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Mike Tyson said: "Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face." When it comes to semiconductors I'd say: "Everyone wants to make their own chips unti

Mike Tyson said: "Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face." When it comes to semiconductors I'd say: "Everyone wants to make their own chips until they have to do so at scale". (Doesn't roll of the tounge as well!) There is definitely a threat from Apple, Amazon, Google and especially China that will put Intel's market share in target distance, but making chips at scale is incredibly difficult. It's hard to see Amazon transitioning their AWS machines to Amazon built chips, but if they display competency they'll certainly be able to squeeze more out of Intel.

jimbokun 8y ago
But these companies don't really make their own chips at scale, they just make their own chip designs, then contract out to a fab to actually manufacture them. And Apple is already at an incredible scale, considering every iOS device currently made is running on Apple designed chips.
btian 8y ago
But TSMC has demonstrated many times that they can make chips at scale. I don't see why they would fail this time.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- abfan1127 8y ago
  TSMC can run the masks, but if the design is not sound, then it doesn't matter how good the transistors are. Power islands, clock domain crossings, proper DFT, DFM, etc. are all needed to get a good design.
Nokinside 8y ago
Intel is microarchitecture + fab corporation. They do it all. 1. TSMC (also GlobalFoundries) is fab only. They design the node for the process and way to fabricate it. 2. Then ARM joins with TSMC to develop the high performance microarchitecture for their processor design for TSMC's process. 3. Then ARM licenses the microarchitecture designed for the new processes to Amazon, Apple, Qualcomm who develop their own variants. Most of the the prosessor microarchitecture is the same for the same manufacturing process. As a result, costs are shared for large degree. Intel may still some scale advantages from integrated approach but not as much as you might think.
- dnautics 8y ago
  My personal suspicion is that the integrated approach can eventually be a liability. If you have an integrated process/design house, process can count on design to work around its shortcomings and failures. By contrast, if you are process only, and multiple firms make designs for the process, you have to make your process robust, which means that your process staff is ready and has good practices down when it's time to shrink. ^^ Note that this is entirely baseless speculation.
  - Nokinside 8y ago
    Intel has always been a process first, design second company. The company was founded by physicists and chemists. Their process has always been the best in the world until just recently. Intel brings in or buys design talent when needed, but their R&D in process technology is their strongest suit even today.
    - stcredzero 8y ago
      Intel has always been a process first, design second company. The company was founded by physicists and chemists. Their process has always been the best in the world until just recently. So they had a particular advantage, and exploited the heck out of it, but now the potency of that advantage is largely gone?
      - n-gatedotcom 8y ago
        I don't know what country you're in but in cricket there's a concept of innings and scoring runs. There's this dude who averaged nearly a 100 in every innings, most others average 50. Now think of the situation as him scoring a few knots. Is he old and retiring? Or is this just a slump in form? Nobody knows! I worked for a design team and we were proud of our material engineers.
        stcredzero 8y ago
        Back in about 1996, most of the profs were going on about how x86 would crumble under the weight of the ISA, and RISC was the future. One of my profs knew people at Intel, and talked of a roadmap they had for kicking butt for the next dozen years. Turns out, the road map was more or less right. Is there more roadmap?
whynotminot 8y ago
Do you realize how many devices Apple sells a year? I think they've figured out the scale thing ok.
product50 8y ago
This is what Intel supporters always say till the time everyone builds those chips and there is no market left for Intel at all. It is just so sad that Intel, which had such a ferocious lead and was on the cutting edge of processor design/manufacturing, is now dying from a thousand cuts. Just look at the industry - everyone who is a major player in cloud, AI, or mobile (Apple, Huawei, & Samsung) are now in the chip business themselves. How will Intel grow? And where would this so called scale advantage come in? Wake up and smell the coffee.
- Brybry 8y ago
  How is Intel dying? Losing a near monopoly is a far cry from dying. And Amazon's Graviton/armv8 chips aren't going to be competitive for many workloads. If you look up benchmarks you'll see they generally aren't competitive in terms of performance[1]. They'll only be competitive in terms of cost (and, generally, not even performance/cost). I'm personally pleased that there is more competition but I find that saying Intel is dying to be silly. [1] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ec2-graviton-performance&num=2 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ec2-grav...
  - rbanffy 8y ago
    And it sure doesn't help that Amazon won't be selling desktop PCs or on-prem servers anytime soon.
    - Rafuino 8y ago
      Well, they did announce Amazon Outpost as well...
electrograv 8y ago
> It's hard to see Amazon transitioning their AWS machines to Amazon built chips As a strategic move, this makes a lot of sense for Amazon. Moreover, Amazon is a company known for excellence in a diverse set of disciplines, and TSMC has an excellent reputation for delivering state-of-the-art CPUs at scale — yet you are here to doubt they can pull it off, despite providing no evidence or rationale for your position? The burden of proof is on you to justify your pessimism. If you have evidence for your claim that Amazon + TSMC will have problems scaling, please provide it.
- jawnv6 8y ago
  how many amazon customers have they migrated to their existing ARM solutions? like that's the bit that's missing, the servers sitting on a rack are meaningless without ARM customers, and amazon chips not existing didn't somehow prevent the demand. they sell arm compute now and it's a paltry fraction of the whole. pretending it's about TSMC scaling is ridiculous.
JohnJamesRambo 8y ago
Delivering almost any package to my house in two days at scale seems a lot harder than making chips at scale and they did that already.
- evancox100 8y ago
  Unfortunately I think making cutting edge chips is harder these days. Just going on cost, the most expensive Amazon fulfillment center comes in at $200 million, the most expensive fab is $14 billion, from Samsung, with word of a $20 billion fab coming from TSMC.
bitmapbrother 8y ago
>Mike Tyson said: "Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face." Mike Tyson actually said "Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth."
askafriend 8y ago
Apple sold 217 MILLION iPhones in just 2017 alone. That's a number that doesn't include iPad, Apple Watch, HomePod, or Macs - all of which have custom Apple silicon in them. I think you're severely underestimating Apple here.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  There are lots of countries around the world where common people hardly get to see an Apple device on the wild.
  - acdha 8y ago
    There are lots of places where you rarely see PCs, too, but that doesn’t mean that Intel and AMD don’t sell a lot of chips. 200M per year is well into the economies of scale range.
  - askafriend 8y ago
    That has nothing at all to do with the original point, or even my point.
marcosdumay 8y ago
> Everyone wants to make their own chips until they have to do so at scale Isn't it exactly the other way around?

jimbokun 8y ago

But these companies don't really make their own chips at scale, they just make their own chip designs, then contract out to a fab to actually manufacture them. And Apple is already at an incredible scale, considering every iOS device currently made is running on Apple designed chips.

btian 8y ago

But TSMC has demonstrated many times that they can make chips at scale. I don't see why they would fail this time.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
abfan1127 8y ago
TSMC can run the masks, but if the design is not sound, then it doesn't matter how good the transistors are. Power islands, clock domain crossings, proper DFT, DFM, etc. are all needed to get a good design.

Nokinside 8y ago

Intel is microarchitecture + fab corporation. They do it all. 1. TSMC (also GlobalFoundries) is fab only. They design the node for the process and way to fabricate it. 2. Then ARM joins with TSMC to develop the high performance microarchitecture for their processor design for TSMC's process. 3. Then ARM licenses the microarchitecture designed for the new processes to Amazon, Apple, Qualcomm who develop their own variants. Most of the the prosessor microarchitecture is the same for the same manufacturing process. As a result, costs are shared for large degree. Intel may still some scale advantages from integrated approach but not as much as you might think.

dnautics 8y ago
My personal suspicion is that the integrated approach can eventually be a liability. If you have an integrated process/design house, process can count on design to work around its shortcomings and failures. By contrast, if you are process only, and multiple firms make designs for the process, you have to make your process robust, which means that your process staff is ready and has good practices down when it's time to shrink. ^^ Note that this is entirely baseless speculation.
- Nokinside 8y ago
  Intel has always been a process first, design second company. The company was founded by physicists and chemists. Their process has always been the best in the world until just recently. Intel brings in or buys design talent when needed, but their R&D in process technology is their strongest suit even today.
  - stcredzero 8y ago
    Intel has always been a process first, design second company. The company was founded by physicists and chemists. Their process has always been the best in the world until just recently. So they had a particular advantage, and exploited the heck out of it, but now the potency of that advantage is largely gone?
    - n-gatedotcom 8y ago
      I don't know what country you're in but in cricket there's a concept of innings and scoring runs. There's this dude who averaged nearly a 100 in every innings, most others average 50. Now think of the situation as him scoring a few knots. Is he old and retiring? Or is this just a slump in form? Nobody knows! I worked for a design team and we were proud of our material engineers.
      - stcredzero 8y ago
        Back in about 1996, most of the profs were going on about how x86 would crumble under the weight of the ISA, and RISC was the future. One of my profs knew people at Intel, and talked of a roadmap they had for kicking butt for the next dozen years. Turns out, the road map was more or less right. Is there more roadmap?

whynotminot 8y ago

Do you realize how many devices Apple sells a year? I think they've figured out the scale thing ok.

product50 8y ago

This is what Intel supporters always say till the time everyone builds those chips and there is no market left for Intel at all. It is just so sad that Intel, which had such a ferocious lead and was on the cutting edge of processor design/manufacturing, is now dying from a thousand cuts. Just look at the industry - everyone who is a major player in cloud, AI, or mobile (Apple, Huawei, & Samsung) are now in the chip business themselves. How will Intel grow? And where would this so called scale advantage come in? Wake up and smell the coffee.

Brybry 8y ago
How is Intel dying? Losing a near monopoly is a far cry from dying. And Amazon's Graviton/armv8 chips aren't going to be competitive for many workloads. If you look up benchmarks you'll see they generally aren't competitive in terms of performance[1]. They'll only be competitive in terms of cost (and, generally, not even performance/cost). I'm personally pleased that there is more competition but I find that saying Intel is dying to be silly. [1] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ec2-graviton-performance&num=2 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ec2-grav...
- rbanffy 8y ago
  And it sure doesn't help that Amazon won't be selling desktop PCs or on-prem servers anytime soon.
  - Rafuino 8y ago
    Well, they did announce Amazon Outpost as well...

electrograv 8y ago

> It's hard to see Amazon transitioning their AWS machines to Amazon built chips As a strategic move, this makes a lot of sense for Amazon. Moreover, Amazon is a company known for excellence in a diverse set of disciplines, and TSMC has an excellent reputation for delivering state-of-the-art CPUs at scale — yet you are here to doubt they can pull it off, despite providing no evidence or rationale for your position? The burden of proof is on you to justify your pessimism. If you have evidence for your claim that Amazon + TSMC will have problems scaling, please provide it.

jawnv6 8y ago
how many amazon customers have they migrated to their existing ARM solutions? like that's the bit that's missing, the servers sitting on a rack are meaningless without ARM customers, and amazon chips not existing didn't somehow prevent the demand. they sell arm compute now and it's a paltry fraction of the whole. pretending it's about TSMC scaling is ridiculous.

JohnJamesRambo 8y ago

Delivering almost any package to my house in two days at scale seems a lot harder than making chips at scale and they did that already.

evancox100 8y ago
Unfortunately I think making cutting edge chips is harder these days. Just going on cost, the most expensive Amazon fulfillment center comes in at $200 million, the most expensive fab is $14 billion, from Samsung, with word of a $20 billion fab coming from TSMC.

bitmapbrother 8y ago

>Mike Tyson said: "Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face." Mike Tyson actually said "Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth."

askafriend 8y ago

Apple sold 217 MILLION iPhones in just 2017 alone. That's a number that doesn't include iPad, Apple Watch, HomePod, or Macs - all of which have custom Apple silicon in them. I think you're severely underestimating Apple here.

pjmlp 8y ago
There are lots of countries around the world where common people hardly get to see an Apple device on the wild.
- acdha 8y ago
  There are lots of places where you rarely see PCs, too, but that doesn’t mean that Intel and AMD don’t sell a lot of chips. 200M per year is well into the economies of scale range.
- askafriend 8y ago
  That has nothing at all to do with the original point, or even my point.

marcosdumay 8y ago

> Everyone wants to make their own chips until they have to do so at scale Isn't it exactly the other way around?