Comment by blackoil
4 days ago
Apple, Nvidia and US govt can provide the required funds if they have confidence in its ability to deliver. These companies will benefit from breaking current monopoly of TSMC.
4 days ago
Apple, Nvidia and US govt can provide the required funds if they have confidence in its ability to deliver. These companies will benefit from breaking current monopoly of TSMC.
Samsung is already in a much better position for this. They have external customers and experience facilitating them. Unlike Intel's track record which doesn't inspire confidence at all.
Intel has something Samsung doesn't. It's a US company operating mostly on US soil so the US government has a vested interest to keep this strategic asset going for as long as possible.
Tech hardware is a cutthroat business, tech companies are gonna order at Intel if it has something that others don't on a business point of view: more performing, cheaper, faster delivery.
The US government can wish and encourage all they want, as long as Samsung, TSMC and any other produces better chips for less, the money will flow there.
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> Apple, Nvidia and US govt can provide the required funds if they have confidence in its ability to deliver.
Given Apple's history with Intel's ability to deliver, I'm guessing the confidence there isn't high.
Are you referring to 5G radio modems or another chip?
Probably Intel’s fumble when Apple asked them for better performance per watt for the laptop CPUs and whether they wanted the iPhone CPU business back in 2006.
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Probably the Intel CPUs in Macbooks before Apple made the push for the M1 - circa the Intel quad core era where their laptop chips had major heat issues... ~2012 IIRC?
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I wouldn't count on either to save Intel as it still is (i.e with the fab business still attached to the CPU/GPU business). While it's true that having Intel fabs as a second source would be nice for them to alleviate the dependency on TSMC, they are also competing with Intel on the CPU/GPU side.
My guess is, they're gonna let Intel rot a little further while doing their best to pressure for Intel to split off their fab biz (as AMD had done back then), and then invest just in the fab.
> Apple, Nvidia and US govt can provide the required funds
When the first tough about investing is to go to big corporations and the goverment instead of going to investors is a telling about how nowadays the economy works.
I love that the Orange guy has opened the door to the nationalization of big tech. I hope that the next president is bolder on this regard. If all these companies depend on monopolies to exists, they should be state owned/controlled.
Yep, that's exactly what they did with TSMC. Foundries don't just build massive production lines and hope someone will use them, even TSMC.
Yeah, everyone is focused on TSMC as the company with the secret sauce, but really it’s Apple. Whichever foundry Apple goes with gets the majority of leading edge transistor volume.
Amazon and Google probably as well?