U.S. Govt pushes Nvidia and Apple to use Intel's foundries | Hacker News Reader

U.S. Govt pushes Nvidia and Apple to use Intel's foundries

tomshardware.com

33 pointsivewonyoung42 comments

Which foundries are those? The ones that Intel are not going to finish because they can't be staffed? (Cover story: lack of demand). The ones for whose cost Intel received up-front, no-strings cash subsidies from U. S. taxpayers?

Or from german taxpayers.

Intel hasn’t received any US money yet.

  TSMC will also receive several billion in subsidies. The problem the government is trying to address is 90% of the world’s most sophisticated chips being made in Taiwan, a potential war zone.

It’s probably important for Intel’s fab to get a major customer without offending TSMC. The US government pressure helps Intel and doesn’t cost anyone any money. Intel’s price has been under a lot of pressure because of the fab investments.

> up-front, no-strings cash

Intel has to build the foundries before they get the money. They haven't received any cash yet.

This must be clarified -- I was talking about the CHIPS Act money, not the new money mentioned in the linked article. Has the CHIPS Act money not been disbursed yet?

No, I answered you an hour ago. Where are you getting your information?

Customarily any sort of "stimulus" is disbursed immediately so that the multiplier effects can begin to be felt. Also, money went to the local high school where one of the fabs is being built, for some kind of "partnership". So I assumed that the money had been disbursed. If it has not, then I need to look up what the milestones are, because Intel keep fuzzing the schedule and the strategy for the in-progress fab up the road from me. Regardless, there is no way for them to staff it; it would have all had to be on H1-B and O1-A, but now no one will come even for those, as they see that they will be lynched for eating dogs.

> Customarily any sort of "stimulus" is disbursed immediately so that the multiplier effects can begin to be felt.

That's not particularly true of industrial and infrastructure funds (its true of broad consumer stimulus) even when they are part of broad fiscal stimulus laws, but, in any case, the CHIPS Act wasn't really a stimulus law, it was an industrial policy law; it wasn't about boosting short-term economic activity, it was about long-term competitiveness in a key area.

That explains a few things. If Intel don't get paid until they finish the fab, then they have that incentive -- though no other -- to actually finish it, which they obviously don't want to do. And they have to do all the work on credit...no wonder they are whining their faces off.

In any case it is too late for the US to have industrial policy. Maybe a lifetime ago, but not now.

Technically is that even possible ? (I know nothing about chip manf)

I can see the US can probably force Apple to do that. Nvidia may be a tough sell unless the US puts an embargo on Nvidia. We know that won't happen.

I'm skeptical that the US government would go so far, but why the difference between Apple and Nvidia? You can walk between their headquarters in California, and they are both incorporated in Delaware.

Apple is a US Based Company. Isn't Nvidia based in the UK ? Plus with the AI push, many US companies will be against forcing a change to Nvidia's status.

edit: OK, maybe I got arm and Nvidia mixed up :)

I read the book Chip War. The US Government has been the chip industry's faithful customer. They are also allowed to step in when they have national security concerns. The pandemic chip shortage brought our reliance on overseas producers into sharp focus. They're trying to patch that now.

TSMC is top class though, so it's difficult to convince people to use anything else.

national security, exactly. if intel makes everr'one's chips like the old days then intel, that old friend the US government helped shield from bankruptcy... .. maybe intel can slip in a little extra circuit here or there, won't be used for anything NORMALLY but maybe if things got bad maybe hypothetically the NSA could have a teensy little backdoor added on. conversely the assumption is this is what already occurs in chinese chips, which makes the US govt want even harder to centralize all chip making under the NSA's home turf

It seems feasible technically. The machines and process is just about effectively the same regardless of the chip manufacturer, since they all use the same ASML EUV technology to produce the wafers.

From a regulation perspective though, it's sus from my point of view but definitely not unheard of in other industries of course.

Reading the article, it sounds like the government agent is pressuring the shareholders of those firms to in turn pressure nVidia and Apple to use those fabs. And it reads like the official didn't mention Intel by name, so par for the course for avoiding scrutiny using the "invisible hand" (/s) of the market.

> since they all use the same ASML EUV technology to produce the wafers

If only that's all there is to it. This is sort of the media's simplified view for the general public. And well what some people want to talk about.

There are lots of vendors involved with a lot of unique technologies in the mix. If it was so simple everyone would just buy these machines and copy it.

> The machines and process is just about effectively the same

It's clearly different. Apple experienced it first hand many times. Same as Qualcomm. Try ask TSMC and Samsung to manufacture the same design over roughly the same generation and there have been vastly different results.

> Technically is that even possible ? (I know nothing about chip manf)

The article basically answers this question

> However, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said during the Goldman Sachs conference that the GPU maker could shift its fab if needed. “In the event that we have to shift from one fab to another, we have the ability to do it. We won’t be able to get the same level of performance or cost, but we will be able to provide the supply.”

Good luck with that. I've been a pretty vocal Apple critic for most of my life, but after seeing how much more energy efficient my work MacBook (i.e. Arm) was, I ended up getting one for myself (I just hold my nose about the window manager and live in the terminal instead).

Intel's lack of drive to innovate comes through in consequential dimensions like battery life. No amount of "made in USA" stickers is going to address that.

Regarding macOS window management, have you tried Rectangle? It’s free and open source with a pro version if you want to support the developer…

https://rectangleapp.com/

I use rectangle, but the critical missing feature is the ability to move focus directionally. Why bother tile your windows if you can't have a hotkey that moves focus up, left, down, or right?

Lacking such a hotkey, I now must keep track of them temporally (Cmd + tab + tab + tab to go to the one I used three times ago) which is a really clumsy way to think about something that supposed to be analogous to objects in a 2D space.

This isn't Rectangle's fault, my impression is that the public window management API is just not powerful enough.

Amethyst is the closest thing I've found on MacOS to the alignment of placement & focus management that I'm after (which doesn't require disabling system integrity protection) but I'd much rather think in terms of directions than monads.

So I have to chose between the kind of UI sanity that you find in i3/sway and the kind of battery life that you find on an ARM MacBook, and I blame Intel.

> Intel's lack of drive to innovate

Intel is behind yes, but they're not unwilling to innovate.

Fab delays at one point held up a lot of newer designs and they had to backport it and/or use TSMC.

I didn't mean to imply that it was merely a problem with willpower. Just that the failure to make a competitive product for whatever reason has gone on long enough that even end users who don't bother split hairs about processor specs (that's me) are noticing differences and starting to split hairs.

This is fabrication, not design.

My gripe is that they only fabricate certain designs, and those designs are sub-par. If they fabricated a design which were competitive with Apple silicon, I wouldn't have had to chose between software that I like (Linux) and decent battery life.

I'm aware that one can get a Linux-compatible laptop with an arm chip, but everywhere I look says that the linux kernel is still in the process of catching up. If it had been Intel making chips for general sale, rather than Apple and TSMC making an exclusive deal, there would not have been this compatibility gap that we're in right now.

This is all shaping up to look very ugly, on numerous levels. In any case, we should have fun day trading Intel on the headlines.

The push can come from tariffs due to ~$50B trade deficit with Taiwan and ~$400B deficit with China.

As long as you recognize that a Chinese tariff would be a massively inflationary and regressive tax on American consumers.

A Chinese tariff is perhaps the right long term move, but in the short term it will cause a lot of pain to Americans who are struggling with a cost of living crisis as it is.

If tariffs simply fix the price difference between the cost of materials-dumping that is happening in certain industries where China has over-invested to help properly balance the global economy, it will not be massively inflationary; it’s just a defensive move against attacks on western manufacturing centers.

IOW, a price increase, aka inflation.

If a widget costs $10, and a competitor comes in who is subsidized by the largest population in the world and then sells a competing widget for $1, this will seem like a great deal in the short term for the population. (Until they stop manufacturing widgets because they can’t sell below cost.)

Adding $9 in tariffs to the $1 may seem like inflation, but it’s something slightly different.

As I said originally, that might be good in the long term, but in the short term that's 900% inflation.

For a consumer, there are some key differences between anti-dumping duties and inflation.

ADD: This only affects the price of specific imported products on which the duty is imposed. It doesn’t impact the overall economy or all goods, just the targeted products.

Inflation affects the prices of almost all goods and services in the economy. It is a widespread increase in the cost of living rather than a targeted rise in prices of specific items.

ADD: Consumers will see price increases only in the goods that are subject to the duty. This could make foreign goods more expensive than their domestic alternatives, potentially reducing consumer choice or driving them toward domestic products.

Inflation impacts the price of all goods and services, not just specific items, leading to a broad reduction in real income if wages don’t keep up.

ADD: This is typically a temporary measure until the market corrects itself or until dumping practices are stopped.

Inflation can be long-term or short-term, depending on the economic conditions driving it.

Chinese goods are a large percentage of the goods that American consumers consume. A price increase in them is a broad price increase.

And approximately all of the goods produced in the US use a large percentage of Chinese parts. American services use Chinese goods. They'll all see cost increases.

The shift in demand towards different domestic products will cause price increases -- demand for these will outstrip supply, causing price increases.

Isn’t TSMC building in the US?

They already have a fab in Arizona. https://www.anandtech.com/show/18682/tsmc-unveils-major-us-f...

It would still be a foreign owned company.

Also, if it is in the US, the staffing problem would be the same

If Taiwan is invaded, wouldn’t the Taiwanese nationalists come to the US? I thought that was the plan.

You're assuming that the invading forces would allow people to leave. First thing invading forces do is take over airports, and I would assume blockade the ports in this case as well. Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face

There is nothing wrong here. Any country would like to have the jobs, and beyond that the advanced semiconductor supply chain has a long lead time to replicate and get skilled workforce trained at scale. This is exactly what the Sec. of Commerce should be doing, and the full title of the article,"U.S. Govt pushes Nvidia and Apple to use Intel's foundries — Department of Commerce Secretary Raimondo makes appeal for US-based chip production", gives a better picture of the dynamic here. The government is lobbying for more domestic semiconductor production, not compelling it.

When China invades Taiwan it will be too late to have taken this step. See https://media.defense.gov/2023/Apr/24/2003205865/-1/-1/1/07-..., and https://global.upenn.edu/perryworldhouse/news/japans-respons..., et al. Advanced munitions require this capability. Xi is 71 years old now and has promised reunification, this conflict is inevitable and imminent.

The domestic (US) TSMC fabs are also a good step.

Exactly. The pandemic has brought to light the flaws in lassiez faire libertarian economic philosophy. The US has hostile opposition and has to take steps to keep itself safe from adversarial actors. We dont live in an ideal world and we have to act accordingly, not how we want it to be.

The whole "let the market settle on a smartest solution" idea works great, until your highest-margin exports start getting manufactured abroad in a country without labor regulation. First cars, then software, and now smartphones. By 2045, America will be the manufacturer of Absolutely Nothing and we'll be incredibly proud of what our businesses accomplished.

Yup. We wont make anything but valuation spreadsheets for private equity to analyze by then. Legacy of Jack Welch and simple-mindedness of shareholder value uber alles.

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