Slashdot Mirror
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.
TSMC is great, until you realize that all of the intellectual property released to them is shared instantly with Republic of China gov
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.
Intel saw how Microsoft got PC builders to beat each other up to carry the One True Operating System, and decided to avoid that racket by building their own parallel brand: Intel Inside (with music) so that CPUs from AMD, etc. didn't push their pricing down. It largely worked, to the point where almost everyone in America knows who Intel is: "it's the guys who powered my Compaq 10 years ago - dun dun dun DAHN".
Last year, the Taiwanese company amassed a bigger market value than its U.S. rival for the first time.
I am afraid the USA is [quickly] becoming an entity of little consequence. It's sad. When we lost manufacturing to China, folks here were ebullient, saying we surrendered cheap labor intensive jobs to China. They were happy that when it came to technology, we are "up there."
From this piece, it now appears that we're not safe. All our president can do is to apply sanctions - which hardly work by the way.
Given that china still owns a significant amount of our debt, we're surely in trouble.
Not so long from now, Russia and China will introduce the C929 . Then our serious remaining industry will be threatened.
Suggestion: Let's stop fomenting chaos in far away lands and concentrate on making the USA a beacon of prosperity once again.
"TSMC has a real chance to replace Intel as the best chipmaker in the business".
The big question is: can TSMC produce processor chips without massive gaping security holes? If so, their chances are fair to middling.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
"A company no one ever heard of..." OK Bloomberg, fuck the media
Everyone is switching to ARM. X86 is an obsolete electricity gobbling turd filled with security problems.
You send manufacturing overseas and design and management must eventually follow. And as for Renee James, her Wiki entry shows her to be a major part of intel's creative decline due to the major positions she has held. I don't doubt the doer-ship of women, but they are lacking creative aggression. And companies who do not realize that doom themselves eventually if they depend on being cutting edge and beyond for their positions. 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.
E Proelio Veritas.
The concentration of power of TSMC is already a bit worrying.
But that's nothing if you look at how few actually *make* the machines that TSMC, Intel, GlobalFoundries, etc need. (And how much they cost.)
Basically, it's ASML and a few barely noteworthy ones.
And a single machine can cost between six and nine figures. (You need *many* of those machines in one fab.)
... please fab alpha again.
I heard that during the heydays of the Pentium, there were surveys, that found, that more people know "Intel inside", than even Coca-Cola.
I don't know if it is true... Or if this is for the entire planet of what...
But given how much they advertised, it's certainly believable.
that there aren't fundamental differences between men and women and what they *like to do* with their time.
If you want to create a completely fair, team-oriented place to work where nobody falls through the cracks, hire a woman.
If you want to build a kick-ass video gaming rig from the ground up in the middle of a hot warzone, hire a man. The woman will tell you that if you want to do this, your priorities are misplaced, and will focus on saving lives, not optimizing gameplay between bullets.
Guess what? Tech on the open market basically amounts to building kick-ass video gaming rigs in the middle of a warzone.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
I don't get what this article is trying to say. TSMC is about to dethrone Intel ... how?
In value? TSMC's market cap is half that of Intel.
In innovation? TSMC is a manufacturer of outsourced chip designs ... think a Chinese factory that produces car parts for Ford. The article references the combined research budgets of Qualcomm, Apple, Nvidia and Huawei. That's cute, but what does it have to do with anything? In real life, those budgets don't actually "combine." They're all competing against each other. Does the outsourced manufacturer benefit from having all these customers? Sure, but so what?
Intel, meanwhile, designs its own chips, which still dominate the PC and server industries. It also makes chipsets to go along with these, and most processor customers use these integrated chipsets these days. Add to that wireless devices, compilers, SDKs, and all the other stuff it produces that comprise an entire ecosystem.
Does Intel face challenges? Sure. I don't think anybody can argue that it's kinda fallen on its face in the mobile market. But does anyone see AWS or Boeing approaching TSMC to produce custom CPUs tailored for specific workloads?
So in that sense, you might as well say TSMC is about to dethrone IBM. It just doesn't make any sense to me.
Breakfast served all day!
Just like magic rock gardens a spire can rise only so far and then it crumbles down to be replaced by others on top of the ruins.
If you say one more faggoty thing about females I'm going to fuck holes into your face you Republican INCEL faggot.
The "T" in "TSMC" stands for "Taiwan." We might worry that TSMC might share IP with the government of the Republic of China, for whatever good that would do anybody, but the odds of them knowingly sharing IP with mainland China (the PRC) is substantially zero. Not only for ideological reasons, but also because the PRC has SMIC and other TSMC foundry competitors. TSMC has a substantial lead over them at the moment, and would like to keep it that way.
I want to challenge the very premise here, that TSMC is winning. By exceeding the Intel market cap.
Fab construction and the need to support ever smaller lithography processes, has resulted in fabs getting ever bigger, ever more expensive, and the group of viable fab companies keeps shrinking.
I mean, TSMC is winning for now, I guess, but look at it this way: TSMC is getting huge because it has no choice. Either it grows humongous or it will die and become one of the (large) group of losers. And simply winning "today" in this business is far from being any guarantee that success tomorrow will follow. In fact if this trend continues, process shrinks will simply become unaffordable for anyone, no matter how big they get.
I can't find it now but I saw a stark diagram showing the fab companies over time. At every point on the chart there were fewer and fewer companies still doing this work. Companies are now muttering about forming consortiums simply to be able to afford fabs that can build 5 nm, 3 nm and 1 nm chips. Single fab plants now cost multiple billions of dollars which is an enormous capital requirement.
"knowingly", perhaps not. But how do you think SMIC got started?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
That Ampere thinks it can compete is a testament to stumbles by Intel, and TSMC's ability to benefit from those mistakes.
Maybe. But from personal experience, I can also say that they might just be stupid. I work in IT for a Fortune 500 company. I never name them here. We do a lot of software as a service type things. We're pretty good at what we do and in some areas we are likely the top dog for US based solutions. The business segment I support isn't sexy at all. But every year we have to deal with multiple startups who try to take our business. Many fail. We often see new companies say they can do everything we do for half the cost. Half the cost? Sure. But in reality they do like 1/3 instead of everything we do. So we have customers who leave over cost and then come back because our competitors really suck. Again, this is just not a sexy business segment in what I work with. This isn't it, but imagine you work for Turbo Tax. You don't just have H&R Block, Tax Slayer, etc. to deal with but every year some punk upstart company says it can do taxes better for way less than you charge. How much better can it really be? Either tax software works or it doesn't. You can't really make it "better". But we still have competitors who claim that this somewhat stagnant business can be done better and cheaper. And every year we watch as they go out of business.
Another problem I've seen with startups is the "We can't possibly fail because we're geniuses!" attitude. Most startups do fail. I know a guy who has spent most of his IT career chasing startup glory and failing. He does make really good money, but he's always having to find a new job with the next startup. The older product I still support was started by a successful startup that my current employer bought out. I can tell you that a large number of people associated with that startup left us within a year or two of the acquisition going through and they went to a few different new startups that various people associated with the original company started. All those startups failed. And a large number of those people returned to my employer, tail between their legs. So sure, maybe what is said about Ampere is true and will happen, but I'm not ruling out that it's a dumb idea and they'll fail at it.
What the article didn't emphasize is that Intel's main market is internal consumption (Intel-branded chips), while companies using the foundry model that TSMC pioneered sell to the industry as a whole. (I note that Intel does have a small, and not successful, attempt at a foundry business.)
Intel must amortize the cost of its IC process development, plus the cost of new fabs every generation, based solely on the revenue it can generate from the sale of its own chips, while TSMC can spread that cost over the manufacture of chips for the entire industry.
As the cost of building a single fab doubles with each process generation, and is now in the $10 billion - $20 billion range, it's fast approaching the point where no single semiconductor company has enough revenue to support such capital expenditures -- Intel included. TSMC has a little more headroom since, as a foundry supplier, the upper bound on its production volumes is the volume of the semiconductor industry as a whole.
Right now, TSMC and Samsung are the only two suppliers of state-of-the-art lithography. It will be interesting to watch the political events that unfold as a result of the discovery by the public that the US no longer has state-of-the-art semiconductor processes. It will be even more interesting to watch what happens when people realize the degree to which the US economy is dependent upon three or four Asian semiconductor fabs.
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.
So your point is.............???? That China engages in industrial espionage? Cause that's not exactly news.
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.
Right up until the PRC decides to heat up the civil war again and end it in their own favor...
Taking Taiwan may not be as easy as all that:
* https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/09/25/taiwan-can-win-a-war-with-china/
The "T" in "TSMC" stands for "Taiwan." We might worry that TSMC might share IP with the government of the Republic of China, for whatever good that would do anybody, but the odds of them knowingly sharing IP with mainland China (the PRC) is substantially zero. Not only for ideological reasons, but also because the PRC has SMIC and other TSMC foundry competitors. TSMC has a substantial lead over them at the moment, and would like to keep it that way.
Taiwan is still a province of China, just ask Jackie Chan.
It's about a trillion out of 15.6 trillion. We owe most of the debt to ourselves. Meanwhile what we own to other countries can largely be thought of as tribute. Folks don't seem to realize that with a big military comes an empire, and America has an empire like any other nation with a big army. You don't need 19 aircraft carriers to defend yourself against Canada & Mexico...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The title of this Slashdot story is a joke - "TSMC, a Company Few Americans Know".
EVERYBODY in the semiconductor industry knows TSMC. Before the rise of the current surveillance industry (- Google/Facebook/Amazon), real "tech" had been existing where people actually made tangible things.
It's about time for Slashdot to go back to its heyday when stories were posted about real technology.
Sad to see the juvenile debates of what Intel does vs what TSMC does in the discussions. It's like watching fresh grads who know nothing trying to figure out amongst themselves by bickering about what their employers do
Two points:
1. America recognizes a One China policy... so they are essentially the same country, with a small province exposed to Western influence.
2. When PRC allowed communication with family members in Taiwan, many people in the Taiwan security services (all Hakka) were surprised to find out that their relatives held similar positions on the mainland. It is not hard to assume what happened from that point out.
This idea is stupid. Intel invented the CPU as we know it, the Intel 4004, designed by Federico Faggin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_circuit
Yes, Intel became very interested in mass marketing sometime in the 386 era, with the Intel Inside campaigns. However this was decades later, and Intel has always needed something to market. Without the hardware and CPU business, Intel would have nothing to sell.
You know little of computer history and it shows.
Hsinchu, Taiwan is also a mini free trade zone. It's fenced off and guarded. What goes in gets shipped out and not taxed.
It's been around for quite a long time (over 20 years that I know of). I've visited the area.
They really know what they're doing. They have on campus dormitories for employees if they choose to live there (and work long hours).
Note that this is NOT mainland China and is a sort of democracy. China insists they're a rogue colony though and this has been an item of contention for several decades.
Ironically, Taiwan subcontracts out a lot of their high demand manufacturing to mainland China.
How do those words taste? LOL...
~ TSMC
Or at least significantly dominant positions in a market area, and how those positions are attacked. It's been a long time that intel has been retreating, once they were a memory player, and giving that up to concentrate on higher-profit parts over tech to boost more commodity parts may have played a roll, allowing other players to leverage large volumes to support process improvements over time.
Not an unusual scene to see a player retreat from the broader market to live in the high-profit end. Seldom works out that well in the end though. Trials of entering new areas in attempt to expand their footprint often result in less-than-stellar initial efforts, followed by giving up. Look at all of Google's attempts to find something new. Then there is buying up competitors -- look at Microsoft. Another good way to lose a lot of money on a big bet. One imagines that the management of these profitable companies fancies themselves as geniuses, even though most of them arrived long after the actual success of the company, and are just arrogant self-deluded gamblers who like to spent other people's money. Of course, a huge pot of corporate cash always attracts these smooth-talking bastards.
Someday it would be nice to see one of these companies decide that they actually want to make the best widgets possible and please their customers, and employees even if they don't grow to gargantuan size and influence the political landscape.
Why not use the word "people" instead of the word "Americans" in that title? Why assume your readers are US-centrically minded?
The "T" in "TSMC" stands for "Taiwan." We might worry that TSMC might share IP with the government of the Republic of China, for whatever good that would do anybody, but the odds of them knowingly sharing IP with mainland China (the PRC) is substantially zero. Not only for ideological reasons, but also because the PRC has SMIC and other TSMC foundry competitors. TSMC has a substantial lead over them at the moment, and would like to keep it that way.
You might also point out that we (the US) actually give (or sell at very low prices) our military hardware directly to the ROC on a regular basis.
That's where the ship I used to be stationed on is currently.
They have been our ally since WW2.
If I recall correctly, Chinaâ(TM)s (State-subsidized) chipmaker, SMIC, settled or had adjudicated a complaint that SMIC stole proprietary information by recruiting key personnel from TSMC...
So your point is.............???? That China engages in industrial espionage? Cause that's not exactly news.
No. TSMC CXOs had an internal power struggle at one point, when the old TSMC CEO Morris Chang decided to heavy hand against his rival Richard Chang. Richard detected in response fled Taiwan along with 100+ Taiwanese engineers and managers in his party to mainland China and founded SMIC. Because of this conflict, SMIC was trusted and invested by Communist China's state capital. Later SMIC had a similar internal struggle that had expelled Richard Chang.
When the Chinese see a good idea from the west, they copy it. When the west see a good idea from the Chinese they ridicule it. Now they are getting creatively destroyed.