and cronyism. Think Mussolini’s Italy.
A lot of cash is going to be redeployed towards tilting at the windmill of domestic ballistic missile defense… while we’re watching a war in Ukraine where cheap drones are demonstrating that most major weapons platforms are functionally obsolete.
Forums like HN full of senior technologists and future founders are disproportionately high impact. If the tone around here shifted a little to stop excusing what YC has become and start embracing how it all started?
Shit like that adds up. geohotz had that post a few weeks ago about this late capitalism internet shit, he was pretty deep in with the Effective Altruists and he got it together. I said at the time and I'll say again, you get a few more people like that to sober up? pmarca and lex and people? Maybe even pg?
Real change happens that way.
The current board is a pack of cargo-culting epitaph writers.
I forget the name of the speaker guy who has this turn of phrase, but whatever the merits of his overall platform this hits perfectly: "People doing well today are using every means at their disposal to decrease their accountability while increasing their compensation. If you don't compensate people based on the responsibility they are willing to undertake, you will get a world run by people like this and it will look like the world you live in right now".
Really? Because:
> During Donald Trump's 2025 speech to a joint session of Congress, the president asked House Speaker Mike Johnson to “get rid” of the subject act.[190]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIPS_and_Science_Act#Subseque...
Usually opposing parties have had the common sense not to immediately hit the undo button once they take office. E.g., Biden leaving most of Trump's previous nutty tariffs in place. But "common sense" isn't on the agenda these days. We are, to all intents and purposes, under attack from within.
In 1998 Meriwether and the rest of LTCM nearly crashed the economy, needed the Fed to get involved, and they were personally ruined, guy never opened a ten thousand dollar bottle of wine again and probably never had anything again. Shortly thereafter, Jeff Skilling took out offices in 9 cities and pension plans all over the country with shady accounting. 24 years in prison (reduced later to 14). Ebbers/Worldcom 2002: died in prison.
By 2008? Zero prosecutions. Bonuses the next year.
Around the same time Clinton got caught lying about chasing (consenting and of age) skirt in the Office: nearly ended his presidency, definitely ended his policy agenda, real consequences and he caught a shooting star to avoid far worse. The public was not going to accept it, Congress was not going to let it slide on either side of the aisle. Today? Something like that barely makes the press. You have to be accused of sex trafficking to even get an investigation started and everyone will probably walk.
The idea that this became uniquely bad in January, or even 2016 is demonstrably untrue. At some time in the last 30 years we started accepting leadership who are dishonest, nakedly self-interested, lie without consequences, enrich themselves via extraction rather than value creation, collude with no oversight, and sell out the public.
This is a completely bipartisan consensus on these norms. Speaking for myself, I think Trump represents a new low, but not by much, he's just the next increment in what history will probably call the Altman Era if his ascent to arbitrary power on zero substance continues on it's current trajectory.
Reasons for that are easy to come up, imo chief among them being web2.0 (social media) and the ever increasing degree with which people exaggerate everything just to get a reaction.
Under that context, what's a little skirt chasing compared to what people usually say about the politicians? And how are you gonna remember he did something a few months ago, when so many more extreme things have happened since?
Really, I feel like social media will be considered the most destructive force to society in 20-50 yrs
Sometimes I find myself thinking about that experiment with the perfect rat paradise. The overpopulation got so bad, the normal social functions of the rats started to break down and the rats started acting like sociopaths. Sometimes, I think that's what we're doing to ourselves by exposing the average human to millions of voices through the internet.
Of course, ironically, I'm ignoring my own advice and still engage with the Internet. Though I mostly keep to HN and some IRC.
It was just as wrong as predictions about human overpopulation like Malthusianism
Like there are any number of extremely specific issues which are not "screaming and posturing" unless you're dead set on not talking about them.
The thing about those sources is that for the most part, it wasn't really economically viable to alienate half the population by leaning hard right or left. Any reduction in audience would likely translate to a commensurate reduction in advertising revenue.
Today, there are many, many sources of 'news' available in various forms around the internet, and of course people are free to choose what to pay attention to. This means it's entirely feasible for each source to cater to a particular viewpoint, even at the expense of definitely alienating half or more of the theoretical potential audience.
I theorize that the reason for this is that people have voted with their feet, balanced sources aren't as profitable and that's why there are fewer of them. It makes sense, a more balanced take on events is by definition not nearly as sensational, and almost always requires more mental effort on the part of the listener.
That by itself would probably be enough to explain the current situation, but on top of that, we also have the fact that many people receive the above mentioned information via algorithms designed to feed them more of what they already like (i.e. agree with) and nothing else, which of course only amplifies the effect further.
I have no idea how we get out of this situation (or if in fact we will), but in my mind it's not surprising at all.
I think the internet just supercharged a change that was already well underway.
I usually can think of at least a few plausible/possible solutions to most problems. But I am not at all sure what the Democrat's right response should have been.
However, a severe lack of legal tolerance for businesses that use technology to super-scale poisonous conflicts of interest, like surveillance backed ads and media feeds algorithmically manipulated for addiction/attention behavior would have been part of it.
Zuck should have been put away for life a few accidental genocides ago. (IMHO)
I don't think Al Franken would agree with this
In other words, I completely agree.
They heavily pushed the idea that the opposition could not have legitimacy. Gingrich did it through the exercise of power and Limbaugh did it on the airwaves. It wasn’t just that the opposition was wrong or bad for the country, standard democracy stuff, but that the opposition had no right to hold power at all. Once you start thinking that legitimacy is based on which side you’re on rather than who you are or what you do, you won’t care about bad leadership as long as it’s yours.
Trump's entire rhetoric relies on this tactic. Anyone who disagrees with him or tries to shut him down should be impeached, jailed, whatever, because they shouldn't be allowed to exercise their power against him, no matter how legally they wield it.
It just makes me so angry to hear Vance say things like "judges aren't allowed to control the executive's legitimate power". Yes, they are! That's literally one of their jobs, specifically enumerated in the constitution! But that's the tactic: train people to believe that the judicial branch is not legitimate when it comes to executive branch decisions.
The child sex ring that was uncovered in 2008 resulted in ludicrously light consequences and then after a repeat offense in 2019 was systematically ignored until now.
The same President Clinton, with the same Congress, repealed the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999 and thereby effectively legalized much of the next 26 years of corporate malfeasance, starting with much of what enabled the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. And when they did this, it was popular and politically nonthreatening.
We got what we voted for.
They've been doing the exact right thing for the shareholders: squeezing the living shit out of an asset (x86/64) for decades while cutting anything interesting or competitive to the bone to give shareholders more money. Money spent on something that could really have been competitive is money not sent to the retirement fund that keeps John and Jane Q. Public swinging in more ways than one at their golf course retirement community in Florida.
The problem is, you can only do that for so long. There is a minimum spend to remain a competitive company with regard to being able to market products to consumers. Executives don't have a fiduciary duty to create the best possible product for consumers to look at and potentially buy in the marketplace, but they do have a fiduciary duty to shareholders to meet an earnings projection. If these two activities can coexist peacefully, great. If not, the first activity stops while the company gets gutted.
The most expensive, highest-margin, technically advanced and risky business in the world is for investors who want that in their portfolio. If they wanted to milk a dying industry on the way down they would go buy Disney stock.
It is very clearly in the interests of long-term investors in Intel to maintain a commanding position in fabrication: it's been the secret sauce of the company since the very beginning, it's never been more in demand.
This idea that companies are obligated to do what will deliver some little bump in the stock price in 90-180 days is everything from not how the rules work to just a lazy meme for people who don't want to earn their princely salaries.
Don't make excuses for weakness at the top.
Different market participants will be trading on different signals, sentiments, or theses, and this will influence everything from the order types they use to the hold time of the instruments in question.
But one of many things they all have in common is that they know that what other people think about the future affects the price right now: an intuitive proof of this is that if some major announcement is made about e.g. trade policy, and the market deems it credible, you will see instruments transact up or down in price immediately.
In any effort to go deeper, one must be wary that this goes from market microstructure to Ito calculus to voodoo real fast, a closed form solution would be an infinite money machine! But a reasonable jumping off point might be the notion of a Keynsian Beauty contest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest
The TLDR is that hold times across like 13 orders of magnitude (rumor has it a cutting edge FPGA fielded by someone like Optiver or HRT or Virtu can pull a whole ladder in 20-50ns glass-to-glass, so whatever Buffet does divided by that) the market still in some sense reflects expectations about the future: it's "priced in" in trading parlance.
"Too late" has some ways you can use it meaningfully in finance, but it's not in the sense I take you to mean above.
At a certain point, you hollow yourself out, and you can't recover. Top-level talent doesn't want to work at a place that doesn't have a real shot. So things just... peter out.
Inflation-adjusted INTC [1] is the same as it was in 1997, including dividends! Shareholders have no real return from INTC for almost 3 decades.
I would quibble with the exact right thing phrases but otherwise agree. Intel indeed followed a formula which is intended to and often does produce massive return for some time frame. The formula is indeed "gutting the company" - squeeze every part of an enterprise and return the results as profits. Whether destroying the companies long term prospects is worth these short term profits is a complex calculation.
A managers' duty is to promote long term value and stability, actually, but return enough short term profits and you trump that long investment income.
And in the days when fraud or "fraud-adjacent" behavior carried serious costs? When violating the social contract around pensions and severance and stuff had real reputational costs that followed the principles around? People used them when necessary. You sold off the assets sometimes.
But beginning with the LBO "innovation" in the 80s and running a line through Milken and shit all the way to the Vanguard/State Street/Blackrock "quasi-sovereign" level of PE asset capture?
People started arbing it, not by seeing value where others had missed it! By betting that Gordon Gecko had enough fans to make the arb work. "Gutting" a company slowely and painfully is in a bucket I'll call "fraud adjacent": usually not outright illegal (lotta "gray" work, gray edge), clearly not what society wants or intended, and you know it's a scam when you look in the mirror every night. i used to get wasted with these guys at Catch when I lived in NYC: they'll tell you everytging I am and more on five gin and tonics
There's no place for the word "duty" in any version of that argument unless you also use the word "derelict".
Don't excuse weakness at the top.
By betting that Gordon Gecko had enough fans to make the arb work. "Gutting" a company slowely and painfully is in a bucket I'll call "fraud adjacent": usually not outright illegal (lotta "gray" work, gray edge), clearly not what society wants or intended
Sure, but if society doesn't intend this, society has to f---ing do something. Clearly it's not.
IE: if the only legal obligation of management is promoting maximum legally possible valuation over time, "squeezing" still makes sense if there's enough money to be had. The only way to change this is forcing the issue in some fashion or other.
Intel fired the one CEO that spoke both engineer and business, and Gelsinger could have been their Lisa Su. They fired the only talented CEO they've had for years.
This will be fatal.
Gelsinger was the scapegoat for 20+ years of inability to compete with foreign companies, no matter how much money was poured into them. They used American exceptionalism as a cover to defraud shareholders and any government that invested in them. They used the relationship of AIPAC and Congress to build a fab and R&D lab in Israel (inserting yourself into global politics to make a buck is always spicy) at low cost to them.
Taiwan became the capitol of electrical engineering in the world, and is a shining example of how to survive and thrive in a post-war era, and it absolutely shows. They caught up to Intel and zoomed right past.
Gelsinger's crime was try to do what AMD did: they didn't have a fab that could make their chip BUT they had a fab that made chips that people wanted AND the foundry could take that work and survive if they legally split. GloFo is now the third largest semi foundry in the world today, and when it was part of AMD, it very much wasn't; I can't quite remember, but 5th or 6th? Something like that. GloFo is #3, TSMC is #1, Samsung is #2, and Intel could very well be that #4, and push out UMC (#4) and SMIC (#5) in the secondary chip foundry market.
Gelsinger could have split Intel into Intel and IFoundry or something, and Intel could have profited on IFoundry taking off and taking external work. Right now, IFoundry can't compete on top nodes, but _could_ steal work from all other fabs for secondary larger nodes. Having a working 12 nm competitor as well as a working 7nm competitor is big business, which Intel currently has _ZERO_ of (since they don't take external contracts). Gelsinger was big on this potential revenue stream.
Gelsinger's other crime was being part of the negotiation between TSMC and the Biden administration for the CHIPs act money: part of what built the TSMC fab right next door to Intel's in Arizona was Biden and Intel money. Intel was investing in it's future by playing the American exceptionalism card again, but now in everybody's favor. We _all_ benefit from this. Gelsinger wanted to have _somebody_ fab the chips, and if its good enough for AMD, Apple, and Nvidia, its good enough for Intel.
There is zero indication that GAA 20A is ready, and Intel has a history of having leadership that says such-and-such is ready for it to either come out several gens later, or just vanish off the roadmap. Gelsinger's other OTHER crime is admitting to this and changing the direction of the Titanic before it hits the iceberg, for the CEO that replaced him just to steer right back into the iceberg.
I have _zero_ faith in Intel's leadership if they can't bring Gelsinger back. Tan, Gelsinger's replacement, is a former board member. I have no reason to think he is not just going to further poison the company. Tan has not spoken about any plan that indicates he understands Intel is not competitive, Intel cannot competitively make 100% of the tiles, that Intel's Foveros tech stack is extremely valuable because the only truly comparative alternative is TSMC's CoWoS tech family and superior to it and people are willing to throw money at that problem but they can't license it as long as IFoundry is part of Intel.
Intel is cooked imnsho.
At the time, EPROM tech was Intels most profitble product until the 8088 and 8087, which were designed in Israel at the dev center (along with many of their chip designs).
Edit: Look, to whoever is out there on a downvote spree, I don't care if I get downvoted, man, but wild you'd just downvote people talking about a guy whose won multiple IEEE awards, has patents to his name, and has left his mark on EE, and isn't even the focus of the discussion at hand.
His over-optimism gave the whole "5 nodes in 4 years" supposed path to leadership a weird flavor, like it must be somehow a bit of a con even if it gets technically achieved.
Also, I looked into the claim when he had said it, apparently he was being intentionally misleading about it, and the press tried to ask what he meant: he was speaking tensor performance on future enterprise Arc card products at datacenter scale, ie, AI bait.
In early 2021, Nvidia's compute flagship was the A100, 19.5 FP32 MAD TFLOPs, but the misleading number they quote in marketing is the tensor performance of 312 TFLOPs of FP16 accumulates. That would be about 3.2 million of these at tensor perf.
Skipping H series, in late Nov of last year, their new flagship is the B200. 124 FP32 MAD TFLOPs, 2250 tensor FP16 accumulate TFLOPs. That is now 445k cards to reach zettascale if using tensor cores. You won't be fitting ~1400 GPU-laden machines in a single datacenter, but the number is becoming more manageable.
They improved, in 3.5 years, 7.2x.
Lets say Nvidia does this again. 3.5 years, again, would put you in early 2028, and they manage another 7.2x win: that could be 62k cards across 7.7k. That absolutely is doable in a single datacenter.
The problem is, and this is where the prediction actually falls apart, not that its impossible: We don't know what future Arc cards look like, nor enterprise ones. Battlemage is an improvement over Alchemist, so the tech *is moving forwards at, but either Celestial or Druid was supposed to introduce the enterprise compute card variants, but that seems to be dead, and no indication either of those lines will even see the light of day now. The new CEO seems to be hard set on making Xe for iGPU only.
I can't find any hard numbers on Intel's tensor units, but apparently they're actually competitive. I can find the normal FP32 MAD numbers, and it ends up that Intel is 13.5w per TFLOP and Nvidia is 8 and both companies have equal efficiency in transistor usage. Assuming Intel made a B200 competitor, and assuming the higher power usage is due to voltage (Intel B series voltage is similar to Series 40's voltages, which is a lot higher than equivalent enterprise/pro series cards), Intel could be making a card that's somewhere in the ballpark as 2/3 as good for the same power usage.
So, in the end, yes, I don't agree with his claims of future Zettascale at Intel by 2027. I don't think he was wrong for the industry as a whole, however. If he would have said, say, 2030, I don't think we would be discussing this, that certainly would have been doable if he was at the helm and they kept doubling down on Arc every gen and everything went according to plan.
But maybe it was more of an early foreshadowing. I had a housemate that worked on their internal CAD tools and it also sounded like a bit of a mess with NIH syndrome. (20+ years ago)
nVidia market cap is 4T or about 40x Intels. Im not sure who those smart people are.
I was disappointed with their offerings and went with AMD for my latested build. I don't know too many people who have built PCs recently, but the few I do know who have or are planning to, everyone is planning to use AMD. Similar to the GE example, it seems many people would recommend LG or Samsung appliances over GE.
"Over the past 10 years, Intel engaged in financial engineering, primarily through significant stock buybacks ($53 billion in 2011–2015) and stock-based executive compensation, which diverted resources from innovation and contributed to its lag in semiconductor fabrication. This financialization, as critiqued in the 2021 report, is a long-term factor in Intel’s weakened competitive position"
https://semianalysis.com/2024/12/09/intel-on-the-brink-of-de...
https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/how-intel-fi...
https://www.intc.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1726/...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14588429
The top of the market will go GPU and the bottom will go ARM, and the middle will be an ever shrinking x86 market share. The few places that will need heavy CPU resources will be the same people who can apply pressure to Intel's margins.
The process of chip making will look very similar in the future, but the brand of the CPU will matter less every year. Intel's not "dead in five years", but Intel will definitely cross the point of no return in that timeframe. Shifting a big company's focus is more difficult than growing another company who already has the right focus.
A friend used to send me articles regularly from Semiaccurate in the mid 2010s. I thought it was "alternative truth" but it turns out to have been more, uh, accurate than I thought.
Smart people know to choose AMD. OEMs heavily favor Intel for the brand recognition. It's the same on the workstation side, though AMD's market share has been rising quite fast (it's apparently at a 36.5% share) so I'm unsure if system integrators will keep pushing their Intel SKUs so heavily.
So they're not cooked, but they're certainly not doing well and barring a massive jump in performance or efficiency, they're not going to be making a recovery any time soon.
Corporations outsourced not because they couldn't compete, but because why leave 10% on the table when we can reward the executives with that cash instead of the labor?
This is a confluence of the previous administration having the forethought to do this, before the current administration tried to kill the CHIPS act.
If they hadn’t done that, you likely wouldn’t have seen domestic production able to satisfy the needs.
Tariffs alone are a misguided cudgel.
Also your comment about a “major impact to the consumer” ignores that this is an increase in cost just for the silicon. There’s a lot of tariffs on different parts of the actual product.
For the sake of argument, if all goods increase in price by 20%, Americans are going to have the experience of being worse off than they were before.
This is the largest tax hike on Americans in modern times (possibly ever?). While it may take a while for people to understand the impact of policy, people generally do not like large tax hikes. I don't think it's a stretch to think people will not like this tax increase, either.
These greedy fucks in the 1970s sold out current generations so they could min/max profit for themselves and billionaire buddies. All of this at the expense of decimating: local manufacturing industries, environment, public safety nets, and sustainable living.
I'm not attempting to assign blame to one political party or another. Reasonable tariffs to protect domestic labor should be a bi-partisan issue.
You need to have reasonable certainty that your factory is going to be profitable on a 20+ year horizon to commit into building a production line.
I don't understand how MAGAs don't get that.
When you offshore a production facility, it's not about being profitable, it's that it can be more profitable elsewhere.
If you have no guarantee that the tariffs will still be there to artificially maintain your profitability so high, then you don't build.
I think we can agree on the facts there
If you want to bring back manufacturing you need to consider the entire supply chain, and make sure that inputs for whatever factory you are bringing in are secure and will be equal or cheaper in 20 years. These things need to be predictable.
Also, let's not pretend the MAGA movement listens to anything other than the propaganda.
Despite the marketing, the tariffs are fairly bi-partisan among the congress.
On the other hand... most of the tariffs you hear about aren't real and never had/will-have an impact, and are clearly being weaponized as a way to get trading partners in-line. Few actual tariffs have been realized as-of yet... but if you read the news you'd be led to believe everything you buy is tariffed all to hell.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. The Biden Admin left in-place a lot of Trump foreign policy, and Democrats (the likely next admin-party) have been wishing for tariffs for years. Currently they're playing their part as the "opposition" but I'd bet money most of the tariffs stay during the next admin.
Your point about changing every 2 weeks is sound, however.
I'm fine with chips made in Taiwan.
The world needs a healthy diversified CPU/GPU chip market. At least there is ARM on the CPU side, but it's not nearly enough.
Branching out supply chains and industry is a big problem to solve effectively because it touches so many different pieces.
That's just silly.
1. https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
2. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/d...
CPU space is definitely easier to disrupt but the GPU space requires a HUGE investment and you're fighting uphill against proprietary technology like CUDA that has become industry standards. Intel, Qualcomm, Samsung and Google have made inroads with budget to mid range which is the highest selling segment. But to compete with Nvidia or AMD on the high end you either need a whole datacenter or many years of R&D with very little return for a long time. Apple would be on this list but they have siloed off themselves entirely.
So sure, right now we might not want to pay that 20% markup for US-made chips, but 20% will be cheap if the only operational TSMC fabs are in the US.
I'd rather see America hooked on the same supply as everyone else to make sure they stop China from invading Taiwan. Our shared weaknesses force governments to cooperate, which is a win in my book.
Especially silly when the chance of China invading Taiwan is very nonzero.
You see it with Columbia university and that network television network that got sued
And yes, no matter what you think of America First (I'm not even American), that sounds very much worth it.
That 5%-20% is worth it now because no one else can fabricate competing chips. In a competitive market, 5%-20% can be the difference between having the price edge or not. I understand why the USA wants TSMC to manufacture outside of Taiwan, but perhaps it makes sense to move it not the USA but, say, Mexico?
Chinese car companies seem to be slowly but surely rolling American car companies in international markets with great value at low prices. The move in this market evidently isn't to move manufacturing away from Mexico at a 5%-20% increase in price.
In the chip market there's less immediate competition, but I can only imagine it'll come. Hopefully economies of scale would have removed this extra 5%-20% by the time China catches up?
Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and other countries even Philippines and Vietnam don't want to depend too much on China. A lot of island disputes and so on and so forth.
My guess right now is that China will never catch up because Europe, US, Australia, and many other developing countries will avoid depending on China critically. This doesn't mean 0% would buy from China but it'll never become a critical dependency.
The problem China is big enough to catch up just by it depending on itself + some cheap mass consumer market outlets to even further scale production.
Like they have 1408 Million people ~3times the US and their education system tries (at least of paper) to give everyone a chance to reach silence excellence iff (and only iff) they are noticeable above average (but also due to the form of their education system for people which certain kinds of approaches to thinking which is a major handicap they gave themself accidentally). Like either way with that population size, priority on catching up on chip production, willingness to steal science (through it's not like the US doesn't have a habit for that, too) it's just a matter of time until they have some truly genius people put into the right kind of position with the right kind of resources which will close the gap step by step.
US has become less dependable but a lot of countries still depend on US maybe less but not as allergic as depending on China.
Well that is an insurance only for the US. As a european, I feel safer, or at best neutral, knowing my ships are made in the Taiwan rather than the US, so having them more 5-20% more expensive is not competitive.
With all their antagonizing of allies, and predatory privacy laws, and repeated espionage on allies, the US has disintegrated any trust other parties have to buy things made there.
Credit where credit is due: Australia, UK, New Zealand and Canada are all doing their major parts in espionage on each other and everyone else as a service as part of Five Eyes.
As a European myself, I am pretty miffed that my fellow Europeans keep acting like we're not leading the charge when it comes to spying on each other.
If rumors are to be believed, TSMC will scuttle their fabs before they fall into Chinese hands. Even if they don't, or fail to execute, Taiwan-based chip production will be disrupted for years.
Bet you'll be happy that TSMC has fabs in the US, despite your understandable misgivings.
Because Taiwan is a small, earthquake prone island perpetually on the brink of invasion of a superpower 180 kilometers away. And antagonizing, predatory privacy laws and espionage is also an issue with CCP, however we still import a lot of electronics and semiconductors from there.
This almost sounds verbatim what U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent told Bloomberg yesterday, so take the headline phrase “worth it” in that context.
>TSMC’s new Arizona plant is already comparable with those in Taiwan when it comes to the measure of yield — the amount of good chips a production run produces per batch — Su told the audience at the forum.
More cynically, perhaps the DoD is getting a sweetheart deal and TSMC is passing the cost onto customers.
It's the limited and expensive talent pool, construction costs etc. resulting in a difference. Americans do earn at least 2-3x more than someone in Taiwan for a given role.
You can hop in a car and visit them. In the US they are across the Pacific and in a very different/inconvenient timezone. It's a 15 hour gap. 9 am in Arizona would be midnight in Taiwan. And there's the anti meridian running through that so it's a day later over there as well. And the business days barely overlap.
I bet all that adds some friction in day to day operations. Lost time, shipping delays, miscommunication, etc. There are solutions to this, of course. But I'm sure that adds complexity to an already complex business. So, limiting that overhead to just 5-20% sounds pretty good to me.
Semiconductor companies need gross margins of around 65% to grow and be able to invest in development of the next node. So this large additional variable cost really can’t be shrugged off as you suggest. If so, Ms. Su wouldn’t have mentioned it at all.
I couldn't help but laugh. And they say software engineers are replaceable by AI.
5-20% more expensive prices for just one type of thing
I don’t think this is an “if” situation, but rather a “when”. There is no question in my mind - it’s simply too attractive to China. It may not come through all out war, but they will eventually claim what they feel is theirs. They operate on much more manageable time scales.
After the 1992 Consensus [1], the Taiwanese government still considered the Mainland its territory (again under a One-China Interpretation), but also acknowledges the CCP's interpretation of One-China. In practice, this meant they officially abandoned plans to re-take the Mainland, and focus on maintaining the status quo of peace and stability.
Interestingly, the Taiwanese government also used to lay claim to Mongolia in addition to the Chinese Mainland.[2]
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_Consensus
[2]https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/feat/archives/2024/08/25/20...
It's whose government will get to run the whole thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_General_Assembl...
Everything else is just bonus to them. Semiconductors, supporting nationalism, you name it.
Taiwan isn't about military proximity. It's about access shipping access. Try open up a map. Despite China having a vast coastline, they do not have access to the open seas. Every one of their shipping lanes requires passage through another nation's waters.
If a heavy conflict were to erupt, China's supply chains would be cut off via naval blockade. It's a huge risk to China, and one they've attempted to ameliorate via the Belt and Road Initiative.
That changes if they acquire Taiwan. Taiwan's importance is not of offensive, but defensive primacy.
Or possibly the 30+ fast attack submarines sinking every military or resupply vessel in the region, augmented by a colossal amount of rapidly-deployed naval mines.
Taiwan doesn't buy them much in this regard. Why would China be permitted to use sea freight at all in a "heavy conflict" scenario? Why not just sink these vessels near their origin - why allow Brazilian soybeans to even make it out of the hemisphere?
I didn’t realize that Okinawa is halfway between the Japanese mainland and Taiwan, and the Japanese territorial waters extend right up to the Taiwanese EEZ on account of Japan’s far-flung southern islands.
It's also political: China hates that there's a Western-style democracy full of "Chinese rebels" on an island 80 miles from their doorstep. They also don't like the cozy relationship between the Taiwanese and US militaries.
If you’re going to use accents, technically it’s Táiwān (ㄊㄞˊㄨㄢ)
Democracies aren't perfect, but they can change, admit mistakes and adapt.
In a democracy ideas are ingrained in public psyche for support. Be it Muslims/Jews/Christians good/bad, immigrants evil, abortion bad all become part of a large percentage of people's belief and changing that requires equally herculean efforts.
In autocracy, people are generally kept aloof of such decisions so you can always switch enemies from Eurasia to Eastasia and no one cares. In case of China, the value of Taiwan/Arunachal/... is mostly egoistical, based on some notion that Qing China boundaries must be restored. If tomorrow a new leadership comes and makes EU kind of setup with Taiwan, people will have no say and most won't care.
Any form of government is going to make mistakes.
Going to war and killing people is "a mistake". Let me rephrase it for you:
The fact that democracies are the same murderous criminal fucks when it suits their goals as are dictators. Yes the have more problem having their population to approve it but do they give a flying fuck?
Now granted, China is getting there but their navy is still mostly brown water (by design). And in any Taiwan / SCS conflict they would have an advantage because they can use their land assets, especially air force and land based anti ship rockets, on top of their navy.
The US land bases in the region are few or dependent on the grace of the host countries. Depending on political situation they might not Ok strikes against China if a conflict occurs for fear of being drawn into the war and angering China if the US loses. The only one Id be 100% on is Japan, they’d fight China to the last.
TLDR is the potential regional balance is increasingly lop sided in favour of PRC with gap widening, i.e. US+co can't preposition hardware at relevant rate. PRC hinted their cruise missile gigafactory has capacity to exhaust/target entire current US+co hardware inventory + stockpiles with few months production. A few more months enough to comprehensively shatter critical infra of US partners in 1IC. Hence why JP likely won't fight, because ultimately they're just a larger TW, also dependant on energy and calorie imports, and main islands also entirely within umbrella of PRC mainland fires. Mainland China is much better postured to operation Starvation JP than US from Marianas (25% further, and still needed logistics from CONUS) was during WW2. And if JP gives PRC excuse to fight them then PRC will (LBH be somewhat eager) to fight to the last JPnese. If JP doesn't, then they... well survive, maybe even still keep US protection. Most likely they'll only lose Senkaku when regional dynamics reconfigure. IMO current sign of JP not fighting is stronger than JP will fight... i.e. not opening main islands to distributed AGILE basing - US basically said they need JP in TW scenario, but they need to disperse all across JP not just Okinawa and Ryukyu's for survivability and JP action so far (since Trump1) is to not. It doesn't matter what JP politicians say for security theatre, IMO JP not committed until they start heavily militarizing main islands.
This doesn’t really hold up when looking at a map that includes Okinawa and Batanes.
https://semianalysis.com/2021/08/27/the-semiconductor-heist-...
> Does the United States really have that expertise or does it simply have a bunch of guests with that expertise?
The US has the expertise. I’m not totally sure what you are meaning to say with your second sentence - are you saying that only very recent immigrants or those here on various temporary visas have the knowledge or ability do do this stuff?
So, having them spread over is nice, but not enough.
I meant with EU Russia and Ukraine.
Plus, France and German economies were also connected before WW2 and that didn't stop the war. And the economies of former Yugoslav nations were very well connected, that didn't stop them going to war with each other.
What stopped the wars after WW2 was western Europe being under the rule of a nuclear superpower needing to unite against a bigger nuclear superpower next door, and the countries having democracies with separation of powers making war declarations on their neighbors impossible politically, nothing to do with economies.
So the famous "muh economies connected = no war" is a very reductionist and short sighted take that ignores evrything else.
Do you believe Russia and Ukraine are a part of the EU?
> Plus, France and German economies were also connected before WW2 and that didn't stop the war.
Even if we ignore the complete ignorance required to make that statement and take it at face value, keep in mind that the interwar period lasted little more than 20 years. The EU's inception started in the early 1950s with the treaty of Rome being signed in 1957. So at this point the EU's track record on peace is already twice as long as your reference period, and counting.
So we'll see if anyone wants the same.
No one is saying that trade makes war impossible-- but every bit of trade is an additional incentive to not start war, especially if it affects a broad slice of the population directly (=> the average German would be much more affected from losing car exports than the average Russian from lower gas exports).
Regarding Russia:
I believe that the main mistake on the western side was underestimating Russias imperialistic ambitions combined with the almost existential risk that a western aligned, economically successful Ukraine would have been for the current regime: Russian citizens getting overtaken economically by former compatriots makes it much harder to keep the kleptocracy running; Poland is one thing, but the same happening with the Ukraine would have hit much closer.
But regardless, I'm highly confident that Russia/Putin would have decided against the war with the benefit of hindsight.
You could even argue that insufficient economical consequences (from the Europeans-- basically the other, necessary side of the peace-by-trade playbook) after the 2014 annexation were a big factor in encouraging the war in the first place.
And before anyone says it’s because of nukes or superpower protection or whatever, there has been plenty of wars on the periphery of the EU during this time. The balkans, Cyprus, Egypt, etc.
I meant how did that ensure peace between Ukraine, Russia and EU? It clearly didn't even though EU was buying shit tonnes of gas from Russia, and Russia was buying shit tonne of aerospace parts and stuff from Ukraine. War still happened.
[..edited out the Yugoslavia argument..]
All the proof shows "peace through trade" does not work. The only thing that works is "peace through strength", which then you can use to enforce and defend your own favorable trade policies for you and your close allies, which has been the US's MO since 1945.
> Yugoslav wars started in 1991 and ended in 2001. Russia invaded Crimea in 2014. Are these wars not "European" enough?
Well, Ukraine, Russia and the former Yugoslavian republics that had wars are not part of the EU, or were not at the moment they had their wars. And even though all neighbouring countries trade with the EU, their economies are much less interdependent than those of the EU countries because of the lack of free trade and freedom of movement.
So this supports the idea that the EU does prevent wars rather than invalidating it.
Yes, it was all the EU economy. The 40 or so US military bases occupying the EU had nothing to do with ensuring peace on the continent.
Of course the US plays a part. But they don't have bases everywhere so it's not that obvious why it would explain why France and Luxembourg get along fine but Serbia and Kosovo don't, is it? Or Turkey and Greece, which both host US bases.
The discussion wasn't about getting along fine but about economic ties preventing wars, since Russia and Germany were also "getting along fine" till 1940 when they suddenly weren't.
And Luxemburg has nothing that would prevent France form invading them if they wanted to, economic ties or not. Economic ties might even be a negative for your protection since economic ties have to be negotiated but if you invade the other party you own their assets and economy and don't need to negociate any ties anymore.
The only thing prevents war is a strong military force.
Why hasn't France invaded Luxemburg then? They would be met with close to zero resistance and no other EU state would attack them militarily for it. You must be able to see that there are other factors preventing war other than military force?
Because they're a developed, civilized, self sufficient democracy, so they have more to loose than to gain by doing that in modern times.
My point wasn't that they aren't, my point was that they can do it if they want to, and no trade is gonna stop them, they just don't want to because they don't need to.
If you want a better example look at Monaco, who had to cede to France and tax only the French citizens living there as Monaco was popular place for French elite tax dodgers. Monaco did this for France and no other country precisely because France has the military upper hand in this negotiation and could just invade them without breaking a sweat if they opposed.
Another example is when Swiss military accidentally bombed their neighboring ally Liechtenstein several times during drills/exercises, and they just apologized with a box of wine, but funny how they never accidentally bomb their more powerful neighbors France and Germany. Weird how the small kids who can't fight back always end up being bullied, amirite?
Luxembourg is, and it doesn't get bullied by its neighbours, using your words. (Not anymore at least, because most of historical Luxembourg has been annexed by its neighbours in the recent past).
There lies the source of your confusion. The EU was designed to prevent wars within Europe, not between outside members. Do you think that NATO bombing Kadafi represents a failure of the EU's mission?
thats a weird way to justify the logic. so one arbitrary datapoint is enough? the EU has been relocated to a second tier in terms of economic importance and they have no credibility when it comes to geopolitics. does that sound like mission accomplished?
They got away with it because they built up their industrial base while the west let its industrial base wither. It's only starting to dawn on our leaders (3+ years in) now that dropping the ball on stuff like steel, mortar and missile production actually loses wars and that it takes years to undo those mistakes.
The west's Achilles heel was always profit driven capitalism + a superiority complex. All China had to do was to systematically undercut the west on industrial inputs while its superiority complex held firm and the west took care of hollowing out its own economic and military potential.
Even today when the US produces ~50/year patriots for the entire west and Ukraine needs ~400-500/year to stay afloat some people are still telling fairy tales about how a lack of "will" was the only thing standing between putin and domination. The superiority complex hasnt even died yet.
I would instead assert that it is very likely that the US would destroy the fabs rather than allow China to gain control of them through an act of aggression.
The doctrine of mutually assured destruction has been around a long time. The international players are familiar with it.
And mututally assured destruction has nothing to do with the US destroying an industry in Taiwan. MAD specifically refers to the idea that superpowers cannot engage in nuclear war against one another without also being destroyed themselves, because of a Nuclear Triad.
For "Mutually Assured Destruction" to be in anyway applicable, you'd have to say that the second that the US destroyed "Chinese" fabs (Taiwan), China would destroy American fabs. Thus, the US would not attack China without risking itself. The US making targeted strikes on Taiwan is one sided destruction. But to be clear: MAD doctrine is specifically about fullscale thermonuclear war.
The current U.S. leadership is so chaotic and seemingly uninvolved in strategy that predictions about whether/how MAD would play out are difficult to make.
The valuable bits and pieces are already equipped with a self destruct mechanism.
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/tsmcs-euv-machine...
Being a small island it’s much more of a zero sum / all or nothing fight than say Ukraine where at some point they can agree on a line on the map for Putin to walk away with a territorial partial win.
Lot of headwind for US between ship building, distance, whether Japan allows usage of bases, total manpower, Chinese ship killer missiles, authoritarian dictatorships willingness to throw manpower into meat grinders, etc.
Not that it’s a slam dunk for China either - beach landings are hard, and their war machine is largely unproven.
The most likely outcome is Taiwan or US destroy the fabs in event of invasion.
The mask slips: I thought the USA wanted to protect Taiwanese democracy.
Silly me.
Because yes, a protracted conflict on the island would mostly reduce it to rubble.
I'm amazed at how many people think China is going to take Taiwan by force. They're playing a long game because they want it intact. They want the people there to want to be part of China. That doesn't seem to be going very well, but how can outsiders know? But again they're playing a long game and have plenty of time so long as things are moving in the right direction.
Such that the market forces don't push pricing that the plant would naturally die.
Planned obsolescence does happen, but the phoebus cartel is the worst 'example' of it.
This point is only relevant if 1000 hour old bulbs cost more electricity to run than new bulbs. Maybe I don't understand how old bulbs worked but why couldn't they invent ways to make bulbs run hot which also last longer than 1000 hours.
I was just talking about organization of competitive companies for price manipulation, but specifically controlled for the benefit of the public - such that we don't lose the US plant due to natural market forces.
It's why ULA is still in business despite SpaceX being significantly cheaper.
They last a lot longer.
Or require no fines at all. It's much simpler to sell a non-sickly looking bulb at the store and other companies would converge.
This isn't really a workable argument any more. As examples:
https://apnews.com/article/north-carolina-quartz-hurricane-5...
The global supply chain is now so deeply interwoven that a large geopolitical disruption is nearly impossible. It took explosives for the EU to curtail its Russian natural gas use. And there is still stiff trade with Russia today (not as much as pre war) and lots of folks exploiting the gaps in that system (Turkey, India, china).
If you have never read it I highly recommend I, Pencil: https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/read-i-pencil-my-family-t...
Assuming you refer to NS2 blowup, it was unused when it got sabotaged.
NS1 was hit at the same time as well.
NS2 had not been activated and NS1 was undergoing work at the time.
It's going to take decades for the USA to catch up with Taiwan, and once China has its grip on the fabs they'll only further advance them.
In an existential crisis, the chances of Taiwan's leadership doing a deal with China when it's military protector retreats from its former declarations is in no way low.
It'll be the end of American military dominance but in fitting with the US's repeated isolationist trajectory.
The US companies cough Intel cough did not. Which is part of the reason they are laying off workers
For the rest of the world, Taiwan with a "China Risk" looks like a safer bet than the USA.
There should be more places that can produce enough energy and have AI leverage.
Not really. Taiwan with a China risk means China has pressure to not change the status quo.
US with a US risk means they have a vested interest to facilitate China's imperialistic agenda to try dethrone Taiwan as a competitor in the chip market.
That, coupled with the imbecile tariff war, underlines the unacceptable risk presented by the "US risk".
But it could be. I don't have to consume the canned food in my basement for it to provide food security in the event of a natural disaster.
I'm finding exact numbers difficult to come by but rice requires noticeably more water to grow. Dried corn kernels are approximately equivalent to dried rice when it comes to storage and transport.
There really isn't any sensible argument for switching from corn to rice in the US midwest.
Are you certain there's no strategic reserve? If not there probably ought to be. Seems like a rather cheap form of insurance in the bigger picture.
Disagreed otherwise though. Soil degradation is due to people cutting corners to save money. Rice requires significantly more water. Wheat and oats don't have the same shelf life. Legumes are likely comparable but how do they stack up against corn for things like animal feed and chemical feedstock?
The reality is that corn is an extremely practical crop regardless of its lack of political popularity of late.
I already own a perfectly adequate computer for my needs. In every possible way this won't affect me, and infact so long as the cheaper product is available for purchase it still won't affect me. If I'm a business I'll be 20% better off then other local businesses by continuing to not buy local anyway. If I'm consumer...well I'll just have more stuff I want.
And so on in this way you might want to go read up on The Tragedy of the Commons in economic theory and then reflect on what one of the primary roles of government actually is.
We need to have know-how, talent and all that stuff to create some value. We're bleeding all these things by the minute, and I don't want to be around when the critical point is reached.
The part you don't want to be around for is following the realisation that there is no path back.
Where would they be if their exports were significantly slashed? They didn’t develop all that manufacturing capacity to sell domestically.
The author of the post you are responding to has a valid point. Consumption alone isn't sustainable.
And when we're talking about international relations, if your exports don't cover your imports, eventually you'll go bankrupt.
People of like minds and compatible values can and should work together and form agreements to allow each other to specialize in some ways and play to each others' strengths.
But in the West, our values are not compatible with the Chinese government's.
If you're making a product one of the considerations you make is how robust your supply chain is. If you fail to make that consideration you will get eaten by the organizations that do, on a long enough timescale.
First, high-end chips have essentially a single global market. Compared to the value of the product, transport cost is negligible. If a TSMC Taiwan factory has an oopsie, all its customers are going to be buying from your local US plant - so you are still ending up having to deal with the effects of a significantly higher demand. AMD unable to ship? Expect Intel to go out of stock rather quickly as well.
Second, the chip manufacturing supply chain. Having a local chip factory is nice and all, but where is that factory getting its supplies and equipment from? Most of it does not come from the US, so during another COVID your local chip factory might still be forced to shut down. This also applies downstream: what use is a fancy high-end CPU if you can't find anyone locally to produce all the trivial parts you need to support it? Who is going to manufacture those trivial-yet-essential $0.05 connectors and $0.001 capacitors or resistors? That has all been outsourced to Asia decades ago.
A single US plant isn't going to do anything for your supply chain robustness. You're going to have to rethink the entire chain and each step is going to be 20% more expensive, so better prepare for a doubling or tripling of the final product price.
Local factories are nice for the defense industry, where the confidentiality needs due to national security might warrant the premium. But regular consumer chips? You'll be paying a huge premium just so a politician can get a couple of favorable headlines, often without there actually being a significant impact to the local economy.
> You'll be paying a huge premium just so a politician can get a couple of favorable headlines
You're paying a premium to reduce the cross section of risk that your local economy is exposed to. The cost savings of globalization do not come without their own downsides.
The main issue here is political.
There's nothing that represents American values more than respecting the market, and supporting a non-competitive player is the kind of manipulation that could have had all kinds of negative implications, both now and in the past.
The State choosing winners... smh.
/s (but only partially)
Numbeo shows the cost of living (including rent) is 45% higher in Phoenix than in Hsinchu (where TSMC's 2N is)
Rent is 176% higher.
Ffs, take a look at how many superfund sites Silicon Valley has, from back when we manufactured semiconductors.
A physical taurus embedded in our 3D universe, i.e. a donut, cannot be flat. Which may be the confusion.
But video game spaces are neither logically embedded or restricted by our 3D space. All its physics, including its spacial topology and geometry, flat or otherwise, were completely up to the game designers.
And the Asteroid game designers chose a flat space.
• Two parallel line segments stay parallel, no matter how long you extend them. Or how many times they wrap around the Asteroid space. (They also never intersect, but can overlap, just as in any flat 2D space.)
• Any number and distance of moves in any two perpendicular directions, are commutative. I.e. you can change the order of the moves, and you will still end up at the same spot.
• The three angles of any triangle in Asteroid space adds up to 180 degrees.
None of which applies to the surface of a donut.
Consider the reverse direction: if a company can decrease costs, they will usually pocket the extra profit, not reduce the price they charge. Price cuts usually only happen for one of two reasons: 1) to avoid losing customers to another company that is charging less (or to entice customers of another company that's charging the same), or 2) to capture more profit if they'll earn more customers at a lower price than they'll lose due to the lower per-unit profit. (Yes, there are other reasons, but these seem to be the main ones.
For goods that are not essential to life, prices are set based on what people are willing to pay vs. how many units can be sold at that price, with the cost as a floor (absent a policy of using a product as a loss leader).
I am no expert in BoM and margins, but that seems like a wild claim to me. Could you explain your math?
Purchasing products made under autocratic regimes strengthens those regimes and gives them more power on the world stage.
I think "moral obligation" (a phrase the GP did not use, for the record) is a bit over the top, though.
[1]: Why are these countries “autocracies”? To better resist foreign intervention.
In Europe nobody is going to pay extra for a gadget that comes with an American chip inside it, they will just buy Chinese.
The result will be like automotive with the Chicken Tax, with Americans having pickup trucks and the rest of the world having crossover SUVs.
No, that is not the cost of keeping "the value" within western economies. It would be the cost of granting the US a leverage against the collective west. The US proved to be a very unreliable and outright hostile partner. At this point, it is not clear whether the US is more hostile to the collective west than the likes of China.
There is a quite long history of USA doing coups, sabotage, and so on, against its own "friends".
If we look at the military investments US did since Clinton(so, last 30 years), you'll notice a trend of looking after it's own interests before the ones of the world. An example is the lack of investment in destroyers to patrol the seas, while at the same time the focus shifted to super-carriers which are good for one thing: obliterate a single, powerful country.
This is not just Trump, but everyone after Bush Sr.
There were only 31 Spruances and 4 Kidds.
That seems like an investment in destroyers, and much more capable ones than it's predecessors at that. Argubly more capable than even the Ticonderoga.
But maybe you mean something else I'm not groking.
The current US administration has been threatening two separate NATO allies with invasion and annexation.
Not even Russia, with their daily Russian last warnings of nuclear Armageddon, dare being that hostile.
Trust is a funny thing like that. You do have to do it all the time, but if you fail even once without extremely good reason you lose it all.
Averaging over a large window while ignoring the trend is not reasonable.
A country willing to cut mineral supply anytime they don’t like anything is good partner and friend of EU , lol, how delusional someone can be ?
Even current US Administration sends Patriots and military support to Ukraine, while China is sponsoring WAR, help Russia to keep up with war killing people around the world.
China can end that war in 1 week if they really want.
US spent fortune to protect collective west while countries like Germany almost dismantled their army in the past.
Very rational thinking , sure. China will wipe out entire west with technological superiority in the next decade or two without west being united.
If that is true, perhaps the US should stop destroying the western alliance.
Other proxies are Iran with their satelites, without china neither Iran or Russia would not survive current wars they sponsor agaist west.
as much as I hate current US admin, they push to increase NATO spending etc.
how is that not "uniting" ?
You haven't been paying attention. Even to this thread.
Let me be very clear: The US proved to be a very unreliable and outright hostile partner. At this point, it is not clear whether the US is more hostile to the collective west than the likes of China.
Therefore, let the US keep their backyard TSMC. It changes nothing. It helps nothing. It is not to be trusted.
That is the wake-up call.
Not when people are being absolutist rather than taking the situation for what it is and doing the best they can with it.
Tariffs or no the US wants back in on the construction/manufacturing industry. This is something that should be seen as a good thing. I just wish the EU was so visionary but we're worried about recycling plastics (when we don't use the plastic) or curtailing bad think (rather than open dialogue)...
The US is threatening NATO partners with invasion and annexation, not to mention the moronic tariff war, and you come here talk about "absolutist"? Pathetic.
I do not feel united. And, echoing you, how is that not unreliable?
The current US administration directly and very overtly threatens two NATO members with invasion and annexation.
I personally can't interpret Trump administration's insistence on supporting Russia on all fronts alongside its enthusiastic push to completely cut military support for Ukraine as anything other than something far more damaging to the collective west's protection than whatever support China or even North Korea is providing to Russia.
There is no way to spin this: the US is the biggest threat to the collective west, not only by reneging on their obligations towards their allies in general and NATO in particular but also by it's clear and very overt threats.
> Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told the European Union’s top diplomat that Beijing can’t accept Russia losing its war against Ukraine as this could allow the United States to turn its full attention to China, an official briefed on the talks said, contradicting Beijing’s public position of neutrality in the conflict. https://edition.cnn.com/2025/07/04/europe/china-ukraine-eu-w...
The Trump administration is overtly cutting support from Ukraine while pressuring Ukraine to capitulate to Russia. At the same time it's also pushing for sanctions to be lifted and economic times with Russia to be normalized. Trump went to the extreme of pressuring the G7 to admit back Russia.
What do you call that?
China supporting glorified golf cars doesn't hold a candle to the damage that the US has done to peace in Europe and the collective west's interests in security.
You also underestimate the Chinese support. The war would have been over in 2023 if it wasn't for China.
> The discovery of a Russian decoy drone made up entirely of Chinese parts is another indication of the growing wartime relationship between Moscow and Beijing. ... Beyond components, China appears to have provided Russia with at least some complete weapons systems. In May, we reported that Russia was using a new Chinese laser system to shoot down Ukrainian drones. https://www.twz.com/news-features/new-russian-drone-made-com...
Rossiya-1 viewer/bot sighted
China may potentially be able to stop the war, but at what cost? They've been licking their wounds and rebuilding their nation at breakneck speed for the past century, and it's only recently that they've finally reached a critical stage with innovations on all fronts. Going against one of their two allies now would be pretty ill-advised.
The US has also been very erratic, while China's current goals seem to be fairly consistent: reclaim everything they lost during the century of humiliation.
There are certainly benefits to being able to make something down the block and quickly iterate. But that's a different thing from industrial scale production. And if we really wanted that benefit wouldn't we just... do it?
5%-20% is surprisingly cheap imo.
i'd prefer taiwan over the US...
In the long term, it would provide the US with an independent source of chips, and eventually allow them to let go of any plants to protect Taiwan from China.
In Europe or Japan I can already build much cheaper, workforce is cheaper, now even hardware is cheaper.
How does data centers in US stay competitive? Why would Google or others build their new AI infrastructure in Ohio rather than elsewhere?
1. The estimates are never accurate; after subsidies dry up expect 50-200%.
2. I will buy used before I buy new to cut costs.
3. American manufacturing is trash; I will never buy GM/Ford/Chrysler/Tesla; no matter how much you try to force me to. Intel falls into this category. I'm supposed to just accept on faith that building a tsmc fab in the US is going to "just werk"? Nah.
4. I don't care if it's "Made in America"; what I care about is price to quality and performance ratio. Which as we all know the Americans have gave up on (ahem Ford and only manufacturing trucks, etc). Intel has been getting it's asshole rocked the past couple years and it has home field advantage.
5. I care what Linux runs; and if China and RISC-V take off and are lower price point I'll buy that before I spend anything on US "American made chips".
6. I don't care about "ccp bad"; fuck off with your propaganda. You realize Taiwan is an island state of China right? Seems like good idea to let them setup shop in US? Good job you played yourself.
7. The "rare earths" to make these chips come mostly from China. China will counter like they already have screwing over Micron and Intel (and soon tsmc).
8. Apple will mark up whole price; not just chip price. The consumer will pay for the entire shift of the supply chain not just the cost to manufacture. Even in best case of 5% your 2,000 laptop is now minimum 2,100; yea, the average American can afford that... People can't even afford to eat fast food anymore and some idiots in here think they can pay more for something they don't give a shit about? Lol
9. You first; just like with the idiots that bought Teslas (which are the lowest and worst in quality of all cars manufactured). Meanwhile I'm still driving my second car (Japanese btw) after having bought in 2019 (and the one before lasted 20 years).
10. This reeks of the anti Honda shit I would see during 2008 PvP of US auto industry because they failed to innovate. And guess what no propaganda saved them and they still can't compete in the market.
11. Intel is on life support, and tsmc is supposed to what...?
Like I said it's nothing but delusion.
there I fixed it.
Asia has a massive pool of highly skilled manufacturing talent, and that kind of deep expertise is something the U.S. is quickly forgetting.
So my question is: with TSMC building a fab in the U.S., are Americans actually getting retrained in real manufacturing skills? Or are they just being taught to push the buttons TSMC tells them to push?
I was born in 1978 and was really into Heathkits and breadboard projects and stuff when I was a child and early teen. My dad was (and still is) an analog electronic engineer and gave me lots of surplus oscilloscopes and frequency counters and other coolness too. I distinctly remember often seeing "Made in Korea," "Made in Japan," "Made in Taiwan," etc. on circuit boards and chassis assemblies. The single word "Korea" was very common on components. This would have mostly been stuff from the late 1970s and 1980s.
At the very least it seems like electronics from at least the early-mid solid state era onward into the IC era has always been a globalized industry with a globalized supply chain. I feel like you've got to go back to vacuum tubes to find self-contained nationalized electronics industries.
Back then as now a lot of stuff was designed in the USA and Europe but manufactured elsewhere. Just like Asia has a ton of top tier manufacturing and logistics talent, the US and Europe have a ton of top tier design engineering and coding talent.
I still do agree that there is strategic value in making sure the US at least has some domestic capacity to manufacture leading-edge chips and electronics, not just to maintain some talent here but in case a major global conflict breaks out that deeply fractures all these supply chains. Same for Europe and any other country. China meanwhile would do well to develop its own domestic software and design talent pool.
Everything started to globalize starting in the late 1970s to early 1980s which really kicked off with the end of the gold standard and the Volker Shock.
The Japanese and Germans, which had IC industry already, picked up steam and started to export as the economics changed.
China, Korea, Vietnam, etc. are recent entries (2000s)
The US has plenty of manufacturing operations much more complicated than building CPUs, so of course we can do it. Manufacturing expertise in Asia (as I understand it) comes down more to macro-level processes, where different components might be built or raw ingredients sourced near each other, so further assembly can be done easier than any place in the United States.
It's my understanding that this is not the case. That CPU (and similar) manufacturing is considered one of the most complex processes humanity has ever developed. What are these plenty of manufacturing operations that are more complicated?
Compare this to, say, building a car. Much less automation, much simpler end product.
bsder•2d ago
A 20% premium for one of the pillars of a modern economy to both repatriate engineering knowledge as well as be significantly less threatenable by your primary geopolitical enemy would be money very well spent.
Teever•1d ago
Like, as more of the supply chain is reshored will that continually increase cost because reshoring is intrinsically less efficient or will it decrease costs because the increased cost of just reshoring the fab part of the supply chain costs more due to less proximity and integration with the existing supply chain?
nobodyandproud•1d ago
Businesses that rely on the chips will see an increase in cost; and that means passing the cost down to their customers (or having less to invest on their own R&D).