Right now NVIDIA has the lead because they have the better software, but they can't make the chips fast enough. Will be interesting to see if their better software continues to keep them in the lead or if people are more interested in getting the capacity in any form.
> So it really brings together many of the things that Intel is doing as an IDM, now bringing it together in a heterogeneous environment where we’re taking TSMC dies. We’re going to be using other foundries in the industry, we’re standardizing that with UCIe. So I really see ourself as the front end of this multi-chip chiplet world doing so in the Intel way, standardizing it for the industry’s participation with UCIE, and then just winning a better technology.
Looking at their balance sheet: plenty.
TSMC is all about pay to play. Apple is first in line because they’re willing to pay to be first in line. I have no doubt Microsoft can justify spending the money they save not buying nvidia into getting some priority access from TSMC.
Also keep in mind Apple is now on 3nm so there’s likely spare 5nm.
It’s very likely they knew something like this was coming, as they’ve been doing FPGAs for more than a decade now.
Why aren't any other companies entering this space? TSMC's growth and profits are immense, it's not like the market couldn't bear more competitors.
Also, the current situation is geopolitical insanity. It feels like China and the U.S. are on a path to war in the next decade or so. China is itching to retake Taiwan... and if you thought the U.S. fought a lot of wars over oil, there's NO WAY we wouldn't go to war to prevent all the world's most important semiconductors falling exclusively under PROC control. It's the 21st century, we would have no choice. I know that TSMC is diversifying and building fabs in the U.S. and Germany, and hopefully that will reduce the risk of war. But it's just nuts that this is even a risk. How does one company control so much of the global market?
The sooner Intel spins out the fab side into its own entity the better positioned it will be to pick up the business that TSMC doesn't have capacity for.
People will overlook a lot, if the product is compelling enough and the sales guys can keep a straight face while promising not to peek.
Apple and Microsoft are trillion dollar companies ( both nearing $3 trillion market caps ). They can afford it. Heck they have the balance sheet to acquire both tsmc and samsung if either were up for sale.
I thought Apple was moving towards being a full-stack company. Where all the hardware and software is developed in-house. If anyone has the resources, it is apple.
Having a modern chip fab binds an insane amount of capital, and makes you much more vulnerable in case of market turbulences. This is exactly a reason why there exist people who like to claim that Intel should spin off their fabs.
TSMC is so dominant because they have very, very, deep institutional knowledge. Even if you have billions to invest it's not easy to create that, and definitely impossible to do it short term.
There's only 3 companies left chasing smaller nodes. Everyone else has given up and are focusing on revenue from high volume parts in older processes.
I get the impression it's mostly physics guys.
Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/435/
TLDR: Math is not. :-)
I almost went to get a CE degree because I find it all so fascinating but ultimately I'm glad I didn't.
the serious system architects, designers, and fab managers are doing just fine, software or not. the dudes in Phoenix who are getting pushed through 2-year degrees to help run a clean room are probably making 65k.
This is the crazy thing. Such fundamental important technology but salaries generally suck. Much more money in cat memes and influencer channels.
In fact for a small project in an elective he programmed a computer vision system that was far ahead of anything me or my peers had made at the time in our CS program. He had pretty much zero programming experience.
I must admit he's a particularly smart person but it was crazy that I went on to make more money than him. His work is way more complicated than mine as far as I can tell.
More importantly, the new chip production lines are dependent on hyper-specialized EUV lithography systems that only company is able to manufacture (ASML). ASML has their own limits to production too.
GlobalFoundries' Fab 1 can do 1 nm, and its Fab 8 is capable of doing 14 nm:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=GlobalFoundries&o...
ASML are solving a small subset of physics problems: how to project extremely small features. TSMC are solving many more physics problems: how to structure layers of doped silicon into transistors, how to structure those transistors into logic gates, and those logic gates into functional blocks. This is why silicon process is not just a matter of capital investment, and why nobody is going to show up overnight with 10 billion dollars and change things. It’s not that TSMC are the only ones with a big bag of cash to give ASML.
ASML's machines are very impressive, but they're just one piece of that puzzle. And ASML themselves rely on collaborators like Zeiss.
This idea that it's all just capital and others are reluctant to invest otherwise they could duplicate TSMC simply false.
Just few years ago was four companies doing the bleeding edge: Intel, GlobalFoundries, Samsung and TSMC. Intel was the best. First Global Foundries could not keep up. Then Intel fumbled ant TSMC became the best. Samsung is the only one keeping up with TSMC but they come slightly behind. Intel tries to catch up the two. No companies have "exited" they just can't compete.
The bleeding edge semiconductor node design is like doing Apollo moon program every 4-5 years. Only one can be the best.
There are? INTC and Samsung?
>falling exclusively under PROC control
It wouldnt fall under PROC control.
It would be destroyed.
The market could only bear if they are willing to pay a lot more in the name of diversification. Otherwise most would simply have trouble keeping up.
We really need some basic FAQ on HN for hardware technology related topic.
Taiwan (unlike Ukraine) is far too critical to the world economy.
Take Taiwan. You can’t “retake” something you never had.
Because it would take over a decade to build a comparable chip fab and thats assuming you had unlimited cash to throw at it.
You'd be spending billions with zero revenue for a decade and no guarantees it'll be anything as close to as good as TSMC's setup. Try finding someone willing to invest in that and it becomes clear why theres not more chip fabs out there.
IMO, MAD (mutually assured destruction - if a nuclear power start a war with another nuclear power, both will probably end up destroyed by nukes) makes the prospects of that highly unlikely.
they are literally having discussions in San Fran right now to reduce the likelihood of that happening. And it sounds like China is quite open to discussion, and the US as well.
They are building navy fleet like no other.
Still harassing neighbors ( eg. Philippines).
Nothing changed. They just want a bigger advantage.
Azure Maia is TSMC N5, I think.
Nvidia H200 and H100 are TSMC 4N.
Because different than the ARM chip also announced in the same Ignite event, Microsoft doesn't exactly "need" nor can fully utilize an AI chip. Google trains its foundational models (e.g. Gemini) on its own TPU hardware but Microsoft's is heavily reliant on OpenAI for its generative AI serving needs.
Unless Microsoft is planning to acquire OpenAI fully and switch over from Nvidia hardware...
They're going to play a modified version of the old Rareware trick.
It's also a pretty great game to buy up OpenAI equity, which ultimately gets spent on Microsoft compute. Two birds, one stone.
Almost nobody in this game cares about profit right now.
[0] Microsoft tried to buy Nintendo very early on
None of this is really strange. It also wasn't strange when Google announced H100 systems while also pushing TPUs they developed. Microsoft has Jensen on stage because customers of Microsoft Azure demand Nvidia products. Customers of Google Cloud demand Nvidia products. So, they provide them those products, because not providing them loses those customers. It's that simple. Everyone involved in these deals acknowledges this.
I'm guessing at this point the ASICs make a lot more economic sense, though. :)
In some ways, Microsoft was 10 years ahead, but they are terrible as an organization at proliferating research projects to production across multiple orgs.
Inferentia (inf1) was GA'ed in December 2019 so it's actually almost 4 years old now. The trainium (trn1) chips and the Inferentia 2 (inf2) refresh is indeed 1 year old though.
Microsoft Azure™ Inference for Cloud Apps© 365 Pro® Live Series X™®
> Azure Active Directory is now Microsoft Entra ID
ok, geez, thanks
Entra ID sounds like a type of ID.
I’m not sure how something could legitimately have each of these names. I assume the functionality changed pretty dramatically over the lifespan of the product?
I was pretty confused the first time I encountered it, though. Could tell from context that it had something to do with accounts, but thought maybe it could be for syncing a user’s home directory or something!
It actually isn’t a terrible name, in isolation, since a directory (like, the non-digital version) was for keeping identities. But “directory” in tech has a pretty strong association with file systems.
It technically builts upon (amongst other systems) LDAP, the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol and X.500
I guess you could think of it more like a telephone directory - which again is also where the file system metaphor has its roots I guess. So the two are not so different in the end.
A month or so ago my laptop was requiring a BitLocker recovery code before it would boot. I spent ages looking for Azure AD, before eventually discovering it was renamed to Entra. They should have had a transition period where it would have “ (formerly called Azure Active Directory)” on its name.
TPU is pretty good but is associated with Google. MTIA is an acronym but still maps to what the chip does. ~~"Cobalt" is worse as it does not mean anything~~ . Cobalt is the CPU chip, MAIA is the accelerator so this matches Meta's naming.
Funny, that's precisely why I think the names are bad. It's like if Google had chosen "Search-ola" as their name. Way too on the nose and/or lazy. Having said that, I don't really care all that much and I imagine that may have been the spirit of those who chose the names.
The funny thing is that this fact has been shown inadvertently by NVIDIA:
https://www.servethehome.com/nvidia-shows-intel-gaudi2-is-4x...
There cannot be more than a handful of companies in the entire world that could afford such a huge price (tens of millions of $).
In comparison with a still extremely expensive cluster of 64 NVIDIA H100, the difference in speed would reduce to only two to three times, and paying several times less for the entire training becomes very attractive.
That’s complete pocket change for any of the Fortune 500.
Such a big expense only makes sense for a company where spending that amount would bring hundreds of millions of $ of additional revenue.
I doubt that any of the companies that have already spent such amounts have recovered even a small part of their expenses. It is more likely that they bet on future revenues, but it remains to be seen who will succeed to achieve that.
Sure if there is a plausible ROI, they’d have no issues dropping that much money (actually far more). Revenues for fortune 500’s are going to be in the 10’s of billions anyway, and it wouldn’t be hard to make an argument that random AI project could increase that by a couple percent or decrease costs a couple percent, which would more than provide that ROI.
Their biggest issue is usually having anyone in leadership that has a clue enough to even propose something plausible, let alone get a team together to give it a plausible go.
If they have that, Capital is not the issue.
am i missing something here? just like you'd want to scale an h100 cluster out beyond one box of 8, you'd do the same for gaudi2?
Intel has always published the "training per dollar" because no one else competes.
Even for fine tuning you are almost always better off getting smaller GPU cloud instances.
https://press.aboutamazon.com/2023/9/amazon-and-anthropic-an...
Supporting the common librarires that I use is very important for me to chose the cloud platform.
Amazon has had Graviton chips (after they acquired Annapurna Labs) since 2018. Or do you mean specifically AI-oriented chips?