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The fab business is very sensitive to scale, with enough money and discipline you can mostly make your own luck. TSMC does way more volume than Intel and they h
by hedgehog 4y ago
The fab business is very sensitive to scale, with enough money and discipline you can mostly make your own luck. TSMC does way more volume than Intel and they have a very aggressive customer (Apple) that can help work out early quirks and guarantee orders on new nodes before they're economical for anyone else. I don't know what a turn around might look like but it's a tough problem.
- pedrocr 4y ago> TSMC does way more volume than Intel Do you have a source for this? The only one I found says Intel is 2x TSMC: https://www.statista.com/statistics/883715/microprocessor-market-share-worldwide-by-vendor/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/883715/microprocessor-ma...
- sct202 4y agoThat is revenue based, and not based who makes the chips. In the chart Nvidia, Broadcom and Qualcomm are all fabless (outsourced production) and their chips are made by TSMC, Samsung, or other foundries. By wafers produced (including memory), TSMC is 2nd and Intel is 6th. TSMC is 2x the 5th placed company on the table, so Intel is even smaller than that. https://www.eetimes.com/chipmakers-increase-share-of-global-ic-wafer-capacity-to-57/ https://www.eetimes.com/chipmakers-increase-share-of-global-...
- pedrocr 4y agoBy wafer doesn't sound like the correct comparison as we mostly care about top nodes for this. Revenue actually sounds better to correct for that. Your link also shows that Intel sells their old nodes to others further skewing the per-wafer comparison. Wafers at 14nm or better would probably be a good metric for who has the volume behind top nodes to then be able to stay in front. If that's TSMC by a large margin losing the mobile and GPU markets has really done a bigger number on Intel than I had assumed before.
- mymyairduster 4y agopeople buy a lot of smartphones, often