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Comment by OhMeadhbh | Hacker News Reader

Sure.. calculators and MSP430s for remote power meters are keeping TI from closing up shop, but TI doesn't have the capitalization structure to bring up a fab for the types of chips people say they want. I mean sure... If you want to make 28nm chips, they're fine, and you can do a lot with 1 and 2 GHz parts, but... We keep saying we want to make the chips in the states that they're making in Shenzhen and Taipei... And honestly, a $1.6B grant from daddy warbucks may not be enough to prevent TI from taking the money and dropping out of the program in a few years.

And this comes from a place of love... My family's been invested in GSI for almost 100 years

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> calculators and MSP430s for remote power meters are keeping TI from closing up shop

calculators have consistently been a minor percentage of TI’s business (~5% of profits per source below). I doubt MSP430s in particular amount to a huge percentage either

one random source: https://www.meta-calculator.com/blog/ti-graphing-calculator-... (this is pretty easy info to find)

I can assure you that TI's margins on calculators and MSP430s are much higher than their margins on DAC*s.

Depends on which line of DACs. And calculators are an almost irrelevant amount of TIs revenue. They don’t report it individually, but it’s categorized under the miscellaneous “other” bucket which is only 6% of their business and includes DLP and “other charges” related to M&A. $947 million with all those other things means you’re talking about probably 100-300 million in revenue. There’s other businesses within TI that do more revenue than that by themselves.

Saying "TI makes money on calculators" does not mean "TI does not make money on DLPs."

Also... revenue, profit and margin are all different things.

Saying "TI makes money on calculators" is a pretty misleading statement outside of any other context. Its a tiny part of their profits and revenues. It's like suggesting McDonalds is an ice cream shop. Sure it's on the menu and they make a profit on it but it's a small side business after selling burgers and fries.

So TI is losing money on every calculator they sell? News to me.

I’m really confused how you got that from the comment you’re replying to, and why you’re continuing to defend misinformation you’re spreading in the original comment. you implied TI primarily makes money from calculators and MSP430s. this is easily provably false

the person above made an analogy —- they didn’t claim TI loses money per calculator

> Sure it's on the menu and they make a profit on it

My point is, the statement "calculators and MSP430s for remote power meters are keeping TI from closing up shop" isn't based in reality. Both of these products are tiny parts of their business. If that's all you know of TI, you don't know TI. Like thinking McDonald's is an ice cream shop and completely being ignorant of the burgers and fries, saying those ice cream cones are keeping McDonald's from closing up shop.

Even for the MSP430, it's a small product line of their wireless and microcontroller products.

I’m not saying that at all. I’m saying it’s nearly meaningless in the grand scheme of their overall revenue. They make roughly 50% margin on their $17 billion in revenue right now. If somehow calculators cost nothing (100% margin) it wouldn’t make a meaningful difference on their overall margin.

Microcontrollers and calculators are a small part of TI's revenues. Most (>70%) of their revenues come from analog devices like amplifiers, DC-DC converters, ADC/DACs, and things like that.

They make important chips and many top of the line products of their segments but they're not things like server grade CPUs or GPUs.

Yes. They make most of their money from low margin parts. That's not as good a story as you might think it is. Though... making money is certainly better than not making money. And yes, they have a decent mixed signal story.

But... everyone seems to think TI will be competing with TSMC's and Samsung's small-node parts. And they probably could, but they would need to a) build a fab that can make 5 or 3nm parts and b) build a sales channel for new parts. I was alive in the 2000s so remember TI doing an exceptionally poor job of step b.

Their analog division has >50% margin, a good bit more margin than their MSP430's and graphing calculators. That's not far off from TSMC's overall margin.

It's a better story than your misleading statements acting like TI only makes calculators and old microprocessors and flat out inaccurate ones about profit margins.

I only saw their OPM broken out by division. OPM was around 37-38% in 2025Q2. Do you have numbers for NPM broken out by division? But yes, if they could get volumes like analog or mixed signal with margins like "other" or "embedded" that would be pretty awesome.

What does GSI refer to? Googling did not lead to any obvious results.

TI's older name: Geophysical Service Inc.

The original name of Texas Instruments (Geophysical Service Inc.).

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