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Comment by NeutronStar | Hacker News Reader

Citation needed.

There are only two companies capable of fabricating the most advanced processor technologies: TSMC and Intel. The disaster of 10nm at Intel has meant that all of its product lineup has had to internally compete for 14nm fab space, greatly constraining supply there. Meanwhile, Global Foundries' decision to abandon chasing smaller nodes means that fabrication for pretty literally everybody else has had to compete for space in TSMC, so smartphones, GPUs, CPUs, TPUs, etc. are all vying for the same fabrication capacity. Furthermore, it is extremely expensive--$10 billion or so--to make a new fab, so there are few companies that could even afford to throw money at TSMC to expand production.

Put more succinctly: there is literally not enough semiconductor fabrication supply today to meet demand, and the supply is very inelastic.

You forget Samsung.

Yes, but Samsung’s latest nodes have faced delays, so they are slightly behind TSMC. I believe NVIDIA was hurt by this.

And yet they still are ahead of Intel.

I believe that AMD relies on another company to produce its CPUs which may limit their supply. If they can't produce enough, and there is still a demand then there will be no choice but to go with Intel. This is some guessing on my part, since I don't have any economic background.

I don't think it is purely a TSMC supply issue. To put it bluntly; AMD isn't used to selling that many CPUs. Zen 1/+ brought them parity with intel performance-wise (something AMD has been laking for over a decade). It's only with Zen 2/ the 3000 series that AMD has had both core-count and single-threaded. Before you had to choose between lots of slower cores or fewer/ faster cores.

I do wonder if the 3900x/ 3950x shortage is at least partially manufactured (they're so hard to get they must be good right?). Intel halved their prices pre-lunch which is something that has never happened before, but they still can't match AMD for price/ performance.

AMD has both good CPUs & GPUs (something that is very rare!). Being an owner of an RX 5700, I'm surprised how low the power usage is. If they put a cut-down RX 5000 on a low-power CPU, they could make some decent laptops that don't need dedicated GPUs (memory speed is a bottle-neck especially on a laptop with a single memory channel). That could pose a problem for Intel. I'm actually a little surprised it hasn't been more of a priority for AMD, all Intel can do to compete right now is to literally give their CPU/ APUs away (better to make a loss than lose a customer to AMD). Next year will be a good time to buy a laptop. It looks as though Zen 3 will first launch on laptops, that may pose a problem for Intel...

Honestly, I feel that Intel could have the better laptop chips if they get 10nm in a better state. And I say this after building a 3600X +RX 5700 XT desktop this year.

Intel's R&D budget is several times larger then AMD's revenue so they'll always be able to squeeze a little more out of their current chips.

Could just be a timing issue though. Intel might abandon their current 10nm leaving AMD as the default winner by mid/late 2020.

Disclaimer: I'm long on AMD and wishing I bought more 5 years ago.

> Intel's R&D budget is several times larger then AMD's revenue so they'll always be able to squeeze a little more out of their current chips.

But Intel has to compete with TSMC. Since TSMC is making Apple, AMD, NVidia, and Qualcomm chips, TSMC's R&D Budget seems to have won over in this generation.

Agree.

TSMC amortizes its RD/CapEx/Op costs over Apple, Qualcomm, NVida, Broadcom, Xilinx, etc.

Apple, Qualcomm paid for most of the heavy 7nm RD/Capex long before to AMD's 7nm production commitments. AMD basically got the 7nm production advantage without the RISK on Fab investments like Intel. It was good that the AMD 's board had the foresight to divest fab to Global Foundry a few years back.

Intel has to amortizes its fab cost over Altera and x86 CPU. Altera part is probably trivial. Intel's huge 10nm investment in RD, Capex depending entirely on one x86 product line to recover. When execute well like 15 years before 2017, it was big advantage. Any execution misses, the FAB RD/Cap cost became a liability.

"Only the Paranoid Survive" - Last few years, Intel was definitively not Paranoid enough.

The Radeon Pro 5000 cards on the new 16" MBPs seem to have some good reviews

Is it still TMC?

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