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Everybody except Intel and Samsung is screwed if TSMC stops making chips. Apple (and the rest of the mobile industry) would try to move to using Samsung's fabs

Everybody except Intel and Samsung is screwed if TSMC stops making chips. Apple (and the rest of the mobile industry) would try to move to using Samsung's fabs and Intel would go back to being the undisputed king on desktops, laptops, and servers. I think TSMC has like 2-3 times the fab capacity that Samsung does right now for modern chips, so there would be a huge chip shortage. Apple's $200 billion cash pile would come in handy when trying to buy fab capacity from Samsung so they might come out ahead of less cash-rich competitors. There would be a significant hit to processor performance. Samsung fabbed the recent Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, which has comparable single core performance to the iPhone 7's A10 fusion chip.

Tostino 4y ago
The performance of that core is not necessarily all dependent on the node... Apple have been lauded for their designs. Samsung / arm, not so much.
- kergonath 4y ago
  > Samsung / arm, not so much. I don’t think that is fair. ARM and Apple have very different objectives. Apple does not care if its CPU design division makes any money and they can get away with very large SoCs that rely on cutting edge manufacturing. ARM on the other hand needs to sell designs that manufacturers can use to make money. So there is a tendency to go towards simpler designs that are easier to manufacture. So sure, Apple has an edge in performance. But they don’t have the same business model or optimise for the same things.
florakel 4y ago
>There would be a significant hit to processor performance. You are probably right. Look at the gains Qualcomm saw by migrating from Samsung to TSMC: https://www.anandtech.com/show/17395/qualcomm-announces-snapdragon-8-gen-1-moving-to-tsmc-for-more-speed-lower-power https://www.anandtech.com/show/17395/qualcomm-announces-snap...
- 2muchcoffeeman 4y ago
  I never thought you’d get gains by simply switching vendor. 4nm to 4nm and they still saw gains.
  - terafo 4y ago
    The thing is that 4nm doesn't actually mean anything. Intel's 10nm node is mostly on par with TSMC N7 and it caused quite a bit of confusion, so Intel renamed a bit improved version(something they would call 10nm++) to Intel 7. It's all just marketing and have been for 15 years or so.
jononomo 4y ago
With $200 billion why can't apple just fabricate their own chips?

Tostino 4y ago

The performance of that core is not necessarily all dependent on the node... Apple have been lauded for their designs. Samsung / arm, not so much.

kergonath 4y ago
> Samsung / arm, not so much. I don’t think that is fair. ARM and Apple have very different objectives. Apple does not care if its CPU design division makes any money and they can get away with very large SoCs that rely on cutting edge manufacturing. ARM on the other hand needs to sell designs that manufacturers can use to make money. So there is a tendency to go towards simpler designs that are easier to manufacture. So sure, Apple has an edge in performance. But they don’t have the same business model or optimise for the same things.

florakel 4y ago

>There would be a significant hit to processor performance. You are probably right. Look at the gains Qualcomm saw by migrating from Samsung to TSMC: https://www.anandtech.com/show/17395/qualcomm-announces-snapdragon-8-gen-1-moving-to-tsmc-for-more-speed-lower-power https://www.anandtech.com/show/17395/qualcomm-announces-snap...

2muchcoffeeman 4y ago
I never thought you’d get gains by simply switching vendor. 4nm to 4nm and they still saw gains.
- terafo 4y ago
  The thing is that 4nm doesn't actually mean anything. Intel's 10nm node is mostly on par with TSMC N7 and it caused quite a bit of confusion, so Intel renamed a bit improved version(something they would call 10nm++) to Intel 7. It's all just marketing and have been for 15 years or so.

jononomo 4y ago

With $200 billion why can't apple just fabricate their own chips?