TSMC Not Charging Apple for Defective 3nm Chips | Hacker News Reader

TSMC Not Charging Apple for Defective 3nm Chips

macrumors.com

24 pointsTomte15 comments

Well if Apple paid for broken chips, that would lower the incentive TSMC would have to fix the problem. What I don't get is why people have been paying for broken chips until now.

For a mature process the defect rate is low and known and everyone factors it into their financial models. Paying for the whole wafer also encourages customers to salvage partially good chips.

What's the difference between paying for the full wafer minus a 10% to 20% discount vs not paying for entirely unusable chips and paying a discounted rate for partially usable chips?

That's a pretty crazy offer on any node, let alone 3nm. It almost makes me wonder if their yield is so bad that they need to make offers like this to keep new nodes attractive. It's better to keep Apple as a customer at a lower profit than to lose their continued business for N2 & beyond.

I'll be keeping an eye out for new Macbooks with "binning tiers" like the original M1.

And who is gonna take away TSMCs business exactly? lol, Intel can claim all they want but until they achieve that then...

Samsung has a fighting chance, at least if they swallow their usual yield issues. Intel's foundries are good too, but probably not an upgrade over 5nm for Apple.

Customers like Apple will build new fabs if they're unhappy with the old one. Keeping them fat and happy is part of not going-under for TSMC.

It’s odd that people forget about Samsung who, as recently as 2015, was ahead of TSMC. Even now they’re not far behind.

TSMC is not untouchable. If they really drop the ball on yields, someone else will gain marketshare.

>It almost makes me wonder if their yield is so bad that they need to make offers like this to keep new nodes attractive.

Apparently it was so bad that everyone except Apple jumped ship. Now Apple gets like 90% of the 3nm production output, so I guess TSMC won't risk offending them.

That sort of control over the supply chain is the kind of logistics play that Tim Curry was famous for as Apple’s COO.

Without knowledge of the details of the contract it's impossible to state anything about this arrangement isn't it?

There's not much of a difference between paying $20,000 for a wafer holding 400 chips with a known 50% defect rate versus paying $100 per chip. Could just be accounting games.

The difference is this way, the price per working chip doesn't change as they improve the process.

That sounds like an awesome deal for TSMC. Right now, they lose money on every chip. But if they can improve their processes and get the defect rate down, they will start to make profit off every chip. So this is Apple giving them a fighting chance to improve yield and profit off it - if they can do that.

Could be a play to spin-up 3nm, make it more reliable, while Apple foots a large part of the cost.

Apple is a beta tester for N3 and you shouldn't expect to pay full price for a beta service.

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