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Comment by baq | Hacker News Reader

That's too pessimistic. In general, customers don't want to be dealing with a monopolist and foundry customers are no different. It's in everyone's interest to solve the unproven process problem, so if Intel has evidence that the process isn't bust, customers will find a product which can be used as a pipe cleaner for mutual benefit.

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Specially companies like Nvidia for which the gross profit margin is so high their risk of losing TSMC is higher than risk of losing money.

Apple is similarly paranoid about single-sourcing -- off the top of my head I'm not sure whether their top-end M-class chips are currently fabbed by both TSMC and Samsung, or just TSMC>

They always are the first ones to use the most advanced node by TSMC, the designs probably are only compatible with that particular process. Have not heard of apple using samsung for SoCs.

Apple used Samsung through the A7. Moved to TSMC for the A8.

Sorry for not adding ”in the past decade” at the end of that sentence.

Because if there was only a single source (for example if the other one was out-competed), they'd have to pay 30% of their revenue for the privilege of being in the FabStore.

This is already happening. The leading edge node wafers cost a fortune compared to older nodes. TSMC has limited capacity, as it takes years to bring new fabs online, and with competitors struggling they have great pricing power. Maybe why their revenue has roughly tripled over the last decade.

Samsung has already announced that their frontier node (what they call 1.4nm) is going to delayed at least two years, and issuing statements calling it into question at all. Intel has announced that they will only do what they call 14A if they can get a partner who will promise to use it in significant volume.

As of this moment, the only company that is definitely going ahead with that next generation node is TSMC. The other two companies capable of doing so are both signalling that they will only do it if they get a partner who promises to use them for significant volume, not just as negotiating leverage against TSMC.

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