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Comment by moomin | Hacker News Reader

In the 90s, it was Intel that were so far ahead. And the barrier of entry was sky-high then. From that perspective this story is amazing.

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In the 90s there were dozens of leading edge fabs. But while the barriers were high back then the capital investment needed to get into the next node has gone up exponentially, about 15% each node, since then doubling every 5 years. It took less than $1 billion to get in the game back then but over $20 billion now.

Rock's law, the inverse of Moore's Law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_second_law

It's not clear whether this is cause or effect. The insatiable demand for silicon fabbing has arguably made a $20B plant today more economical than a $1B plant 25 years ago.

Makes you wonder what the hell they’ve been actually doing this whole time. Just pumping out more of the same and becoming obsolete.

Well, then same happened then with Pentium 4 vs Athlon 64.

I had an Athlon 64 machine. The good old days of socket 754/939

Via HN yesterday, some good thoughts on that question: https://stratechery.com/2021/intel-problems/

Handing out dividends like clockwork. Makes me think of Boeing.. Big engineering company taken over by the accountants.

(Now I don't mean that as a slight to accountants - just you need balance).

Not likely,

What’s tricky to understand is that once TSMC said, ‘we will build everything and design nothing’, everyone looked to them when there wasn’t another competitor willing to do the same.

The massive order volume they received (with low margin) let them experiment on process development 10x that of Intel.

Remember when Wall St. said America can outsource manufacturing because ‘other people’ aren’t smart enough to innovate? Looks like they were wrong :)

The American middle class is going to be further decimated over the next decade. Wups

Tsmcs r&d spend has been equivalent to Intel's for the last decade. TSMC did a great job, most particularly on EUV introduction.

I don't think wall street cares about outsourcing, except as a potential savings. The hollowing out is real, but it is fixable.

It will take a really different approach, though.

Actually trying to fulfill an order might not be bucketed under ‘r&d’ spend for finance/business. Every order is an experiment for yield improvement.

Huh, barelly who knows that TSMC buys all the equipment in Europe, in Netherlands, EUV is not an effect of TSMC R&D

On another side - has the software side done much to incentivize Intel to innovate over the interim? i.e. Windows has accrued a lot of cruft. It feels pretty outdated at times. It feels almost unprofessional at times coming from a unix-like OS user space and has since the 90s. But then unix-like OSes have been a thing this whole time.

Yeah, I think Intel is our latest, greatest example of the follies of not regulating markets properly. Properly regulated, Intel would have been smacked around or incentivized against dominating the chip market 'back when'. Given the factors required, this may have had to require state-led/funded chip research and fab production. i.e. Effectively making a government do what TSMC did years ago - and privatize the actual results of the efforts at key points/areas. Just enough public investment to push the market toward efficiency then back out. Proper regulation would have kept pressures in place to keep key technologies and manufacturing processes/abilities from entirely leaving the local market, too.

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