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Right. Who need power plants when the power is coming out of the wall plug. See the problem? Someone has to build the fab in the first place so you can use it.
by nn3 10y ago
Right. Who need power plants when the power is coming out of the wall plug.
See the problem? Someone has to build the fab in the first place so you can use it.
- trsohmers 10y agoOh of course there needs to be fabs, but plenty of them exist. All I was saying is that if you want to make a chip, you don't need to take on Intel's capex.
- wolrah 10y agoThen you end up like AMD, with designs that have to be cut back and compromised when a third-party fab doesn't manage to do what they expect on a new process. There's something to be said for tight integration between fab and design when you're trying to go in to uncharted territory. If you don't need to be at the edge of process technology, you're completely right of course.
- _yosefk 10y agoWhy do you have to be like AMD - why can't you be like Apple, Qualcomm, NVIDIA, or, well, about any successful/large chip maker other than Intel and Samsung? Regarding the edge of technology - Intel doesn't beat others to a new node by making both chips and fabs, it would beat others even if it was only building fabs. And it's not like TSMC is that much behind Intel. Grandparent who mentioned 28nm could mention 16nm except that there the masks will costs much more but it's still millions, not billions.
- trsohmers 10y agoOur next shuttle run is on 16nm... Depending on a bunch of different options, it is "only" ~2-4x the cost of a 28nm run (and should be declining in the next year). Doing a full mask set is still extremely expensive though (~$5-10m range)