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TSMC, a Company Few Americans Know, is About To Dethrone Intel (bloomberg.com)
For more than 30 years, Intel has dominated chipmaking, producing the most important component in the bulk of the world's computers. That run is now under threat from a company many Americans have never heard of. From a report: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. was created in 1987 to churn out chips for companies that lacked the money to build their own facilities. The approach was famously dismissed at the time by Advanced Micro Devices founder Jerry Sanders. "Real men have fabs," he quipped at a conference, using industry lingo for factories. These days, ridicule has given way to envy as TSMC plants have risen to challenge Intel at the pinnacle of the $400 billion industry. AMD recently chose TSMC to make its most advanced processors, having spun off its own struggling factories years before.
TSMC's threat to Intel reflects a sea change in chipmaking that's seen one company after another hire TSMC to manufacture the chips they design. Hsinchu-based TSMC has scores of customers, including tech giants Apple and Qualcomm, second-tier players like AMD, and minnows such as Ampere Computing. The explosion of components built this way has given TSMC the technical know-how needed to churn out the smallest, most efficient and powerful chips in the highest volumes.
"It's a once-in-a-50-year situation," said Renee James, the former No. 2 at Intel who heads startup Ampere. Her company is less than two years old and yet it's going after Intel's dominant server chip business. That Ampere thinks it can compete is a testament to stumbles by Intel, and TSMC's ability to benefit from those mistakes. It's been a decade since Intel faced major competition and its 90 percent revenue share in computer processing will again deliver record results this year. But some on Wall Street are concerned, and rivals are emboldened, because TSMC has a real chance to replace Intel as the best chipmaker in the business. Last year, the Taiwanese company amassed a bigger market value than its U.S. rival for the first time.
TSMC's threat to Intel reflects a sea change in chipmaking that's seen one company after another hire TSMC to manufacture the chips they design. Hsinchu-based TSMC has scores of customers, including tech giants Apple and Qualcomm, second-tier players like AMD, and minnows such as Ampere Computing. The explosion of components built this way has given TSMC the technical know-how needed to churn out the smallest, most efficient and powerful chips in the highest volumes.
"It's a once-in-a-50-year situation," said Renee James, the former No. 2 at Intel who heads startup Ampere. Her company is less than two years old and yet it's going after Intel's dominant server chip business. That Ampere thinks it can compete is a testament to stumbles by Intel, and TSMC's ability to benefit from those mistakes. It's been a decade since Intel faced major competition and its 90 percent revenue share in computer processing will again deliver record results this year. But some on Wall Street are concerned, and rivals are emboldened, because TSMC has a real chance to replace Intel as the best chipmaker in the business. Last year, the Taiwanese company amassed a bigger market value than its U.S. rival for the first time.
Intel Designs and makes their own chips. TSMC just takes your designs and makes the chips. Which is a perfectly fine business model, but comparing Intel to them isn't really the same. As Intel puts a lot more R&D in designing the chips then making them.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
if your chip designs are that sensitive for national security you better have your own Fab.
ROC is a solid America ally, so there isn't much "national security" risk. American defense contractors can't afford their own fabs.
Now the part that can be fixed with trade negotiations is to be sure that the company doesn't go ahead and make a spinoff product based off your IP.
ROC does not require any IP sharing or joint ventures (ROC != PRC). If they are fabbing your chip, you give them your masks, not your VHDL/Verilog source. With the mask, they could make direct copies, but not "spin-offs".
Of course, if they are caught ripping off their customers, their $190B market cap would quickly go to near zero. So they have a pretty big incentive to behave.
There is no historical evidence of the creative aggression of women on any level that has meaning in the large. Every device and entity that they occupy was created and pushed forward by men.
You write this on a comment thread about the fab AMD is using? AMD, the company headed by Dr. Lisa Su? The company that's going to cause Intel to lose a double digit market share percentage in 2019? For the second time in the company's history? That AMD?
She joined the company in 2012, became CEO in 2014, and is widely credited with driving the company to commit to and complete the Zen architecture. She took over from Rory Read, a business wonk who did businessy things... and drove AMD into the ground in the process by failing to invest in new development. She's a match for Dirk Meyer, the CEO prior to Rory Read who gave AMD their first big lead over Intel with the Athlon family.
It may be that men have created more things this way than women, but it's not "creative aggression" so much as it is risk-taking. Men take more risks than women. They have to, to reproduce it nothing else. Many of them fail in their aggression. Enough succeed that stuff gets made. But across the spectrum of risk-takers, there are women right up there at the high end of the spectrum, right along with the men. Dr. Su is one of them. So no, not "every device and entity".
Given that china still owns a significant amount of our debt, we're surely in trouble.
That could actually be worse for them than it is for us.
There's a saying: if I owe you a thousand dollars, I have a problem. If I owe you a trillion dollars, *you* have a problem.
Well, that is actual debt though.
Holding bonds isn't the same as giving a loan, though; you get no power over the bond issuer. Defaulting only means people wouldn't want to buy that bond in the future.
Also, the US government issues the bonds, and they all get purchased. What the market does with them after that doesn't even affect the US Government. There is no reason for the US Government to care who buys them. Only a country that has limited demand for bond purchases would need to care about that stuff.
What are they going to do, send their leader to stand outside the embassy waving bond certificates in the air? Holding lots of US bonds just means that if their economy collapses, there will still be a core of foreign denominated income for them that is safe in the future. They get paid when the bonds mature, or when they sell them, same as everybody else.
It is merely a wise investment, not a source of power or control for either side.
Each company seems to be measuring a different thing when they report a process is "x nm." So while you can compare nm within a single company's offerings, you can't compare them between different fab companies. TSMC and Samsung's 7nm processes leapfrogged Intel's 14nm process (37.5 million transistors per mm^2). But they're still behind Intel's 10nm process.