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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.
This can be elevated with proper trade negotiations. Also for the most part if your chip designs are that sensitive for national security you better have your own Fab. 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.
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.
All they see is layouts. it's very very difficult to extract RTL or functionality from a layout.
They don't see 100% of the chip either, EEPROM programming, or fuse programming, especially keys, are typically handled elsewhere.
They can clone things, but without the fuse details, programming details, and test details, it's just a cheap non functional piece of hardware that can function as a space heater.
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.
Intel does R&D, producing new designs. TSMC just makes stuff others design, and therefore has a much higher chance of making stuff with security holes (and doesn't care because security isn't their job).
Negotiations can get agreements but since they don't admit to doing this as it stands... good luck with that.
Oh they might not use it where it is obvious, or in the US but you can bet they are studying and using your IP
Also, most all chips are sensitive for national security.
dprk --> lol... anyway, what happends when communist china marches in... the solid ally stuff get defferenter.
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.
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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".
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 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...
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.
But there is a valid #reason# for that. See OP and then go out and research what mobile phone manufacturers are actually building their battery-sensitive phones on.
As others have noted, it depends on who's designs they're fabbing, but the answer is that everybody who's designing high end, state of the art out-of-order with speculative execution chips has screwed up royalty. All of Intel, ARM, and IBM, both zSeries (lastest mainframes derived from the System/360) and POWER have Meltdown problems. All including AMD have much more sinister Spectre problems.
So everyone in the industry has a lot of work to do, and TSMC ... well, this might actually hurt them if this delays some designs, or in general slows the design process down.
ARM has the same exact security problems, right down to one of their latest designs having a Meltdown variant. Of course, the overwhelmingly vast majority of ARM chips are in-order, some superscalar like the Pentium before you get to their fastest designs, which of course are the only ones that can compete with Intel for processing power. No real joy for Intel haters, everyone in the industry has failed, AMD except for Meltdown, IBM both mainframe and POWER including Meltdown.
Also, I've never heard that ARM beats Intel on electrical power consumed for computing power, for servers and the like where you want the absolute maximum computer power you can afford.
"knowingly", perhaps not. But how do you think SMIC got started?
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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.
It would be very, very bad if their high end fabs got trashed or destroyed in a PRC attempt to take over the ROC. Everything would be messed up for a while due to inevitable trade disruptions with the mainland, but other countries can spin up discrete parts and low end silicon fab lines (for discrete transistors and the like, and for those a lot of outside China fabs could probably just up their output) faster than high end fabs.
That has got to be the biggest pile of horseshit I've ever read about women in the workplace, at least based on my experience.
(and doesn't care because security isn't their job)
Well they probably care a lot about the integrity of the designs, if you could compromise the masks it probably takes only a minor adjustment to create a hardware backdoor. Of course this is more three letter agency level hack than a script kiddie, but the prize is potentially huge as no code is safe if the hardware can't be trusted.
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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.
Only a very tiny part of ARM offerings has that stuff, and it seems they licensed most of it just to produce high end designs for specific customers.
I have dozens of ARM processors within 10' of me, across multiple families, and none of them have out-of-order speculative blah-blah, they're all pretty standard RISC chips. The deepest pipeline is 4 stages, in-order.
They're giving up and the customers of the defunct fabs are now TSMC customers.
Indeed, but are any of those chips within 10' of you competing with Intel for the desktop and server markets, or could they in theory do so (especially for the desktop)?
BTW, I remember reading that there's pretty much one ARM chip in every SD/SDHC/SDetc. card. I assume this is one way we get "billions and billions" of ARM CPUs shipped every year.
You can't expect Zetas to understand that Betas select the Alpha from their own numbers, and that you have to be a Beta before you can be an Alpha, and you have to also have support from the other Betas.
They're so far below all that, the Alpha just looks like a Godhead to them. So they worship.
Zetas also rarely get to breed, so they don't have experience with the other sex and they get really distracted by their presence. This is one of the (many) reasons why the Zetas are chased off before the Betas get down to making decisions.
Testing won't help, he just needs to be kept at a safe distance from important work, and monitored as a potential mass-murderer.
I read some time ago, probably after they completely dropped the ball after totally slaughtering Intel with their K8 microarchitecture and interconnect technologies, that over time, AMD has never made money for their shareholders. They create a big hit, like their 486 based DX4-100, and then reliably drop the ball again.
But Intel's unique for them fab fumble, at least for a very long time, like going back to the early 1980s when they were forced out of the DRAM business because Japanese yields were so high, also has to be a significant factor. Between the lack of "10nm" production, and their shifting production around in anticipation of it, normally they transition older nodes to chipsets etc., which they're undoing, they can't make enough larger node CPUs to meet current demands. Kinda glad I have a surplus of still functioning fine Sandy and Ivy Bridge systems for my personal use right now....
The PRC might try to finish off the ROC before we can get a carrier there, but worse than the carriers for their schemes are our hunter-killer subs. Unless they figure out something the Soviet never could, it won't take many of them to turn it into an all air affair. Which might be part of their plan, why they've emplaced so many short range missiles, they might hope to beat down the ROC's defenses and get enough airheads in place that they sort of win by default, maybe?
Getting back to the topic at hand, any war which freely uses those missiles would almost certainly shut down TSMC's production on the island for a long time. It could be far easier to exfiltrate their people and set up shop somewhere else (think Operation Paperclip), although of course the PRC would insist they are PRC citizens, and they would be subject to the current sorts of kidnapping and disappearing that's already happening.
Right now he doesn't, but if he starts losing his grip.... That's why you always evaluate countries by their capabilities first, you never know when something externally "stupid" like a faction fight will cause a country to lash out at another.
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...
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ARM still lacks mature "big server" features. If anything, it's more a matter of specialty. x86 (currently) does "big iron" better, and ARM does mobile/small better.
Someday ARM may improve enough on the high-end to render x86 obsolete, but it's also possible it may lose its inherent advantages in that niche when it piles on features to compete with x86 and gathers similar cruft.
Table-ized A.I.
Could a desktop CPU run the code running on the ARM chip at the same speed? No. Not even close. The worst-case latency of that desktop CPU is so bad, if you used it to power your keyboard you'd be missing keystrokes.
It is just a constant stream of "squirrel!" and "whatabutt?"
You were making an accusation against ARM. I pointed out it wasn't true. Now you're talking about desktops.
Yes, lots of people use ARM chips in desktops and servers, but no, that doesn't have anything to do with which chips are vulnerable to spectre.
The PRC might try to finish off the ROC before we can get a carrier there
Taiwan already has WAY more airpower than a single American carrier, and islands don't sink.
The main purpose of the carrier would be to act as a tripwire, ensuring American involvement if it is attacked.
A sea or airborne invasion of Taiwan is far beyond the current capability of the PLA. It would have to be bigger than D-Day. In June 1944, 90% of the German Army was in Russia. Of their soldiers in France, most were focused on Calais. For the PLA, there would be no "second front" nor any deception about landing points. They don't have even 1% of the amphibious capability that the USA+UK+Canada possessed in 1944.
Airborne invasions have a very poor track record. Crete was a pyrrhic victory, the Normandy jumps were successful only because they linked up with troops advancing from the beaches. Arnheim was a failure. So was Dien Bien Phu.
China could go nuclear, but that would likely bring American retaliation. If Taiwan ever feels like they can't count on America, they could build their own nukes in, maybe, a month. Remember, every country that has ever made a serious attempt to build a nuke has succeeded on the first try. As one of the most technologically advanced countr^H^H^H^H^Hregions in the world, Taiwan would have no problem.
I don't see any scenario where we retaliate with nukes. To quote that PLA general from memory, we care more about Los Angeles that we care about Taipei.
Unless they get there hands on some plans, like the Khan network's, it would take them much longer, there are a fair number of tricks and experimentation needed to get implosion devices to work, and the much bigger problem would be procuring the fissionables, can't use civilian reactor "waste" for that. But in geopolitical time frames, maybe, but the PRC wouldn't react well to such an effort, not well at all.
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.
Airborne invasions indeed have some poor records, but Crete still succeeded.
Crete barely succeeded, and the Germans never again did a large scale airborne operation. The allies drew the opposite lesson, and expanded their airborne capabilities, but this was largely because they didn't realize the level of casualties the Germans had absorbed, or how close they came to being defeated.
Crete was lightly defended, and the British and Greeks were caught totally off guard. They had lost much of their heavy equipment the previous month during the fighting on the Greek mainland. There were also some big communications blunders, when defending units were inadvertently ordered to disengage at critical moments. Despite all these problems, they almost defeated the attackers.
China would have no element of surprise, would be facing an armored adversary, and would be faced with weapons that did not exist in 1941, such as DPICM artillery, that are devastating to exposed infantry.
Unless they get there hands on some plans, like the Khan network's
In the 1980s, Taiwan cooperated with Israel and South Africa on nukes. They agreed to discontinue their program when it was infiltrated and exposed by the CIA.
The PRC might try to finish off the ROC before we can get a carrier there
Taiwan already has WAY more airpower than a single American carrier, and islands don't sink.
The main purpose of the carrier would be to act as a tripwire, ensuring American involvement if it is attacked.
A sea or airborne invasion of Taiwan is far beyond the current capability of the PLA.
Why would China care about occupying Taiwan? They could simply bomb it out of existence without risking their troops. There are no defense systems that could prevent the military annihilation of Taiwan, and the US military also cannot do anything to prevent this.
However, there are three things that currently protect the military status of Taiwan:
First, Taiwan doesn't have anything that China doesn't already have much more of. Perhaps China doesn't have a TSMC, but a Chinese takeover of TSMC would kill the company as no client company in their right mind would hand over important IP to a Chinese-controlled fab.
Second, China has already effectively taken over Taiwan in many ways. Taiwan is economically dependent on Taiwan. Taiwan's official international relations and sovereign pride have effectively been destroyed. Most nations already recognize a Chinese takeover of Taiwan, at least nominally. China already exerts influence over Taiwanese elections directly through the 1 million Taiwanese businessmen who live in China and care less about Taiwanese sovereignty than their pocketbooks. Furthermore, the folks who remain in Taiwan realize that the Taiwanese economy will only continue to be more and more dependent on Chinese business ties.
Third, straight from 1984, Taiwan as a purported renegade traitor, an eternal enemy to hate more than the in-power totalitarian regime, is of infinitely more value to the PRC than as a station for military troops.
My experience is now 18 years out of date, but as of 2000 AD, extracting gates from layout is a process that is or can be automated for a large part of any chip. RAM blocks are obvious. Much of the chip can be reverse engineered by repeated application of manual analysis and automated layout-to-gate computer analysis.
That said, your EEPROM and fuse objection is entirely valid, and having a clue to what the chip is actually supposed to do is very important.
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ROC = Taiwan, officially the Republic of China (ROC)
PRC = China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC)
Time for today's English lesson. In this context, "prove" means "test", as in "The proof of the pudding is in the eating."
The idea that an exception would confirm a rule (the common misunderstanding) is pure nonsense. Garbage. False.
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> they could build their own nukes in, maybe, a month.
It would take more than a month. They would need nuclear reactor grade fuel, and would then have to convert one of their civilian nuke plants to work as a breeder reactor. They would have to design and implement their own manufactured equipment to handle the plutonium and shape it into nuclear weapon components. And they would still need to live test their weapon design.
The gov't team developing the materials & the bomb would require bureaucratic omnipotence; I'm not sure that's possible for Taiwan. If the Taiwan executive branch decided that war was imminent and the a-bomb was needed to "survive", could assemble competent scientists, engineers, and project managers, and avoid political/legal challenges, I just don't see it getting done sooner than 3 months, and probably longer. Of course, it would require Taiwan already having made the secret preparations and has put the project into hibernation status. And at the end of the day, simple fission bombs may not have sufficient destructive force to deter the invader. Its fusion bombs (thermonuclear) which have scientists talking about the end of human life and civilization, not fission bombs.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
Lisa Su is also a very smart person, who did a degree because it was the hardest degree she could do. Compare that to the average business shifter who does the degree for money and because other degrees are way too hard.
Thats probably also the main difference between Su and other CEOs of other companies. First she is exceptionally smart. Secondly she comes from an electrical engineering/processor design background and knows the stuff she is having produced first hand and not only the business numbers third she is willing to take risks. The average CEO usually just sees the numbers the people involved and is trying to reduce costs for the next bonus round.
AMD is on a good way, but she also pretty much had a free hand given that AMD when she took over basically almost was bankrupt and the stock a penny stock
A classical example of the reduce costs for the next bonus, is microsoft where the testers of the Windows team were fired to a huge percentage to cut costs, the results were shoddy buggy rolling releases.
Compaq bought DEC, HP bought Compaq. As far as I can tell, sometime before HP bought Compaq about half the Alpha development team were offered jobs at Intel and nearly all accepted.
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Its worst case response time would still be as bad an 8 bit microcontroller. You would not match the response time of a mid-range ARM chip running at 180Mhz.
But ARM-based laptops with no speculative anything do just fine running one application at a time.
It is more about major appliances and consumer electronics than SD cards. Most of those have cloned ASICs. Even if they stole the IP, they wouldn't make it into the statistic.
Airborne invasions indeed have some poor records, but Crete still succeeded. A politically desperate Xi might still try it, hope it works for him. And it would still trash TSMC production.
An airborne invasion would not be required to isolate Taiwan. Sea based denial would be difficult because of the US navy but conventional air and land launched precision munitions would be sufficient.