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Not sure if these numbers can believed, but apparently a 300mm wafer at the 5nm node costs about $17000 for TSMC to process https://www.tomshardware.com/news/t
by smiley1437 5y ago
Not sure if these numbers can believed, but apparently a 300mm wafer at the 5nm node costs about $17000 for TSMC to process
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/tsmcs-wafer-prices-revealed-300mm-wafer-at-5nm-is-nearly-dollar17000 https://www.tomshardware.com/news/tsmcs-wafer-prices-reveale...
Since the M1 is 120 mm2 and a 300mm wafer is about 70695 mm2, you could theoretically fit 589 M1 chips on a wafer.
Subtract the chips lost at the edge and other flaws, you might be able to get 500 M1 off a wafer? (I know nothing about what would be a reasonable yield but I'm pretty sure a chip won't work if part of it is missing)
Anyways, that would be $17000/500, or $34 per M1 chip - based just on area and ignoring other processing costs.
- hajile 5y agoThe M1 Max is slightly off-square and 432mm^2. 19.1 x 22.6 seems like a decent fit. TSMC has stated that N7 defect density was 0.09 a year ago or so. They have also since stated that N5 defect density was lower than N7. Let's plug that in here https://caly-technologies.com/die-yield-calculator/ https://caly-technologies.com/die-yield-calculator/ If we go with a defect density of 0.07, that's 94 good dies and 32 harvest dies. At 0.08, it's 90 and 36 respectively. If we put that at 120 dies per wafer and $17,000 per wafer, that's just $141 per chip. That's probably WAAAYY less than they are paying for the i9 chips in their 2019 Macbook Pros. For comparison, AMD's 6900 GPU die is 519mm^2 and Nvidia's 3080 is 628mm^2. Both are massively more expensive to produce.
- smiley1437 5y agothanks for the link to the die yield calculator, very handy! And I agree - Apple making their own chips is sure looking good for their bottom line vs buying from Intel