15 ms·

> But the logical endpoint of the relentless rise in manufacturing costs is that, at some point, one company, in all likelihood TSMC, could be the last advanced

> But the logical endpoint of the relentless rise in manufacturing costs is that, at some point, one company, in all likelihood TSMC, could be the last advanced fab standing. Most established, capital-intensive markets are winner-take-all, where a few big players control the bulk of the market. And they usually remain at the top of the market until some fundamental paradigm shift occurs that causes the market to shrink. TSMC will be top dog for a while, until something happens that causes the market for custom made silicon to collapse. Just like Intel was top dog until something came along to replace the market for x86. Or like Microsoft was King Dingaling until people moved to mobile computing.

ianai 6y ago
Or a third party decides to enter the market and go for position number 2. Apple could probably do it with the cash they roll - but they don't want to do so. A country could. It sure seems like chips are important enough to warrant a national supply - so international pressures can't weigh on you politically through chip supply.
- na85 6y ago
  I've long held the opinion that chip making will eventually go the route of uranium refining and become national strategic capabilities that all great powers will pursue. I'm continually surprised that this doesn't seem to be taking place outside th defence sector.
  - ianai 6y ago
    Honestly I’d blame governments being staffed by people who make their money in more traditional areas. Aka we need a generational change.
  - bluGill 6y ago
    Chip making is still advancing too fast for that. If the current processes are about the limit of physics, then eventually yes. Right now it is better to hope your country just does the next leapfrog of technology.
    - ianai 6y ago
      The TSMC model seems appropriate: Don't specialize in the design. Focus on the hardware and take designs from customers.
  - mywittyname 6y ago
    This is the case, actually. It's just this article is talking about chip production at the bleeding edge instead of the pedestrian chips used in the bulk of electronic devices. The boring chips made for use in American military equipment are largely produced domestically.
    - baybal2 6y ago
      Unfortunately not. Maybe the "family jewels" level secret ICs which we don't even know about, but at least ICs for munitions been all Taiwanese for at least 20 years.
- simonh 6y ago
  I don't think Apple will get into chips for several reasons, but the main one is sunsetting old fabs. Apple wants only the best and shiniest process for their chips, but any fab inevitably gets overtaken by new technology. What to do with the ageing fabs? Apple would have no use for them, so long term it makes no sense. Better to capitalise TSMC with long term contracts and lock in access to capacity on the best nodes.
noizejoy 6y ago
... and IBM was King Dingaling until people moved to desktop computing p.s. and thus we have doxxed ourselves just a little bit: age group :-)
- 2sk21 6y ago
  You're correct - at one point in the late 70s or even the early 80s, IBM was the biggest chip manufacturer in the world but all of the produced chips were used in their own products.
  - noizejoy 6y ago
    there was even a kind of "cloud computing": "time share computing"[0], since mainframe computers were financially our of reach for anyone but the very largest companies. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-sharing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-sharing
  - amelius 6y ago
    > but all of the produced chips were used in their own products. Sounds like something Apple would do.
    - 2sk21 6y ago
      IBM was _the_ prototypical vertically oriented company back in the late 70s before the PC - manufacture chips, build boards, build computers ranging from desktop to mainframes, develop the OS, provide finance for customers, offer integration services. Apple is nothing compared to IBM in its heyday. When I joined IBM in 1991, it was still a very inwardly focused company. Although it was clear that things were going to be changing rapidly in the industry, it was hard to get employees to understand how precarious things were - until the big layoffs of the mid 90s.
      - noizejoy 6y ago
        ... and Tim Cook spent 12 years with IBM around the time when you joined.
singhrac 6y ago
This is too aggressive a take. Yes, TSMC is 50% of all EUV production right now. But it's only 50%. Samsung has huge resources and is on track to build a 3nm process by 2022/2023, which is not very far behind TSMC (though I don't know if their 3nm processes compare). Besides just diversifying global chip production, Samsung has the (geopolitical) benefit of being in a country with large US bases and plenty of internal demand for their chips (if the Exynos designers can produce something exceptional).
- NonEUCitizen 6y ago
  The internal demand makes Samsung a competitor with its customers. TSMC does not have a similar conflict of interest.
heimatau 6y ago
> TSMC will be top dog for a while, until something happens that causes the market for custom made silicon to collapse. Contrary to many popular technological opinions, Moore's Law will be dead for a while. We're nearly at our physical limits. When this is ceiling is hit, we'll start seeing numerous more competition enter the fray. This is because the research part will be too large for one company to innovate itself out of (TSMC will be the first to hit the ceiling and the competition will reach the same ceiling in a short time. Together, they may advance our scientific understanding but I think governments would need to get aggressively involved). This is afundamental scientific limitation. There is no emerging research that will overcome this problem (zero theoretical research that can be used for engineering the manufacturing needed for the next advancements). 3D transistors are next but that's not growth at an exponential curve. We're looking at a linear growth future for a while. P.S. I'm 33 and I expect within the next 6-15 years that we'll hit this limit and be at this limit for most of my working career unless we start seeing some seriously massive investment to unearth more advanced physics that we can implement at the pico-level. If you disagree, I'd love to hear what you think that will allow Moore to continue because I've read numerous studies and essentially all have zero tangible implementations.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- vlovich123 6y ago
  It will be “Moore” if you talk about “improving performance” (not that the law actually is) as vendors start integrating more and more custom silicon to accelerate various things (eg neural engines, more dsps, etc). So you may still see computers get faster and faster even though it’s not the CPU itself being the one getting faster. That being said cpu design isn’t dead. It’s just more expensive for companies than the traditional “well a new process node will fix it” like the work Apple did with the M1 (which they took advantage of the newer process mode to really put the nail in the coffin).
- josephg 6y ago
  As a software engineer this feels like heresy, but I can't wait for the day computers stop getting faster. Shoddy software design has been bailed out time and time again by Moore's law. I'm excited by the prospect of a software industry where "tell the client to buy a faster computer" is no longer an acceptable excuse. For example, there's room for a clean, native cross-platform application toolkit that does everything that electron does. But we don't have that. Instead application developers use electron (trading my CPU & RAM for their time). And people get angry at Apple for "only" shipping 16 gigabytes of RAM in their computers rather than angry at lazy app developers. And we don't invest in the tooling we'd need to actually fix the problem. (In this case, Electron but small and native). Another example - as an industry we know how to make fast compilers (eg Go, Jai, V8, LuaJIT, etc). But instead most new languages (rust, pony, zig, etc) are built on top of LLVM. LLVM used to be super fast - but now even in debug mode its sluggish. There's usually nothing wrong with old computers & phones, but we throw them out anyway because software developers buy faster computers then take shortcuts.

ianai 6y ago

Or a third party decides to enter the market and go for position number 2. Apple could probably do it with the cash they roll - but they don't want to do so. A country could. It sure seems like chips are important enough to warrant a national supply - so international pressures can't weigh on you politically through chip supply.

na85 6y ago
I've long held the opinion that chip making will eventually go the route of uranium refining and become national strategic capabilities that all great powers will pursue. I'm continually surprised that this doesn't seem to be taking place outside th defence sector.
- ianai 6y ago
  Honestly I’d blame governments being staffed by people who make their money in more traditional areas. Aka we need a generational change.
- bluGill 6y ago
  Chip making is still advancing too fast for that. If the current processes are about the limit of physics, then eventually yes. Right now it is better to hope your country just does the next leapfrog of technology.
  - ianai 6y ago
    The TSMC model seems appropriate: Don't specialize in the design. Focus on the hardware and take designs from customers.
- mywittyname 6y ago
  This is the case, actually. It's just this article is talking about chip production at the bleeding edge instead of the pedestrian chips used in the bulk of electronic devices. The boring chips made for use in American military equipment are largely produced domestically.
  - baybal2 6y ago
    Unfortunately not. Maybe the "family jewels" level secret ICs which we don't even know about, but at least ICs for munitions been all Taiwanese for at least 20 years.
simonh 6y ago
I don't think Apple will get into chips for several reasons, but the main one is sunsetting old fabs. Apple wants only the best and shiniest process for their chips, but any fab inevitably gets overtaken by new technology. What to do with the ageing fabs? Apple would have no use for them, so long term it makes no sense. Better to capitalise TSMC with long term contracts and lock in access to capacity on the best nodes.

noizejoy 6y ago

... and IBM was King Dingaling until people moved to desktop computing p.s. and thus we have doxxed ourselves just a little bit: age group :-)

2sk21 6y ago
You're correct - at one point in the late 70s or even the early 80s, IBM was the biggest chip manufacturer in the world but all of the produced chips were used in their own products.
- noizejoy 6y ago
  there was even a kind of "cloud computing": "time share computing"[0], since mainframe computers were financially our of reach for anyone but the very largest companies. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-sharing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-sharing
- amelius 6y ago
  > but all of the produced chips were used in their own products. Sounds like something Apple would do.
  - 2sk21 6y ago
    IBM was _the_ prototypical vertically oriented company back in the late 70s before the PC - manufacture chips, build boards, build computers ranging from desktop to mainframes, develop the OS, provide finance for customers, offer integration services. Apple is nothing compared to IBM in its heyday. When I joined IBM in 1991, it was still a very inwardly focused company. Although it was clear that things were going to be changing rapidly in the industry, it was hard to get employees to understand how precarious things were - until the big layoffs of the mid 90s.
    - noizejoy 6y ago
      ... and Tim Cook spent 12 years with IBM around the time when you joined.

singhrac 6y ago

This is too aggressive a take. Yes, TSMC is 50% of all EUV production right now. But it's only 50%. Samsung has huge resources and is on track to build a 3nm process by 2022/2023, which is not very far behind TSMC (though I don't know if their 3nm processes compare). Besides just diversifying global chip production, Samsung has the (geopolitical) benefit of being in a country with large US bases and plenty of internal demand for their chips (if the Exynos designers can produce something exceptional).

NonEUCitizen 6y ago
The internal demand makes Samsung a competitor with its customers. TSMC does not have a similar conflict of interest.

heimatau 6y ago

> TSMC will be top dog for a while, until something happens that causes the market for custom made silicon to collapse. Contrary to many popular technological opinions, Moore's Law will be dead for a while. We're nearly at our physical limits. When this is ceiling is hit, we'll start seeing numerous more competition enter the fray. This is because the research part will be too large for one company to innovate itself out of (TSMC will be the first to hit the ceiling and the competition will reach the same ceiling in a short time. Together, they may advance our scientific understanding but I think governments would need to get aggressively involved). This is afundamental scientific limitation. There is no emerging research that will overcome this problem (zero theoretical research that can be used for engineering the manufacturing needed for the next advancements). 3D transistors are next but that's not growth at an exponential curve. We're looking at a linear growth future for a while. P.S. I'm 33 and I expect within the next 6-15 years that we'll hit this limit and be at this limit for most of my working career unless we start seeing some seriously massive investment to unearth more advanced physics that we can implement at the pico-level. If you disagree, I'd love to hear what you think that will allow Moore to continue because I've read numerous studies and essentially all have zero tangible implementations.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
vlovich123 6y ago
It will be “Moore” if you talk about “improving performance” (not that the law actually is) as vendors start integrating more and more custom silicon to accelerate various things (eg neural engines, more dsps, etc). So you may still see computers get faster and faster even though it’s not the CPU itself being the one getting faster. That being said cpu design isn’t dead. It’s just more expensive for companies than the traditional “well a new process node will fix it” like the work Apple did with the M1 (which they took advantage of the newer process mode to really put the nail in the coffin).
josephg 6y ago
As a software engineer this feels like heresy, but I can't wait for the day computers stop getting faster. Shoddy software design has been bailed out time and time again by Moore's law. I'm excited by the prospect of a software industry where "tell the client to buy a faster computer" is no longer an acceptable excuse. For example, there's room for a clean, native cross-platform application toolkit that does everything that electron does. But we don't have that. Instead application developers use electron (trading my CPU & RAM for their time). And people get angry at Apple for "only" shipping 16 gigabytes of RAM in their computers rather than angry at lazy app developers. And we don't invest in the tooling we'd need to actually fix the problem. (In this case, Electron but small and native). Another example - as an industry we know how to make fast compilers (eg Go, Jai, V8, LuaJIT, etc). But instead most new languages (rust, pony, zig, etc) are built on top of LLVM. LLVM used to be super fast - but now even in debug mode its sluggish. There's usually nothing wrong with old computers & phones, but we throw them out anyway because software developers buy faster computers then take shortcuts.