AMD, Nvidia Reportedly Tripped Up On Process Shrinks 230
itwbennett writes: In the fierce battle between CPU and GPU vendors, it's not just about speeds and feeds but also about process shrinks. Both Nvidia and AMD have had their move to 16nm and 20nm designs, respectively, hampered by the limited capacity of both nodes at manufacturer TSMC, according to the enthusiast site WCCFTech.com. While AMD's CPUs are produced by GlobalFoundaries, its GPUs are made at TSMC, as are Nvidia's chips. The problem is that TSMC only has so much capacity and Apple and Samsung have sucked up all that capacity. The only other manufacturer with 14nm capacity is Intel and there's no way Intel will sell them some capacity.
I got an idea (Score:4, Insightful)
Build your own fab
Re:I got an idea (Score:4, Funny)
ain't nobody got time for that!
Re:I got an idea (Score:5, Informative)
And get owned by intel's illegal monopolistic deals with OEMs?
Been there, done that. Signed: AMD.
Re: (Score:2)
We are intrigued by your new technology Y. We have begun production of our own version we copied straight from your designs and need you to sign the attached licensing agreement giving us complete autonomy to use your patents as we see fit. We very much enjoy our relationship and would hate to see OEM X lose its ability to purchase our chips at base rate and be forced to seek them from 3rd party suppliers.
Sincerely, Intel
Re:I got an idea (Score:5, Informative)
AMD did not own the sever space. With the introduction of AMD64, they had superior CPUs. However, thanks to intel's illegal monopolistic deals with OEMs they didn't get the sales and profits to plough back into R&D and sustain their technical lead.
Re:I got an idea (Score:4, Insightful)
Well that too but there's a long feedback loop from profits to production capacity, building a new process facility typically takes 3-4 years. AMD held the lead from mid 1999 (launch of Athlon) to early 2006 (launch of Intel Core). First they had to make some money on that achievement, this still being the dotcom days the stock flew through the roof until the dotcom bubble burst in early 2000. Everything tech-related came crashing down, you could buy AMD stock in 2002 for less than in 1999 despite their excellent products at the time. AMD probably had a helluva time finding funding to expand.
So if you don't get serious ramp-up capital until 2002, well you're not going to get it online until 2005-2006 and if you look at the stock charts then January 2006 is when they peaked. All looked bright, AMD still had the best product and finally the production capacity to knock Intel out of the driver's seat. Then Intel Core gave them a real kick to the nuts. They just couldn't sell as much as they had planned for, the financial burden from the fabs was dragging the whole company down. That's the trouble with betting too much on growth, when you fail you fail hard. But then everyone had been shouting build more, take down Intel. Hindsight is easy.
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Maybe yes, maybe no.
Fabs are incredibly capital intensive. If you build one you sort of need to run it at full hilt to make money off of them. And then you are on the tread mill of always having to build another one to have the latest and greatest.
I am not saying they should not build it, just that it is a completely different beast then design and marketing of their chips. You can't do it half way. FYI, almost everybody agrees that the reason why the x386 dominates today is not because Intel had the best o
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Re:I got an idea (Score:5, Informative)
I read an interview of John Sculley, ex Apple CEO, 10 years after he left Apple. (There is a link to it somewhere here on Slashdot. ) He said that one of his great mistakes was to choose Motorola's PowerPC RISC chip over Intel's x386 design. All of Apple engineers pulled for the Motorola chip, pointing to its better architecture. And it was true, for a given bit of silicon Motorola was better than Intel.
Except that Intel's fabs were so much more efficient than Motorola's, they were able to deliver more powerful chips at a cheaper price even with poorer design. Which allowed them to make fat profits, which they plowed back into newer fab plants, which let them sprint past Motorola.
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Wasn't it Gil Amelio who made that comment? But at the time, Intel was at par w/ PowerPC, and slower than other CPUs, like PA-RISC and Alpha. What made Intel catch up w/ RISC CPUs was Microsoft using the NT kernel to replace the Windows 9x kernel, and as a result, having an SMP capable mainstream OS. So now Intel could toss more cores into it to catch up w/ competing silicon, and because Intel's processes too were so much ahead of everyone else, those Core CPUs were still cheaper than PA-RISCs, Alpha's
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Sculley said it was his mistake - which is not saying that Amelio didn't say it as well. Here is the old Slashdot link.
http://apple.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]
Also they heavily invest in R&D (Score:2)
Intel really goes all in on R&D. It isn't just that they make a lot of money, their percentage of R&D investment is very high, and they don't cut it in down times to try and squeeze out numbers. That snowballs in the long term and is why they had a 14nm process running when others were still struggling to finalize their 20nm.
Also a lot of the architectural arguments regarding Motorola v Intel were bogus. It was programmers arguing on academic issues that maybe theoretically should matter, but didn't
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Yes, what people do not understand is that Intel is primarily manufacturing company. Intel builds the fabs and R&D/demand fills them.
Re:I got an idea (Score:5, Informative)
Maybe yes, maybe no.
Fabs are incredibly capital intensive. If you build one you sort of need to run it at full hilt to make money off of them. And then you are on the tread mill of always having to build another one to have the latest and greatest.
I am not saying they should not build it, just that it is a completely different beast then design and marketing of their chips. You can't do it half way. FYI, almost everybody agrees that the reason why the x386 dominates today is not because Intel had the best or most efficient designs for microchips but that it had the best run and most efficient fabs. Intel has publicly said it want to be the "McDonalds" on the CPU world – standardized and cheap.
Are AMD and Navida ready to bit off such a big chuck? I doubt it.
Fully agree w/ this - it costs a ton of cash to just build the fab, then quite some time before they are in full production, and only after they've run for a few years and been depreciated that their products are profitable. By then, it's usually time to shrink, but by now, at ~15nm, there ain't too much scope for that.
But in addition to that, the costs of running a fab are recurring - even if there is no demand for a product, the fab has to be kept running, thereby piling on inventory. Which is a good reason why a lot of companies either started of as, or later became, fabless. The only one who is profitable is Intel, as a result of being a full 2 generations ahead of the competition. Reason? Because they make volumes of products that they can sell in the market profitably, thereby enabling themselves to put in a whole ton of cash into newer fabs, better equipment and everything else geared towards process improvements.
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Build your own fab
While not a bad idea, it doesn't solve the problem. When you have your own fab, you are pretty much obligated to use it. Even when it is late, low on capacity, or a full node behind. You can reduce this risk by throwing a lot of money at R&D and spare capacity. However, this is more than a little bit expensive. That is why AMD doesn't have a captive fab anymore. They can't afford it.
TSMC is in the business of making chips. They don't make money if they can't make chips. I haven't heard that App
Re:I got an idea (Score:5, Informative)
Build your own fab
AMD did exactly that. Intel responded by raising their prices and offering "discounts" to vendors in exchange for refusing to stock any AMD products, ensuring that AMD's production capacity was wasted because customers found it incredibly difficult to find anyone willing sell them (despite having a large performance, price and temperature advantage over Intel at the time). AMD took Intel to court over this and won, but Intel managed to drag the case out so ridiculously long that AMD weren't able to keep their foundries. Their R&D took a big hit too.
Re:I got an idea (Score:5, Funny)
AMD: They are fab-u-less!
FTFY. :-)
Consumers tripped up on exclusive deals (Score:2)
Who cares about the designs when my AMD GPU doesn't run software properly because Nvidia has a special deal with that software company? And visa-versa? Stop worrying about design and fix the real problem...your current products are unreliable because of greed.
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Is that why... (Score:2)
So, this is why we can't have nice things?
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Yes. Exactly.
bean counters ruin another company (Score:5, Insightful)
Who didn't see not having their own fabs was going to bite them in the rear?
Only a bunch of bean counters would not have seen this coming.
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Trouble is, at the rate we're going, the manufacturers won't need us for very much longer, especially if economies in other countries that don't respect IP become strong enough that those manufacturers can sell unlicenced production there, even if they can't sell it here. I'm thinking of that happy little picture of the world with a circle over portions of South and East Asia and the large islan
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I'm thinking of that happy little picture of the world with a circle over portions of South and East Asia and the large islands in the Indian Ocean where half of the population of the planet lives.
Madagascar ?
I dont see the connection, maybe i need to research geographic sterotypes...
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It may have something to do with ATI legacy manufacturing as much as AMD CPU legacy. If ATI didn't have their own fab maybe it wasn't doable for AMD to outlay cash to create one for GPU, not that legacy ATI tooling would be up to task for modern GPU fab anyway.
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ATI never had their own fab. They were always fabless.
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Agreed, nothing wrong with that. But it was highly disappointing when they got bought out by a foreign company.
Re:bean counters ruin another company (Score:4, Insightful)
I really don't see that. Manufacturing in the USA typically runs Lean and often Cell based with process changes made in minutes. The people also tend to have a wider range of skills and experience. The states with unions pretty much don't do any more manufacturing.
Outsourcing only works from 2 fundamentals - ignoring IP (theft) and currency manipulation.
Re:bean counters ruin another company (Score:4, Insightful)
Outsourcing only works from 2 fundamentals - ignoring IP (theft) and currency manipulation.
You left out government regulation, taxes, and pollution controls.
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Also, exploiting cultural differences. You won't get many Americans willing to live and eat in a dorm attached to the manufacturing plant, 800 miles from family, so they really have no distractions but work. (And of course you mention regulation, but having those workers for 12 hour shifts, 6 days a week, for 50 weeks straight can't hurt the bottom line - just the workers.)
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I'll let somebody more experienced on it do the talking:
http://theweek.com/article/ind... [theweek.com]
(And no, I'm not a fan of him, just I don't see any reason why he'd be wrong on this.)
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I really don't see that. Manufacturing in the USA typically runs Lean and often Cell based with process changes made in minutes. The people also tend to have a wider range of skills and experience. The states with unions pretty much don't do any more manufacturing.
I don't know if all shops work this way, but I work as a CNC lathe toolsetter and programmer in a non-union shop in New Jersey and what you say is pretty accurate based on my experience. Most of our operators will typically run a cell of 2 to 4 machines. As long as there are more contracts than we have machines (which is always, or we'd be out of business) we are constantly breaking down setups and retooling our machines for the next production run. We produce hundereds of different parts for some of our
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Point one can be addressed in negotiations. I'll bet a pay bump on days where a reconfiguration is required would get the job done. As for point 2, if there were jobs here calling for the skill, we would soon have workers with that skill available.
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Pretty much this.
The people who own that fabrication capacity are selling it to the highest bidder. Or the one who invested the money to build it.
If you don't control your own production, don't be surprised when you have to wait in line.
But don't act all shocked that the 3rd party who actually builds your products can't guarantee your stuff gets built.
This gets a big "duh".
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If NVidia build a fab, it would be great for them if/when their fab had cutting-edge processes and NVidia chips were the most profitable thing to run. But... what happens when their fab is out of date? NVidia chip designers would likely be forced to design for the NVidia fab anyway, and their hardware would fall behind. Or... what happens when their fab is updated? If they are one of the few on a new process, assuming they aren't sued by Intel for patent violations, should the NVidia fab lose out on pot
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Don't be silly. It's not as if GlobalFoundries is putting AMD at the back of the line.
They just haven't been able to keep up with TSMC technologically (GF couldn't promise to deliver 20nm or 16nm when TSMC could), and they probably wouldn't have been able to if they were still a part of AMD.
The only big difference is that it would have been a pretty hard sell to have your GPUs be produced by a third (technologically more advanced) party instead of in your own (struggling) fabs.
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FTFY. nVidia and AMD could easily jump ahead of Apple and Samsung in TSMC's queue - they just have to offer to pay more than Apple and Samsung are willing to pay. All that's happening is that they've made a conscious decision that it's more cost-effective to pay less and have their 16nm/20nm products come out later and deal with unhappy customers, than to pay m
Re:bean counters ruin another company (Score:4)
How are they bitten exactly. Neither one of them can get chips. There is therefore no real competitive disadvantage. They only way I see them getting bitten is if Intel decides they really want a slice of the high end GPU market; ups their game on the design side AND allocates their 14nm facilities to GPUs in favor of cranking out more CPUs.
Re:bean counters ruin another company (Score:5, Funny)
Well, then it's a good thing there's only two of them.
A third company who owned some fabrication facilities would completely screw things up.
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Well, then it's a good thing there's only two of them.
I think the bean counters might deserve some credit though. Don't you think somebody asked "what happens to our business if things go wrong at TSMC?" and the answer was well our chief competition also uses them so there will probably be little impact to our market share, they won't be able to supply anyone with chips either.
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You attribute far more long-term thinking to the idiots who run companies than I do.
And are you really saying that if I really wanted to destroy large US companies all I'd have to do is to bomb factories in China? Or sow dissent? Or cut off their electrical supply?
Because that sounds like something out of a Bond film.
Hell, build your own fabrication plant and then bomb the ones who build for your competitor; instant monopoly. :-P
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You know that bombing factories is, like, illegal, right? And that most people have, you know, ethics?
Problem is they also compete against themselves (Score:2)
Current videocards work great. You can play all kinds of games in plenty of beautiful detail. So to get someone to buy a new video card, well you have to offer them a reason. If your new card isn't enough faster, or more efficient, or enough new features, or whatever then people will say "Nah, I'm good," and stick with what they got.
So they do have a need to move forward on tech, if they want to stick around.
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Does intel even make a discreet GPU? I thought they were all baked into their newer CPUs.
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Or... They worked so well some(TLA)body got them all, while Intel tweaked it into knights corner / knights landing / xeon phi, where they now use it to dominate the top 500.
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Intel's integrated GPUs are pretty decent these days. At this point, they tend to outperform lower end discrete nVidia/AMD GPUs of a similar generation. Intel's Iris Pro 5200 GPU, for example, performs slightly faster than an nVidia GeForce 640. Each generation has seen Intel's chips creep slightly higher up the nVidia/AMD product line: it's not long since they creeped past the x30 tier of nVidia GPUs.
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Simple gamers do not buy new cards until you can get new cards.
No one buys new cards until there are new cards to buy...
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Yep. That is why no other companies use 'suppliers'. Oh, wait. EVERY company is dependant on its suppliers. Does Intel operate its own mines? Does it create all of the tools, etc in its fabs? No? The stupid bean counters at Intel!
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So Applied Materials is lying when it says:
Applied Materials, Inc. has been recognized as one of 18 companies receiving Intel Corporation's Preferred Quality Supplier (PQS) award for their performance in 2013. Applied Materials demonstrated industry-leading commitment across all critical focus areas on which Intel suppliers are measured: quality, cost, availability, technology, customer service, labor and ethics systems, and environmental sustainability. Applied Materials is recognized for their significant contributions providing Intel with wafer fab capital equipment, mask capital equipment, fab automation software, and services, deemed essential to Intel's success.
Because that kind of make is sound like Applied Materials equipment is 'essential to Intel's success'.
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Fabs are expensive. As in, REALLY expensive. They cost $1B to build, and easily $10+B to equip (or more). So you're already in the hole many billions of dollars and you haven't produced anything yet.
Oh, and there's a clock ticking away, because you're going to need to spend another $10+B to buy ALL NEW EQUIPMENT to handle the upcoming node shrink.
The only way to do that i
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Considering the astonishing rate that AMD was losing money on its fabs, and the fact that upgrading a single fab to a new process node would cost more than AMD's entire market capitalization, I'm going to have to side with the bean counters here.
AMD coundn't even keep its production facilities running. How could they possibly have kept up with TSMC - the world's premier foundry operator?
Re: bean counters ruin another company (Score:2)
Except that in this case they will be quickly out of business if they actually tried to build a fab, which is a 10 billion dollar investment which will go obsolete in 2~3 years.
The fundamental problem is that there isn't enough demand for discrete GPUs, so they are getting a hard time hitting the economy of scale. What I see is that mobile chips are getting the latest and greatest process technologies these days - I believe the market size of mobile processors is order of magnitudes larger than discrete G
No... (Score:5, Informative)
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1. The customer (AMD/Nvidia/Apple/Qualcomm) are accurate in forecasting what they will need, and have a consistent demand at the fab, not varying horrendously, as many smaller players do
2. The customer is not dwarfed by other bigger customers during times of allocation. When market demand is high and semiconductor prices go up, then fabs usually pick their top tier customers, have them allocate which products need to run uninterrupted, and do that. S
Actually...about Intel... (Score:3)
Given that AMD isn't terribly threatening anymore, we aren't in the Netburst vs. A64 beatdown era now, Intel is probably saved a fair amount of unpleasant antitrust inquiry(US and abroad) by AMD at comparatively limited cost in product margins or lost design wins. If it came to it, selling them foundry services would probably be preferred to letting them die.
Re:Actually...about Intel... (Score:4, Insightful)
it wouldn't surprise me if someone at Intel Legal has written up an "AMD/Foundry Contract Opinion.doc" and squirreled it away somewhere.
Or they can take advantage of the situation to acquire nVidia's market position in GPU computing and patent arsenal (to annihilate the trolls - probably not gunning for AMD). Intel wants a viable AMD, to keep DoJ off its back. nVidia is just a market competitor with a manufacturing problem.
Goodbye AMD (Score:2, Insightful)
Your shortsighted business practice of selling off your foundry has just killed you. It's gonna suck having Intel as the monopoly for the X86 CPU market.
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Your shortsighted business practices of getting fucked over by Intel's almost completely unpunished illegal monopoly abuse has just killed you.
FTFY.
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o please, intel has superior cpu, straight out. AMD hasn't had a decent cpu since athlon xp/64. Blaming intel for AMD failure to innovate their cpu is straight up retarded. Intel has the market share they do cause they have made cpu's people want, not slow power hungry piles of silicon.
Go back to the time period we are talking about. The fabs were sold off in 2008 which was when AMD was still a top dog performance wise, but losing money due to Intel illegal deals with OEMs.
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I am sad at not seeing AMD chips in MS Surface Pros and other toys, but that's not something that Intel illegally contrived at AMD's expense.
When the A64 came out it stomped all over the P4. Despite Intel's fab advantage, te A64 was faster, cooler and cheaper than the P4.
At that point, Intel outright bribed Dell and other large vendors to NOT use AMD chips. That is flat out illegal and denied AMD a huge amount of revenue when they most needed it to capitalise on their advantage with intel.
So despite having
no way??? (Score:3)
The only other manufacturer with 14nm capacity is Intel and there's no way Intel will sell them some capacity.
Riiiight. Because Intel never ever sells fab capacity.
Oh wait, they started doing that in 2010. Oops.
Re:no way??? (Score:5, Funny)
Riiiight. Because Intel never ever sells fab capacity.
AMD going to Intel for fab capacity is like the Palestinians going to the Israelis for rocket technology.
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Riiiight. Because Intel never ever sells fab capacity.
The sentence doesn't say that. It says it wouldn't sell AMD or Nvidia, the companies referred to by the "them" in that sentence, some of their capacity.
Not their best stuff (Score:2)
They only have one 14nm fab right now, and it only makes Intel chips. Maybe they'd sell some 22nm, I dunno, and that might be of interest for a GPU, but they aren't selling 14nm at this time near as I know.
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They only have one 14nm fab right now, and it only makes Intel chips. Maybe they'd sell some 22nm, I dunno, and that might be of interest for a GPU, but they aren't selling 14nm at this time near as I know.
Their announced plans for 14nm fabs are vastly more than what they need to supply their own chips--in fact, more than all the world's other fab production combined. Doesn't sound to me like they're planning on hoarding it forever.
Build your own fab (Score:2)
Just one. Nothing out of control. Intel has something like a dozen of them. Just build one. Then you have the ability to expand your own capacity using Intel's model of "EVERYTHING EXACTLY THE SAME" where in Intel copies their fabs exactly down to the furniture.
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Fab facilities are tremendously expensive. This isn't something you can throw together in your basement. A fab is going to cost at least a billion dollars - and that's not even for state-of-the-art 14nm stuff. TMSC's fab cost ten billion dollars to build. That's just the construction cost - semiconductor tech is constantly changing, so if you want to make the latest goodies like high-performance GPUs there's also the need to constantly puchase new and better equipment.
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Intel maintains many of them. AMD is perfectly capable of maintaining ONE.
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The cost of upgrading a fab for process shrink is almost as much as building a new fab. They often don't get upgraded - they get downmarketed. A new fab is built for the process shrink, and the old fab is reduced to making lower-spec tech. All those little microcontrollers, glue chips, controllers and interfaces found in just about everything electronic may well come from the same fab that once churned out the state-of-the-art Pentium 3.
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Just get a 3D printer and make your own chips. Jeez, cheapskates.
Re:Build your own fab (Score:5, Informative)
As of September 2014:
-AMD's available cash: $950 million
-AMD's market capitalization: $2.6 billion
-AMD's credit rating: Absolute garbage
-Cost of a new Intel/TSMC style fab: $7 billion - $10 billion
It's a nice thought, but the reason that so many companies, including huge companies like Apple, IBM, and Qualcomm, have gone fabless is that fabs are astonishingly, mind-blowingly, expensive.
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With what money do you expect them to build a fab?
I think it might be hard (Score:2)
Intel's ahead, but it kind of looks like they have a lot of difficulty too. There are so many different part #s, that it makes you wonder if they all tried to be the same thing, but different wafers passed different tests, and .. viola, diverse line of products!
Nokia the ultimate outsourcing warning (Score:5, Interesting)
Former Semiconductor Furnace Engineer Here (Score:2, Insightful)
If you want the biggest bang for your buck, a single 12" Vertical Semiconductor furnace shipped and installed - $900K - $1m USD (low end guess). I've been to Taiwan into another fab, UMC, and they have hundreds of these furnaces. But with wafers that big, you need an automated transfer system (because you can't trust people to carry $10,000 worth of substrate) Wafer boats, typically holding 13 wafers, are $2000-$3000 each. the substrate itself is incredibly expensive. And not to mention the electrical bills
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Yes, they spun them off into Global Foundries.
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Interesting that they both use the same supplier for their critical component and are competing products....I'm guessing neither have enough money to build their own production labs like Apple did with that special glass they use.
Apple didn't spend their own money on production of their "special" glass (it is purchased gorilla glass 4 from Dow Corning)...
On that whole GT advanced technologies sapphilre disaster, they attempted to purchase their own production labs (and lease them back to GT for production), but apparently that ain't gonna happen now...
Imagine how amazing they would be as a joint company.
Actually Nvidia, Apple, AMD, Qualcomm and Xilinx are major customers of TSMC's advanced processes and all are subject to the whims of the supply and demand for wafers at TSMC. It's ju
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Hah - $2B would be an optimistic number just for upgrading an existing fab. A brand new fab would be somewhere in the $5B to $10B range, judging by what Intel and TSMC are spending.
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Apple didn't spend their own money on production of their "special" glass (it is purchased gorilla glass 4 from Dow Corning)...
On that whole GT advanced technologies sapphilre disaster, they attempted to purchase their own production labs (and lease them back to GT for production), but apparently that ain't gonna happen now...
That is not true. Apple has invested billions in Corning, Samsung, Foxconn, etc. You have only heard about GT because it blew up.
It is not uncommon for a customer to help finance a vendor's factor. Why should a company (let's day Corning) build a huge, risky, cutting edge factory? It is a huge risk. Why should a company (let's say Apple) design a product around cutting edge technology that might not be available in mass quantities?
So Apple pitches in cash to finance the new factory and in return they get
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That is not true. Apple has invested billions in Corning, Samsung, Foxconn, etc. You have only heard about GT because it blew up.
Although I only have access to public information, AFAIK, it isn't Apple that invested in Corning, actually it is Samsung that invested in Corning (~7.4% stake which makes Samsung the largest single shareholder of Corning).
Although in the past, Apple had made an investment in Samsung Semiconductor to ensure flat panel technology availability, I believe they no longer use Samsung flatpanels nor hold that investment.
For their semiconductors, their relationship appears to be a foundry deal only. Samsung has m
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Of course as industry practice, Apple likely makes component pre-payments based on forecast demand on a discount basis (which gives Samsung funds to finance it), but that's not the same as an equity investment.
When I was talking about "investments" I was actually referring to this type of arrangement. Not all investments have to be equity. Some can be simple short term loans to finance inventory and production. That being said, some of the arrangements can be huge, complex, and multi-year and can get pretty near the line of equity. But if not the marriage of equity at the very least it is a very deep partnership of cohabitation. See GT as an example. Of course, the accountants make sure it never crosses the line
Shrinking your competitor's capacity (Score:2)
It's the same reason we import oil in the US - use up the capacity elsewhere and horde your own.
Re:Shrinking your competitor's capacity (Score:4, Informative)
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Actually, they may not. It boils down to what you define as "Samsung". "Samsung" is a lose collection of companies with crossholdings. IIRC, the fab plants are in a different company than the company that does the cell phones. Besides, just because you can make one bit of the phone (CPU) does not mean are the best at making other bits of the phone. I think they have farmed out the cell network bits out.
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Have a look at Google news where headlines from many newspapers and journals are reproduced. You won't see many publishers capitalizing every single word.
"Proper English"? Your journalism text is from a different century. My copy of The Associated Press Stylebook (2005), says this: "*capitalization* In general, avoid unnecessary capitals. Use a capital letter only if you can justify it by one of the principles listed here." - I cannot find an exception for headlines.
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AP style is to only capitalize the first word and proper nouns
https://www.apstylebook.com/?d... [apstylebook.com]
search for "News media" and read the questions that follow
Re:TSMC would *love* to sell fab capacity... (Score:2)
And push our Apple or Samsung or Qualcomm for the right price. Again, AMD and NVidia can't or won't pay what that price would be.
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Intel would *love* to sell fab capacity
Intel has no need to sell their fab capacity.
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the foundry could make more money letting AMD/NVidia use their stuff than Apple.
In what alternate universe? Apple had nearly $183 billion in revenue in 2014. Nvidia had $4.2 billion in 2014 and AMD had $5.3 billion in 2013. How exactly would they make more money from companies whose yearly revenues combined are less than a single quarter of Apple's revenue?
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Why wouldn't Intel sell some of their capacity to nVidia or AMD for their GPUs?
Because they make more money using that capacity to make their own CPUs.
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