10 ms·

AMD, Intel, and Nvidia Reportedly Slash Orders with TSMC

148 points by mirzap 4y ago

j_walter 4y ago
This is all pretty accurate. The only real surprise is that 40um tech and above are still running full steam and even the 20+ year old tech has only dropped a few percent for next year.
- Veliladon 4y ago
  3D NAND, which basically underpins all of our SSD tech, is hard enough to make at 40nm. They basically have to fill a tiny hole really precisely with layers of five different materials to create a vertical stack that works. It's really hard to go down node sizes plus once you hit 28nm the price of transistors stops decreasing and starts increasing instead with 22nm and smaller.
  - wtallis 4y ago
    None of that is really relevant, because TSMC isn't in the business of making flash memory. The fab processes for logic and for flash memory are so different that there's no point to making comparisons between their respective nodes.
    - bob1029 4y ago
      I don't know about "no point to making comparisons", but they are definitely different animals. When I worked at Samsung, flash & LSI were like 2 different companies. Lots of reuse at the systems engineering level though. At a certain point of abstraction you can't tell what is on the wafer anymore so you might as well track it in the same database.
      - j_walter 4y ago
        Completely different animals. I know that when TSMC has looked at acquiring used fabs before and in at least one case because the fab was DRAM it was more costly and time consuming to convert it to Logic fab than just building a whole new fab.
  - zeusk 4y ago
    Micron, Samsung and SK Hynix are doing volume production of 1xnm QLC devices with further complexity like CuA.
  - monocasa 4y ago
    This idea that the price per transistor gets higher after 28nm needs to die. Right now the cheapest node for logic dominated chips is N6 (an optical shrink of N7). And even then, N5 is still cheaper than N10. 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...
- ilyt 4y ago
  This is entirely unsurprising if you actually look at things other than big CPU/GPU/IO. Power regulators doesn't need small transistors, it wants big nice and fat transistors. You'd get at least one of them in every device and a bunch in any bigger device. Same with any power device, LEDs, and really anything that passes some current. Any microcontroller smaller than "runs full fledged linux" often cares about cost of production first and foremost, hell, STM32 only recently [1] got on 90nm node! Interestingly enough, bigger node might get you worse uA/MHz but often lower idle current (the bigger things are the lower the leakage) so they might even be desirable. And the chip might want to have some mA current output on each pin (so it doesn't require external drivers to control stuff), which again means some transistor size in your I/O port is fixed and can't be made smaller so your savings from going to smaller process are not linear. For vast majority of non CPU/GPU chips it comes to cost to manufacture and those 20+ years old lines not only paid for themselves multiple times, they also have great yields. * [1] https://blog.st.com/stm32g0-mainstream-90-nm-mcu/ https://blog.st.com/stm32g0-mainstream-90-nm-mcu/
  - dragontamer 4y ago
    > STM32 only recently [1] got on 90nm node! STM32G0 is value-oriented. The latest-and-greatest power efficiency STM32 is the STM32U5: https://www.st.com/content/ccc/resource/sales_and_marketing/presentation/product_presentation/group1/99/af/38/36/04/39/4c/4b/microcontrollers_stm32u5_series_product_overview/files/Microcontrollers_STM32U5_Series_product_overview.pdf/jcr:content/translations/en.Microcontrollers_STM32U5_Series_product_overview.pdf https://www.st.com/content/ccc/resource/sales_and_marketing/... Which seems to be 40nm. I'm not 100% sure if the STM32U5 is the smallest node they're using. But 40nm (or better) seems like a safe bet these days.
  - Pet_Ant 4y ago
    > Power regulators doesn't need small transistors, it wants big nice and fat transistors. Is it possible to make bigger transistors using a smaller process? Just because you are using saying a 7nm process, can't you still make a transistor (like if you needed) that was the same size as it was on 90nm? I think of newer processes as merely being more precise so you could still do the old designs on them, you are just unecessarily tying up the newer machines... but concievably in the future you could just start using 5nm process to keep producing 30 nm and 90 nm chips just to consolidate production lines, non? I know nothing about this, so I'm just asking.
brink 4y ago
Can't they at least wait until we start to reliably see product on shelves?
- meltyness 4y ago
  TPUs have been all over the shelf, and adoption was snubbed. More graphics cards than ever before! Real-time raytracing available on your cell phone, laptop, and all 5 smart TVs in your home and backyard porch!! You were unable to convince your executives to adopt huggingface, IOT, and instead they opted to employ phone calls and Excel spreadsheets. You, consumer, failed to accept Stadia into your heart,... and now you shall pay for your snide indifference!!
  - walterbell 4y ago
    Where can TPUs be purchased? Vendors linked from Google Coral (https://coral.ai https://coral.ai) have been out of stock for some time.
    - meltyness 4y ago
      Colab and huggingface are fishing for customers by handing out compute time in these things for free, and getting a militia's worth of tensor-connected memory isn't too expensive if you get provisioned to spin up a p2 on EC2, or presumably azure or gcp. Of course real consumers can't buy the hardware, real consumers don't have AAA credit ratings. You can always eBay a K80 as well if your motherboard supports the >4G decoding switch, but my primary point was about the insane purchasing power that affords large CommSvc sector company the ability to crash the market for a product before anyone even has logistics in place, apparently wishing to gatekeep any applications. - Game devs haven't made any games that stress a cloud gaming environment, they didn't even push VR. - Corporate consumers are hardly adopting AI at all, because there's still barely even a workforce. - Some very vocal people find proof of work a distasteful mechanism to support logistical metacommodity growth.
- oblak 4y ago
  Maybe this isn't strictly about GPUs. Or maybe it's just FUD designed to signal that no, video cards aren't getting cheaper and they'd rather cut supply than lower their margins. Who knows with this industry.
arriu 4y ago
They are forecasting a lower demand in the short term future. I’d guess they ran the numbers and producing fewer high cost items is more cost effective for them. Unfortunately, this likely means more shortages and costs stay high for the consumer.
- sitkack 4y ago
  The fact that the market can still do this (reduce supply to operate in the high margin quadrant) is a temporary blip due to the x86 duopoly. Soon anyone will be able to supply cycles/$ at a better rate than the entrenched players.
  - cypress66 4y ago
    On the gpu side there is no "x86 duopoly" and the situation is arguably worse than cpus. So that's probably not it.
    - wlesieutre 4y ago
      Nvidia and AMD have been a GPU duopoly just as much as Intel and AMD have been for CPUs. Intel's new Arc product is the first competitor from another company in a very long time.
      - echelon 4y ago
        Nvidia has a pretty tight stranglehold on deep learning thanks to CUDA. We really need the forces that be to change this.
      - cypress66 4y ago
        But anybody's free to enter, there is no x86 IP in the way, as parent mentioned.
        sangnoir 4y ago
        From my limited outsider perspective, it appears like there are way more CPU and FPGA startups than GPU startups - why is that when GPUs seemingly have lower barriers?
satellite2 4y ago
> Slashing orders to a contract manufacturer is not trivial since fabless chip designers are obliged to procure a fixed number of wafers in certain quarters. Nevertheless, TSMC is reportedly willing to accept compensation (as it will hold wafers with chips from AMD, Intel, Nvidia, etc., before they are ready to buy them) and even renegotiate deals on long-term supply contracts (i.e., increase the number of wafers that a company is committed to buying in the future) in exchange. Sounds like it might not be such a big deal for TSMC, at least in the short term.
glass3 4y ago
> the utilization rate of TSMC's N7-capable lines will decline to around 50% in early 2023. Will that capacity be utilized by other companies? E.g. what is preventing a RISC-V company from leap-frogging the competition?
- wtallis 4y ago
  > E.g. what is preventing a RISC-V company from leap-frogging the competition? They would need to have already taped out on N7 and be ready to start mass production now. That doesn't happen overnight. Even if you have taped out a ready-to-fab design, you usually want to start small and run a few rounds of QA on small batches of chips before you start ordering enough wafers to make a dent in TSMC's schedule.
- monocasa 4y ago
  N7 is a rough node to target. You have the high capital costs for NRE being an EUV node, but N5 is supposed to be cheaper to manufacturer chips on pretty much as soon as N3 is in full swing. So those companies would probably be targeting something in the range of 14nm to 10nm in order to take advantage of the fire sale on late DUV tooling to prove that they can make a working chip to investors, and then leapfrog to N5 after the giants have jumped to N3.
barbariangrunge 4y ago
Sorry; what is tsmc? Is there a single manufacturer with all the patents that everyone relies on?
- Out_of_Characte 4y ago
  Its worse, TSMC is the single biggest semiconductor manufacturer for general logic chips. Samsung has their own fabs for ram and ssd's specialised for density. All the litography equipment they use come from a single company called ASML. They also have complete market domination for the past few generations of litography machines and are the first and only producers of EUV litography. Semiconductors are so complex and capital intensive that even a duopoly couln't balance the expense.
- b0tch7 4y ago
  If you're actually curious -- here is a 2.5hr podcast about the company's history: https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/tsmc https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/tsmc
cm2187 4y ago
Is this because of the economic slowdown as the article suggests, or simply because 2020-2021 covid lockdowns lead to a big surge in buying of computer hardware, and therefore a big drop now given that modern computers last a lot longer and everyone is equipped?
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  Maybe both?
- jmalicki 4y ago
  > 2020-2021 covid lockdowns lead to a big surge in buying of computer hardware, and therefore a big drop now given that modern computers last a lot longer and everyone is equipped In other words, the slowdown?
  - cm2187 4y ago
    Computer hardware doesn't drive the economy. You can have a slowdown in computer buying that isn't the result of a general economic slowdown.
    - adastra22 4y ago
      It’s the same effect though.
- j_walter 4y ago
  Both of those were reasons given by the CEO of TSMC recently.
sycren 4y ago
Could this matter be geopolitically based?

148 points by mirzap 4y ago

This is all pretty accurate. The only real surprise is that 40um tech and above are still running full steam and even the 20+ year old tech has only dropped a few percent for next year.

Veliladon 4y ago
3D NAND, which basically underpins all of our SSD tech, is hard enough to make at 40nm. They basically have to fill a tiny hole really precisely with layers of five different materials to create a vertical stack that works. It's really hard to go down node sizes plus once you hit 28nm the price of transistors stops decreasing and starts increasing instead with 22nm and smaller.
- wtallis 4y ago
  None of that is really relevant, because TSMC isn't in the business of making flash memory. The fab processes for logic and for flash memory are so different that there's no point to making comparisons between their respective nodes.
  - bob1029 4y ago
    I don't know about "no point to making comparisons", but they are definitely different animals. When I worked at Samsung, flash & LSI were like 2 different companies. Lots of reuse at the systems engineering level though. At a certain point of abstraction you can't tell what is on the wafer anymore so you might as well track it in the same database.
    - j_walter 4y ago
      Completely different animals. I know that when TSMC has looked at acquiring used fabs before and in at least one case because the fab was DRAM it was more costly and time consuming to convert it to Logic fab than just building a whole new fab.
- zeusk 4y ago
  Micron, Samsung and SK Hynix are doing volume production of 1xnm QLC devices with further complexity like CuA.
- monocasa 4y ago
  This idea that the price per transistor gets higher after 28nm needs to die. Right now the cheapest node for logic dominated chips is N6 (an optical shrink of N7). And even then, N5 is still cheaper than N10. 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...
ilyt 4y ago
This is entirely unsurprising if you actually look at things other than big CPU/GPU/IO. Power regulators doesn't need small transistors, it wants big nice and fat transistors. You'd get at least one of them in every device and a bunch in any bigger device. Same with any power device, LEDs, and really anything that passes some current. Any microcontroller smaller than "runs full fledged linux" often cares about cost of production first and foremost, hell, STM32 only recently [1] got on 90nm node! Interestingly enough, bigger node might get you worse uA/MHz but often lower idle current (the bigger things are the lower the leakage) so they might even be desirable. And the chip might want to have some mA current output on each pin (so it doesn't require external drivers to control stuff), which again means some transistor size in your I/O port is fixed and can't be made smaller so your savings from going to smaller process are not linear. For vast majority of non CPU/GPU chips it comes to cost to manufacture and those 20+ years old lines not only paid for themselves multiple times, they also have great yields. * [1] https://blog.st.com/stm32g0-mainstream-90-nm-mcu/ https://blog.st.com/stm32g0-mainstream-90-nm-mcu/
- dragontamer 4y ago
  > STM32 only recently [1] got on 90nm node! STM32G0 is value-oriented. The latest-and-greatest power efficiency STM32 is the STM32U5: https://www.st.com/content/ccc/resource/sales_and_marketing/presentation/product_presentation/group1/99/af/38/36/04/39/4c/4b/microcontrollers_stm32u5_series_product_overview/files/Microcontrollers_STM32U5_Series_product_overview.pdf/jcr:content/translations/en.Microcontrollers_STM32U5_Series_product_overview.pdf https://www.st.com/content/ccc/resource/sales_and_marketing/... Which seems to be 40nm. I'm not 100% sure if the STM32U5 is the smallest node they're using. But 40nm (or better) seems like a safe bet these days.
- Pet_Ant 4y ago
  > Power regulators doesn't need small transistors, it wants big nice and fat transistors. Is it possible to make bigger transistors using a smaller process? Just because you are using saying a 7nm process, can't you still make a transistor (like if you needed) that was the same size as it was on 90nm? I think of newer processes as merely being more precise so you could still do the old designs on them, you are just unecessarily tying up the newer machines... but concievably in the future you could just start using 5nm process to keep producing 30 nm and 90 nm chips just to consolidate production lines, non? I know nothing about this, so I'm just asking.

brink 4y ago

Can't they at least wait until we start to reliably see product on shelves?

meltyness 4y ago
TPUs have been all over the shelf, and adoption was snubbed. More graphics cards than ever before! Real-time raytracing available on your cell phone, laptop, and all 5 smart TVs in your home and backyard porch!! You were unable to convince your executives to adopt huggingface, IOT, and instead they opted to employ phone calls and Excel spreadsheets. You, consumer, failed to accept Stadia into your heart,... and now you shall pay for your snide indifference!!
- walterbell 4y ago
  Where can TPUs be purchased? Vendors linked from Google Coral (https://coral.ai https://coral.ai) have been out of stock for some time.
  - meltyness 4y ago
    Colab and huggingface are fishing for customers by handing out compute time in these things for free, and getting a militia's worth of tensor-connected memory isn't too expensive if you get provisioned to spin up a p2 on EC2, or presumably azure or gcp. Of course real consumers can't buy the hardware, real consumers don't have AAA credit ratings. You can always eBay a K80 as well if your motherboard supports the >4G decoding switch, but my primary point was about the insane purchasing power that affords large CommSvc sector company the ability to crash the market for a product before anyone even has logistics in place, apparently wishing to gatekeep any applications. - Game devs haven't made any games that stress a cloud gaming environment, they didn't even push VR. - Corporate consumers are hardly adopting AI at all, because there's still barely even a workforce. - Some very vocal people find proof of work a distasteful mechanism to support logistical metacommodity growth.
oblak 4y ago
Maybe this isn't strictly about GPUs. Or maybe it's just FUD designed to signal that no, video cards aren't getting cheaper and they'd rather cut supply than lower their margins. Who knows with this industry.

arriu 4y ago

They are forecasting a lower demand in the short term future. I’d guess they ran the numbers and producing fewer high cost items is more cost effective for them. Unfortunately, this likely means more shortages and costs stay high for the consumer.

sitkack 4y ago
The fact that the market can still do this (reduce supply to operate in the high margin quadrant) is a temporary blip due to the x86 duopoly. Soon anyone will be able to supply cycles/$ at a better rate than the entrenched players.
- cypress66 4y ago
  On the gpu side there is no "x86 duopoly" and the situation is arguably worse than cpus. So that's probably not it.
  - wlesieutre 4y ago
    Nvidia and AMD have been a GPU duopoly just as much as Intel and AMD have been for CPUs. Intel's new Arc product is the first competitor from another company in a very long time.
    - echelon 4y ago
      Nvidia has a pretty tight stranglehold on deep learning thanks to CUDA. We really need the forces that be to change this.
    - cypress66 4y ago
      But anybody's free to enter, there is no x86 IP in the way, as parent mentioned.
      - sangnoir 4y ago
        From my limited outsider perspective, it appears like there are way more CPU and FPGA startups than GPU startups - why is that when GPUs seemingly have lower barriers?

satellite2 4y ago

> Slashing orders to a contract manufacturer is not trivial since fabless chip designers are obliged to procure a fixed number of wafers in certain quarters. Nevertheless, TSMC is reportedly willing to accept compensation (as it will hold wafers with chips from AMD, Intel, Nvidia, etc., before they are ready to buy them) and even renegotiate deals on long-term supply contracts (i.e., increase the number of wafers that a company is committed to buying in the future) in exchange. Sounds like it might not be such a big deal for TSMC, at least in the short term.

glass3 4y ago

> the utilization rate of TSMC's N7-capable lines will decline to around 50% in early 2023. Will that capacity be utilized by other companies? E.g. what is preventing a RISC-V company from leap-frogging the competition?

wtallis 4y ago
> E.g. what is preventing a RISC-V company from leap-frogging the competition? They would need to have already taped out on N7 and be ready to start mass production now. That doesn't happen overnight. Even if you have taped out a ready-to-fab design, you usually want to start small and run a few rounds of QA on small batches of chips before you start ordering enough wafers to make a dent in TSMC's schedule.
monocasa 4y ago
N7 is a rough node to target. You have the high capital costs for NRE being an EUV node, but N5 is supposed to be cheaper to manufacturer chips on pretty much as soon as N3 is in full swing. So those companies would probably be targeting something in the range of 14nm to 10nm in order to take advantage of the fire sale on late DUV tooling to prove that they can make a working chip to investors, and then leapfrog to N5 after the giants have jumped to N3.

barbariangrunge 4y ago

Sorry; what is tsmc? Is there a single manufacturer with all the patents that everyone relies on?

Out_of_Characte 4y ago
Its worse, TSMC is the single biggest semiconductor manufacturer for general logic chips. Samsung has their own fabs for ram and ssd's specialised for density. All the litography equipment they use come from a single company called ASML. They also have complete market domination for the past few generations of litography machines and are the first and only producers of EUV litography. Semiconductors are so complex and capital intensive that even a duopoly couln't balance the expense.
b0tch7 4y ago
If you're actually curious -- here is a 2.5hr podcast about the company's history: https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/tsmc https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/tsmc

cm2187 4y ago

Is this because of the economic slowdown as the article suggests, or simply because 2020-2021 covid lockdowns lead to a big surge in buying of computer hardware, and therefore a big drop now given that modern computers last a lot longer and everyone is equipped?

ChuckNorris89 4y ago
Maybe both?
jmalicki 4y ago
> 2020-2021 covid lockdowns lead to a big surge in buying of computer hardware, and therefore a big drop now given that modern computers last a lot longer and everyone is equipped In other words, the slowdown?
- cm2187 4y ago
  Computer hardware doesn't drive the economy. You can have a slowdown in computer buying that isn't the result of a general economic slowdown.
  - adastra22 4y ago
    It’s the same effect though.
j_walter 4y ago
Both of those were reasons given by the CEO of TSMC recently.

sycren 4y ago

Could this matter be geopolitically based?