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>They will need to migrate to industry standard tools for foundry customers anyway. foundry is about trust. lets say AMD want to use Intel foundry, how can you

>They will need to migrate to industry standard tools for foundry customers anyway. foundry is about trust. lets say AMD want to use Intel foundry, how can you be sure the Intel's design side won't take a peek at AMD's x86 design. your fabless customers spend million on design and their design is their life blood. how they going to trust you if you also sell semis. example: Samsung used to make chip for iphone. Apple ditched them as soon as Samsung compete with Apple w/its own smartphone. TSMC have over 50% of the market share because they only do one thing and one thing only.

prewett 5y ago
Intel can already peak at AMD's designs, just take the cover off and dissolve off the layers one by one. It's probably about as helpful getting your competitor's source code; figuring out what's going on probably takes longer than figuring out how to do it yourself. Maybe worse, since everything is so low-level in hardware, it'd make assembly look like a high-level language. I'm no hardware designer, but I expect that the results of tape-out are roughly the same as the results of etching off the layers: they need to create masks for each layer, specify the composition of the layer, etc. And then after understanding it, you still have to implement it and get started fabbing it. So I'm not sure that fabbing your competitor's product is a huge risk. I think Apple stopping using Samsung is more related to Apple's higher-level issues: why do business with someone you accuse of violating your design patents. Not because you think they'll copy your IP, but out of principle. There's no IP-related reason Apple needed to stop buying screens from Samsung; Apple has never manufactured screens.
- e4e78a06 5y ago
  > example: Samsung used to make chip for iphone. Apple ditched them as soon as Samsung compete with Apple w/its own smartphone. Apple was dual sourcing as recently as the A9 on 14nm. The reason they stopped was because Samsung fell behind the leading edge in performance and efficiency.

prewett 5y ago

Intel can already peak at AMD's designs, just take the cover off and dissolve off the layers one by one. It's probably about as helpful getting your competitor's source code; figuring out what's going on probably takes longer than figuring out how to do it yourself. Maybe worse, since everything is so low-level in hardware, it'd make assembly look like a high-level language. I'm no hardware designer, but I expect that the results of tape-out are roughly the same as the results of etching off the layers: they need to create masks for each layer, specify the composition of the layer, etc. And then after understanding it, you still have to implement it and get started fabbing it. So I'm not sure that fabbing your competitor's product is a huge risk. I think Apple stopping using Samsung is more related to Apple's higher-level issues: why do business with someone you accuse of violating your design patents. Not because you think they'll copy your IP, but out of principle. There's no IP-related reason Apple needed to stop buying screens from Samsung; Apple has never manufactured screens.

e4e78a06 5y ago
> example: Samsung used to make chip for iphone. Apple ditched them as soon as Samsung compete with Apple w/its own smartphone. Apple was dual sourcing as recently as the A9 on 14nm. The reason they stopped was because Samsung fell behind the leading edge in performance and efficiency.