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Comment by lwneal | Hacker News Reader

How much software depends on Apple, AMD, Nvidia, or Qualcomm chips? TSMC is an indispensable part of our industry's supply chain.

Most of its chips are produced in Taiwan and over 75% are sold to customers in either the USA or (mainland) China, so TSMC understandably tries to remain neutral in trade disputes between the two. Tim Culpan at Bloomberg recently predicted that this neutrality may not hold for long, and TSMC will be forced to move some production to the USA. [1]

Especially if Intel continues to decline, increased investment by TSMC could be good news for American chip fabs and the communities that depend on them. On the other hand, the factory isn't built yet.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-05-11/tsmc-m...

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Literally everyone but the hardware manufacturers would be happier if the software didn't depend on those chips.

If we can't move the supply chain closer we should at least decouple software from particular hardware manufacturers.

The capital requirements for the creation of a modern high-speed semiconductor fabrication facility, and the corresponding integrated circuit design make ‘open hardware’, or large number of interchangeable competitors unlikely.

How and why should software be decoupled from hardware when there are so few hardware suppliers?

And the situation has only gotten worse since everyone and their coffee machine is running on x86. It is high time we created alternatives.

What are you talking about? ARM has overtaken x86 in volume I'm pretty sure, but certainly in edge type applications like coffee machines

Aren't coffee machines and other "dumb" appliances often MIPS? Even my internet router has a MIPS controller (Fritz!Box by AVM).

The answer is: it depends.

Some are ARM, some MIPS, some SH, some even are PPC.

I guess the availability of Android is making a lot of "dumb appliances" run on ARM even if they don't need a screen.

But for basic dumb appliances, PIC, MSP, Atmel processors (either the old 8051 or newer archs)

I think that was only true a few years ago. Everything now, from router, NAS to other appliance are moving towards ARM.

MIPS and PPC are still being used only because of cost ( vendors selling other chips ). The replacement cycles is very very slow, but the trend is pretty clear.

I work with (consumer) internet gateways and the like. In Broadcom's SoCs the main chip is ARM. They have been moving away from MIPS for a number of years.

I'm less familiar with other vendors but I briefly worked with a Qualcomm-based device a few years ago and that was also ARM.

There might be some dedicated cores in those SoCs or devices for e.g. accelerators or Wi-Fi handling. I've seen ARC there but I have the feeling these are also moving to ARM.

Could be, but I've been shocked by some of the products I've seen that have a full blown ARM in them these days. My friend bought a mouse with a full 32 ARM MCU in it.

> And the situation has only gotten worse since everyone and their coffee machine is running on x86. It is high time we created alternatives.

That is why a third semiconductor company (besides Intel and AMD) creating x86 chips has come into existence: Zhàoxīn (兆芯)

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Zhaoxin&oldid=949...

I think the only piece of software I use that’s tied to x86 is the discord native client (which is pretty dumb since it’s an electron app.) This is something I’m (hopefully) not using anymore after quarantine.

Personally I have plenty of arm machines. Part of the reason I switched from fvwm to cwm was because I couldn’t build fvwm on one machine and move it to the other.

In college they asked for x86 windows binaries for lots of the assignments and I always cross compiled from an arm machine (because that’s where I had the toolchain set up and didn’t feel like duplicating it on my x86 laptop.) If you feel stuck on x86 use more FOSS.

Why mention "mainland" China when Taiwan is an independent country?

"Mainland" China excludes Hong Kong and Macao.

Taiwan's official position is that there is only one China and Taiwan is the one.

>[Taiwan] considers "one China" to mean the Republic of China (ROC), founded in 1912 and with de jure sovereignty over all of China. The modern-day ROC, however, has jurisdiction only over Taiwan, Penghu, Kinmen and Matsu. Taiwan is part of China, and the Chinese mainland is part of China as well.

Taiwan is de facto independent, not formally independent. Formally there is still unsettled civil war going on where each side claims the whole China.

Taiwan satisfies three of the four requirements of statehood at international law as stated in the Montevideo Convention.

There was just a proposed amendment which would change that. But it was withdrawn. Probably because they're worried about upsetting China too much.

The current government is very pro (formal) independence. But it's a bit hard to declare China and Taiwan to be seperate when China is threatening with invasion.

It does not help that US long term policy is strategic ambiguity and one China policy as well.

The goal of ambiguity is prevent unilateral declaration of independence by Taiwan and an invasion of Taiwan at the same time.

> Especially if Intel continues to decline,

About Intel... I heard multiple times, from different people that Intel's CEO is frequenting Hsinchu for some, yet unknown, business.

It's easy to guess though, there can only be one company there of interest to him.

You don't need to be so oblique. There are plenty of rumors about Xe GPUs being made by TSMC.

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