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Comment by cogman10 | Hacker News Reader

> no reason Intel couldn’t do the same.

Intel is doing the same. IDK if they are working on new fabs at this point, but the last few generations of chips from intel have used TSMC.

My expectation is that Intel might still run fabs, but they'll be mostly contracting them out to people who want cheap ASICs and 10 year old fab tech.

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> IDK if they are working on new fabs at this point

Yes, they are.

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/in...

Definitely struggling, but still in the game.

How does this scale? TSMC can't literally be the only fab in the world...

They're the only fab company in the world with the technology to allow Intel, AMD, and Nvidia to compete with each other on the playing field they do.

Right but at some point does Nvidia use their muscle and block TSMC from making chips for anyone else? The demand for GPUs is just increasing too rapidly for this to make sense.

That will 100% never happen. Nvidia is big, but not even close to a majority of TSMC revenue or loading. Apple, Intel, Qualcomm, etc...

In this case...TSMC is holding all the cards, not Nvidia

Apple was TSMCs biggest customer (25%) and nVidia is 2nd (12-15%). The bigger thing being that between the two, they lock up most of the bleeding edge process capacity and leave everyone else fighting over older processes.

But leading edge these days is like 15 to 20 percent performance or density. It's not a huge lead any more.

You are forgetting AMD...they are up there as well (double digits %). Thats how the compete so effectively with Intel.

They aren't.

Samsung comes in a close second in terms of tech. GloFo is also still floating around though lagging pretty bad AFAIK. Micron has it's own fabs that they are actively developing (in fact, they are building new facilities right now).

What TSMC is is cutting edge. That's why everyone that needs top performance uses them.

Only one in their class then.

They are now but they weren't always. I don't know much about hardware these days, I gleefully walked away from embedded development over a decade ago, but what I believe is that you don't really want to forecast to hard on any single player too far into the future.

Neither Micron nor GloFo are trying to keep up with state of the art, though. AFAICT that's limited to TSMC, Samsung, Intel and SMIC.

GloFo simply decided to stay at 14nm because beyond that, manufacturing costs actually increase, not decrease, and everybody wants the best, not second best.

Samsung is still in the game at the STOA level, but a distant second. But maybe it’s the nature of the industry that one winner takes all for a number of years at the top end. After all, Intel was the only game in town for decades.

>> Intel might still run fabs, but they'll be mostly contracting them out to people who want cheap ASICs and 10 year old fab tech.

Intel fabs have never had to be as cost effective as others. They were selling top end chips for top dollar for decades. I bet there are 10 other companies that can make 45nm chips cheaper than Intel can on their old equipment. I could be wrong.

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