5 ms·

Secret meeting between Apple and TSMC reported to reserve all 2nm capacity

40 points by ksec 2y ago

baggy_trough 2y ago
Wonder how much one has to pay for this.
- hehdhdjehehegwv 2y ago
  Probably just a pass through of the big check they get from Google for doing basically nothing. The Tim Cook era of innovation never disappoints.
- hesdeadjim 2y ago
  "Give us all your 2nm or we'll start funding other chip fabs with our infinite capital".
  - OutOfHere 2y ago
    It takes more than just money though. Apple couldn't for example make self-driving cars with despite all the money in the world. It also takes special raw materials, talent, and culture, with the combination being too difficult to materialize.
  - jjtheblunt 2y ago
    I worked in Apple HW for several years, and it's not nefarious like that...but I understand how it could look that way. It's more like placing an order for N units of whatever, but the total global capacity (emphasis: total _global_ capacity) is < N. That leaves open the speculation that shady business was going on, but it's just that they ordered early because they're at the moment first to need whatever, and businesses expand footprints to try filling as much capacity as Apple would like to order, when Apple needs more than is available.
    - hesdeadjim 2y ago
      Unless you were involved with negotiating the deals, what happens in face to face meetings (i.e. no email and paper trail) during contract negotiations is a not-so-subtle battle of wills based on perceived leverage -- of which a trillion dollar company has a lot of. I have been on the software side of things for most of my career, but over the last handful of years I have been deeply involved in the bizdev stuff. To say the wool has been pulled back from my naive eyes is an understatement.
  - ksec 2y ago
    Except both Tim Cook and Jeff Williams knows even with Apple's $200B capital it is still not be enough fund a future TSMC competitor ( Intel ) that is price competitive with TSMC's current offering. They may have a better chance helping Samsung Foundry but they dont want their SoC IP to be known to their direct competitor, that goes the same to Intel. On the other hand TSMC dont start building out a $20B 2nm GigaFab and then look for 2nm customers. That is just not how it works.
Cu3PO42 2y ago
I am not surprised. This worked out fairly well for them in the past. While I dislike this personally - I'd rather have competing chips on the best node - I don't think this violates any moral principles. I do wonder if there is a bidding war with other companies for this capacity, though.
- autoexecbat 2y ago
  It's also a big risk on Apple's behalf, as the node could have serious delays/problems
  - stcredzero 2y ago
    This risk should be evaluated iteratively. It won't kill Apple if some small fraction of the time, their releases are delayed. Overall, if their record is that they have stuff their competitors can't even get their hands on, they win. Even though it's not technically illegal, there's something about this that feels unfair and bad for the market.
    - PKop 2y ago
      TSMC being the only game in town is what's bad for the market.
      - adam_arthur 2y ago
        They're certainly the leading player in terms of cutting edge capabilities, but there are plenty of companies working on fabs. It wasn't long ago that Intel used to have the leading fab and simply got complacent/slow opening the door for TSMC to surpass them. In the macro sense there seems to be more widespread awareness and money going towards fab competition than ever before. I suspect we'll trend closer to performance parity between competitors in the coming years. Nobody will be able to compete against Apple CPUs while they're 1 process node ahead of competitors though. I recently moved to Linux from MacOS, but probably will have to go back to Apple on the m4 for local LLM capabilities (high RAM specs much cheaper than commercial GPUs). Too bad Asahi is still missing some pretty critical capabilities (microphone, USB-C monitor connection etc)
jjtheblunt 2y ago
Title here dropped the word “possibly” from the linked article’s title.
vessenes 2y ago
I wonder what Apple's priorities are for the M5 chip. I'm all in on inference and training in my personal life right now, so if I were deploying $20bn with TSMC, (or maybe more this year!), I guess I'd be trying to spec out a scalable architecture with as much high bandwidth memory as possible. I wonder if Apple's willing to spec out 350W datacenter chips or not, and if they're going to make a play at datacenter AI with this generation. It feels like it might be a good time to do it. Anything competitive at all will suck a little oxygen out of NVIDIA and probably pay for itself in market cap. Either way, I'm pleased my Apple tax is going to buy me 2nm chips next year or so; silicon feels very interesting in the next few years. Juicy.
- talldayo 2y ago
  > Anything competitive at all will suck a little oxygen out of NVIDIA and probably pay for itself in market cap. To whom? If you're Apple I guess it makes sense to invest in your own architecture. But Apple doesn't ship a CUDA equivalent, they don't support server OSes, and they make no attempt to support the few cross-platform solutions shipping today. In a lot of ways, they're even further behind than AMD's server-side AI offerings.
  - vessenes 2y ago
    Apple ships MLX, which has found support in creator communities, and is starting to see support at places like hugging face. In fact, it seems to me to be growing faster than ROCM support, but of course, it is starting from scratch, and this is just anecdotal. And, MPS are a drop in replacement for many programs in pytorch -- just replacing device="cuda" with device="mps" works relatively well, much of the time. For those doing inference at the edge / playing / testing, mps works well -- it is entirely the reason for llama.cpp's popularity, for instance. Rumors are that Apple is looking at using high memory M2 chips for datacenter inference -- 192GB of RAM is pretty great, yo. So I guess I'm saying I think you're wrong on the facts -- Apple does support pytorch, it does have an alternate full stack offering with MLX, and I would not be surprised if more tokens are generated through llama.cpp's downstream offerings on Apple Silicon than are generated on AMD.
hullo 2y ago
Have they ever had a public meeting? So basically they had a meeting, and someone is guessing what they may have talked about?
PKop 2y ago
You'd think at some point someone other than TSMC could make these types of chips too. The bigger issue here is there being only one supplier.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
fancyfredbot 2y ago
Nvidia have a higher profit margin than Apple and could have paid more for this. Perhaps Nvidia wont have a 2nm design ready in time or more likely they are less worried about their competition.
marssaxman 2y ago
Apple does this all the time so far as I understand. Back when I worked in embedded firmware, ten or fifteen years ago, I remember hearing about a new MEMS chip we could not get - which nobody could get - because Apple had bought the entire production output.
joshstrange 2y ago
> Secret meeting between Apple and TSMC reported, /possibly/ to reserve all 2nm capacity > Secret meeting /may/ have been about 2nm exclusivity > The low-profile visit was made to secure TSMC’s advanced manufacturing capacity, /potentially/ 2nm process, booked for Apple’s in-house AI-chips, according to the report. It's nothing new at all for Apple to buy up all the capacity and this isn't even an article on that actually happening. It's speculation on top of speculation. Also "secret meeting", ooooooo secret, give me a break... Show me the public meetings that other companies have with TSMC or hell the public meetings they have with any of their suppliers. But what else do you expect from a shovel-blog?
- anakaine 2y ago
  "Private company meets private company to discuss purchasing arrangements in confidence." Oh wow, so secret, much conspiracy.
- asadotzler 2y ago
  Plenty of companies have meetings with other companies where their executives arrive in front of cameras and parade the meeting's existence usually to alert investors, customers, or competitors. There are other meetings they don't advertise that they attempt to keep from others by not inviting press, releasing statements, and otherwise publicizing. Those are called "secret" meetings not because their content is secret, as that's true for most corporate to corporate meetings, but because their existence is secret. Not understanding something as simple as this suggests a feeble or naive mind.

40 points by ksec 2y ago

baggy_trough 2y ago

Wonder how much one has to pay for this.

hehdhdjehehegwv 2y ago
Probably just a pass through of the big check they get from Google for doing basically nothing. The Tim Cook era of innovation never disappoints.
hesdeadjim 2y ago
"Give us all your 2nm or we'll start funding other chip fabs with our infinite capital".
- OutOfHere 2y ago
  It takes more than just money though. Apple couldn't for example make self-driving cars with despite all the money in the world. It also takes special raw materials, talent, and culture, with the combination being too difficult to materialize.
- jjtheblunt 2y ago
  I worked in Apple HW for several years, and it's not nefarious like that...but I understand how it could look that way. It's more like placing an order for N units of whatever, but the total global capacity (emphasis: total _global_ capacity) is < N. That leaves open the speculation that shady business was going on, but it's just that they ordered early because they're at the moment first to need whatever, and businesses expand footprints to try filling as much capacity as Apple would like to order, when Apple needs more than is available.
  - hesdeadjim 2y ago
    Unless you were involved with negotiating the deals, what happens in face to face meetings (i.e. no email and paper trail) during contract negotiations is a not-so-subtle battle of wills based on perceived leverage -- of which a trillion dollar company has a lot of. I have been on the software side of things for most of my career, but over the last handful of years I have been deeply involved in the bizdev stuff. To say the wool has been pulled back from my naive eyes is an understatement.
- ksec 2y ago
  Except both Tim Cook and Jeff Williams knows even with Apple's $200B capital it is still not be enough fund a future TSMC competitor ( Intel ) that is price competitive with TSMC's current offering. They may have a better chance helping Samsung Foundry but they dont want their SoC IP to be known to their direct competitor, that goes the same to Intel. On the other hand TSMC dont start building out a $20B 2nm GigaFab and then look for 2nm customers. That is just not how it works.

Cu3PO42 2y ago

I am not surprised. This worked out fairly well for them in the past. While I dislike this personally - I'd rather have competing chips on the best node - I don't think this violates any moral principles. I do wonder if there is a bidding war with other companies for this capacity, though.

autoexecbat 2y ago
It's also a big risk on Apple's behalf, as the node could have serious delays/problems
- stcredzero 2y ago
  This risk should be evaluated iteratively. It won't kill Apple if some small fraction of the time, their releases are delayed. Overall, if their record is that they have stuff their competitors can't even get their hands on, they win. Even though it's not technically illegal, there's something about this that feels unfair and bad for the market.
  - PKop 2y ago
    TSMC being the only game in town is what's bad for the market.
    - adam_arthur 2y ago
      They're certainly the leading player in terms of cutting edge capabilities, but there are plenty of companies working on fabs. It wasn't long ago that Intel used to have the leading fab and simply got complacent/slow opening the door for TSMC to surpass them. In the macro sense there seems to be more widespread awareness and money going towards fab competition than ever before. I suspect we'll trend closer to performance parity between competitors in the coming years. Nobody will be able to compete against Apple CPUs while they're 1 process node ahead of competitors though. I recently moved to Linux from MacOS, but probably will have to go back to Apple on the m4 for local LLM capabilities (high RAM specs much cheaper than commercial GPUs). Too bad Asahi is still missing some pretty critical capabilities (microphone, USB-C monitor connection etc)

jjtheblunt 2y ago

Title here dropped the word “possibly” from the linked article’s title.

vessenes 2y ago

I wonder what Apple's priorities are for the M5 chip. I'm all in on inference and training in my personal life right now, so if I were deploying $20bn with TSMC, (or maybe more this year!), I guess I'd be trying to spec out a scalable architecture with as much high bandwidth memory as possible. I wonder if Apple's willing to spec out 350W datacenter chips or not, and if they're going to make a play at datacenter AI with this generation. It feels like it might be a good time to do it. Anything competitive at all will suck a little oxygen out of NVIDIA and probably pay for itself in market cap. Either way, I'm pleased my Apple tax is going to buy me 2nm chips next year or so; silicon feels very interesting in the next few years. Juicy.

talldayo 2y ago
> Anything competitive at all will suck a little oxygen out of NVIDIA and probably pay for itself in market cap. To whom? If you're Apple I guess it makes sense to invest in your own architecture. But Apple doesn't ship a CUDA equivalent, they don't support server OSes, and they make no attempt to support the few cross-platform solutions shipping today. In a lot of ways, they're even further behind than AMD's server-side AI offerings.
- vessenes 2y ago
  Apple ships MLX, which has found support in creator communities, and is starting to see support at places like hugging face. In fact, it seems to me to be growing faster than ROCM support, but of course, it is starting from scratch, and this is just anecdotal. And, MPS are a drop in replacement for many programs in pytorch -- just replacing device="cuda" with device="mps" works relatively well, much of the time. For those doing inference at the edge / playing / testing, mps works well -- it is entirely the reason for llama.cpp's popularity, for instance. Rumors are that Apple is looking at using high memory M2 chips for datacenter inference -- 192GB of RAM is pretty great, yo. So I guess I'm saying I think you're wrong on the facts -- Apple does support pytorch, it does have an alternate full stack offering with MLX, and I would not be surprised if more tokens are generated through llama.cpp's downstream offerings on Apple Silicon than are generated on AMD.

hullo 2y ago

Have they ever had a public meeting? So basically they had a meeting, and someone is guessing what they may have talked about?

PKop 2y ago

You'd think at some point someone other than TSMC could make these types of chips too. The bigger issue here is there being only one supplier.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

fancyfredbot 2y ago

Nvidia have a higher profit margin than Apple and could have paid more for this. Perhaps Nvidia wont have a 2nm design ready in time or more likely they are less worried about their competition.

marssaxman 2y ago

Apple does this all the time so far as I understand. Back when I worked in embedded firmware, ten or fifteen years ago, I remember hearing about a new MEMS chip we could not get - which nobody could get - because Apple had bought the entire production output.

joshstrange 2y ago

> Secret meeting between Apple and TSMC reported, /possibly/ to reserve all 2nm capacity > Secret meeting /may/ have been about 2nm exclusivity > The low-profile visit was made to secure TSMC’s advanced manufacturing capacity, /potentially/ 2nm process, booked for Apple’s in-house AI-chips, according to the report. It's nothing new at all for Apple to buy up all the capacity and this isn't even an article on that actually happening. It's speculation on top of speculation. Also "secret meeting", ooooooo secret, give me a break... Show me the public meetings that other companies have with TSMC or hell the public meetings they have with any of their suppliers. But what else do you expect from a shovel-blog?

anakaine 2y ago
"Private company meets private company to discuss purchasing arrangements in confidence." Oh wow, so secret, much conspiracy.
asadotzler 2y ago
Plenty of companies have meetings with other companies where their executives arrive in front of cameras and parade the meeting's existence usually to alert investors, customers, or competitors. There are other meetings they don't advertise that they attempt to keep from others by not inviting press, releasing statements, and otherwise publicizing. Those are called "secret" meetings not because their content is secret, as that's true for most corporate to corporate meetings, but because their existence is secret. Not understanding something as simple as this suggests a feeble or naive mind.