3 ms·

145mm is only the machine cost. Then there is people, raw materials, IP, design, technology, software, maintenance, repair, upgrade, integrating, licensing, pow

145mm is only the machine cost. Then there is people, raw materials, IP, design, technology, software, maintenance, repair, upgrade, integrating, licensing, power, much more. I'm guessing the split here is 20/80. 145mm is the machine cost, and then it takes 800mm or more over the lifetime. That's a billion dollars right there. A billion dollars revenue is unicorn level. But here we're talking just about putting aside a billion in operational expense just for the chip. Then there is the cost of building the actual product on top of this. Then there is the useful life of the machine. No product wants to be on the same chip for 5 years. So they have to recoup the 1 billion fast. The only way would be to generate extra revenue out of the machine by sharing it with other companies. Ah but now you have to cater to their demands as well. Better have a profitable model around this. But well, that's what TSMC is...

jacques_chester 6y ago
As of their most recent balance sheet, Apple holds $90Bn in cash and cash-equivalent assets, plus another $100Bn in marketable securities. They could probably raise another several tens of billions of dollars with bond market issues if they wanted. If Apple goes into manufacturing their own semiconductors, they could absolutely bootstrap the whole shebang and have tens of billions of dollars left over.
fomine3 6y ago
> No product wants to be on the same chip for 5 years. There are many chips stick to old process except latest performance chips like smartphone SoC, GPU, TPU.