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I am pleased TSMC is moving the industry forward, but I fear we are moving from an Intel monopoly to a TSMC monopoly. As a consumer the result will be the same.
by teruakohatu 6y ago
I am pleased TSMC is moving the industry forward, but I fear we are moving from an Intel monopoly to a TSMC monopoly. As a consumer the result will be the same.
- legulere 6y agoIt's easier to switch from one fab to another than from x86 to another cpu architecture.
- Koshkin 6y agoLinux has done it.
- ragebol 6y agoLinux is not tied to a single architecture. Not sure if it ever has been, really.
- pedrocr 6y agoFrom the original announcement email by Linus: > It is NOT protable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that's all I have :-(. And he meant it too, as later in the thread when someone says they don't believe him about the non-portability: > Simply, I'd say that porting is impossible. It's mostly in C, but most people wouldn't call what I write C. It uses every conceivable feature of the 386 I could find, as it was also a project to teach me about the 386. As already mentioned, it uses a MMU, for both paging (not to disk yet) and segmentation. It's the segmentation that makes it REALLY 386 dependent (every task has a 64Mb segment for code & data - max 64 tasks in 4Gb. Anybody who needs more than 64Mb/task - tough cookies). This is a historical curiosity of course. The Linux kernel supports more architectures than anything else.
- close04 6y ago> This is a historical curiosity of course. Mostly because of the slow adoption which allowed a lot of flexibility. It's much easier to move around when you don't have the baggage of millions of users and applications to consider. Even Windows ran on plenty of non-x86 architectures usually because they got in on the ground floor before there was baggage to migrate. And even now you can run it on ARM but without much traction because people hate losing functionality.
- Macha 6y agoWas there a effort to make it cross platform, or just the tech that looked 386 only at the time like a MMU becoming more widespread (I remember a fail0verflow talk on ps4 linux a while back where they mentioned a MMU and clock as requirements to port Linux to an architecture)?
- monocasa 6y agoMMU is less of a requirement these days, since the uclinux patches were upstreamed. And it was ported to Alpha early on to be ported to a very 'not 386' style architecture. Before that it was very x86 specific.
- Koshkin 6y agoAmazingly enough, it only took 4 years from its birth for Linux to get ported to DEC Alpha and Sun SPARC. Talk about going viral!
- close04 6y agoLinux has supported a lot of CPU architectures pretty much from childhood but never had any legacy to carry over. Legacy is the real killer when talking about such migrations and the bigger the footprint with consumers, the bigger the legacy. Linux never had a significant footprint in any long existing segment at the time they migrated from one architecture to another, especially not in a consumer one. Take Apple and their move from 68K to PPC to x86 to ARM.
- throwaway8941 6y agoYet another reason to use FOSS as much as physically possible.
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- Koshkin 6y agoAt the hardware level, I wonder why, though - don't the modern x86 CPUs have a completely different internal architecture anyway?
- amelius 6y agoBecause to change to another fab you "just" have to get a single transistor (or a few devices) working (and duplicate that a billion times). Changing to another ISA requires a lot of redesign.
- iagovar 6y agoYeah, this situation seems quite worrying. It was already worrying with only two x86 companies (VIA is leagues behind). It would also be nice to have some capable foundries in Europe, like STM or Infineon. Just in case.
- NicoJuicy 6y agoASML?
- ragebol 6y agoASML is not a foundry. ASML makes (part of) the machines that make up a foundry.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jp555 6y agojust "machines", or a key EUV machine that only ASML makes?
- Keyframe 6y agoAlso, Intel owns like 15% of ASML.
- tooltalk 6y agoWell, not quite. All foundry players, eg, TSMC, Intel, and Samsung invested heavily in ASML in effort to jumpstart EUV development. They significantly reduced their financial stakes to a low single digit since as the tech matured. https://www.eetimes.com/intel-again-cuts-stake-in-asml/# https://www.eetimes.com/intel-again-cuts-stake-in-asml/#
- bitL 6y agoWas Dresden GF foundry shut down?
- pabs3 6y agoThe ASML monopoly is even more worrying.
- cma 6y agoIntel owns a fifth of ASML.
- ragebol 6y agoWhat would it take to break that monopoly (technology-wise, not politically like eg. the big oil companies were a century ago)? ASML bet on EUV and finally made it work well enough.
- pabs3 6y agoConvince the fabs to buy more from ASML's sole competitor, which I hear is kept alive just in case.
- Taniwha 6y agoProbably the best way to break that monopoly would be to deny their machines to a largish country that would be willing to fund its own domestic competitor ..... but why on earth would that happen?
- vladimirralev 6y agoLike China https://www.reuters.com/article/us-asml-holding-usa-china-insight/trump-administration-pressed-dutch-hard-to-cancel-china-chip-equipment-sale-sources-idUSKBN1Z50HN https://www.reuters.com/article/us-asml-holding-usa-china-in...
- Taniwha 6y agoYeah, well, that was my point - the US government's current bad behaviour will just create a stronger competitor - we'll all probably benefit as a result
- twic 6y ago
- icefo 6y agoAs a customer I'm somewhat happy Intel finally pays for their anticompetitves practices (karma wise) but at the same time I'm worried about the US losing its advantage in chip manufacturing. Do we know what really went wrong at Intel ? I know they made a big bet on a technology that didn't pay off. Is it that they just had no competition for years and became complacent ? I also wonder how much TSMC will ask Intel to split the company to ensure that their process does not leak to the Intel side. There is probably lots of interesting details about what works you can obtain if you work closely with TSMC engineers.
- _Understated_ 6y ago> Do we know what really went wrong at Intel? Now this doesn't come from any position of authority or knowledge of the industry but if I had to guess I'd say their problem has been twofold: shareholder value and lack of competition. Intel, for years, has been the standard choice for the datacenter: AMD never really had a look in there. As a result, Intel has still been making tons of money for years and, by extension, the shareholders have also been making it too so there hasn't been any real reason to take too many risks or change direction especially as AMD was a fraction of the size. AMD have only just recently (last couple of years) been an actual, quantifiable, threat to them so, if I had to guess, Intel are in a bit of a panic as the world makes a slow shift to AMD (possibly ARM and more specialized chips too!). I can imagine that the lead time for chip designs is measured in years so Intel can't just make a massive direction change overnight, hence the reason to ask for external help. Time will tell if this turns out to be a brilliant move for Intel...
- jjoonathan 6y agoThat's the opposite of what I'm hearing, which is that Intel placed a large bet on a risky basket of technologies in order to stay ahead (specifically cobalt wiring and contact-over-active-gate) and burned enough time trying to get them working that TSMC was able to get their own relatively safe basket of technologies working in the meantime.
- klelatti 6y ago
- xoa 6y ago>As a consumer the result will be the same. I don't think this is correct, because TSMC isn't so vertically integrated. There is not a "TSMC CPU" or GPU per se, they're providing a service to other businesses, not in direct competition with every other design. That doesn't mean there couldn't potentially be adverse results, but if so they'll probably be different adverse results since TSMC is entering more into a "basic infrastructure" role vs B2C. Chip design matters a lot to ultimate performance/efficiency, and fabless has promoted rather then reduced competition there. Their customers also have very deep pockets themselves, and TSMC has a lot to gain from keeping demand high with improvements. In fact a potentially more worrisome aspect then any immediate competition threat is the sheer reduction in redundancy of critical production (as we've seen with hard drives and NAND production for example). TSMC has four of their 300mm gigafabs in Taiwan and a 5th in construction, and another four 200mm fabs. They've got a single 300m in China, and that's it for that size. They've got a 200mm in China, one in the US, and one in Singapore. A lot of capacity is in one small island. Taiwan is on the ocean around the ring of fire. I know TSMC has of course done major disaster prep, but it's not impossible for the world to throw curveballs. Taiwan has had earthquakes in the last 100-someodd years up to magnitude 8.3, but only 7s for the last 50+ (the biggest more recent one for them I think was 1999). Of course construction codes (and major manufacturers even more so) take earthquake resistance into account. But what if there was a 9er and a typhoon say? And of course there is geopolitics too, China has made no secret of its desire to retake Taiwan but haven't been taking recent actions to make it attractive and peaceful. And of course the very presence of so much critical-to-US production there enhances the risk (hope?) that yes, the US will in fact honor its defense agreement and cause the whole thing to get very hot. So not that other fabs wouldn't be good for competition reasons too, but redundancy may be valuable in and of itself. However, if so it's not something the market can likely provide, the market tends to optimize out that kind of redundancy since it is by definition not efficient. Fabs represent enormous capital expenditure with long lead times that requires extremely large scale to operate profitably, so governments would probably have to step up and flat out pay for redundant capacity. And arguably should, but even at the government level $10-20b isn't nothing.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]