Comment by miohtama
19 hours ago
There is only 1 winner and 1 loser: Intel.
It's the only chip manufacturer "left" in the US. The argument is national security: the US expects China to invade Taiwan and this will kill TSMC in the process.
Whether this will happen or not can be debated, but this is what the government expects.
> It's the only chip manufacturer "left" in the US
Global Foundries, Micron, and Texas Instruments all come to mind
GF hasn't gone past the 12nm node. TI is at 45nm. Micron is on relatively recent processes, but they make RAM, not logic (which are totally different processes). Intel is the only chip manufacturer left that is working in logic at anything like the leading edge.
GF is a few nodes behind. Micron doesn't make semiconductors, they mostly make flash and whatnot. TI doesn't have the capacity or knowledge to expand to Intel's size/capacity
> doesn't make semiconductors, they mostly make flash and whatnot
Um.
All that stuff is still semiconductors, just with different patterns printed on them.
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> TI doesn't have the capacity or knowledge to expand to Intel's size/capacity
I mean, they might if Intel were allowed to fail.
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GF is a zombie company. Micron and TI are both far far away from leading edge. There is only one American company which is both developing and manufacturing leading edge nodes.
Yeah terrible position to be when your own government is investing in your competitors' company using your own tax dollars.
As a software engineer, this isn't an entirely new concept.
I think all three of those other companies are also getting CHIPS-act subsidies?
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re: Micron - Memory is very different from logic chips. You vast number of repeating cells in memory. If any of them are bad you can just turn them off and bin them as lower capacity. You can do that to some extend with logic chips but not nearly as much as memory.
> the US expects China to invade Taiwan and this will kill TSMC in the process.
Would it though? The TSMC foundries are pretty much in every continent. Are they just going to stop operating if this happens? Because that seems akin to killing a golden goose.
Also what is up with Global Foundries? I don’t hear a peep about them.
I believe the most modern TSMC fabs outside of Taiwan are in Arizona. They are just moving to 4nm which is nearly 5 years old and just a revision of 5nm which is getting close to 7 years old.
TSMC aims to have N3 in Arizona by 2028 at the earliest which is 6 years after it first released. By that time, TSMC will have released N3X, N2, N2P, N2X, A16, and A14.
TSMC is heavily sponsored by the Taiwanese government and was created with the express purpose of making Taiwan so valuable that the West would be forced to defend them against China. Moving newer processes out of the country is against their national interests and they've made it clear that there's no plan to do that.
GF is like a decade behind in research. Without years to ramp up and update their fabs they're not relevant.
Probably closer to two decades behind at this point.
Global Foundries is on 12nm. TSMC is at 3.
TSMC gets their machines from ASML who licenses their technology from the Department of Energy. The US will be OK.
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Outside of Taiwan TSMC foundries are just pumping out already developed non leading edge fab processes. Everyone who matters to TSMC tech development is in Taiwan.
Exactly. Expect to see some kind of additional intervention such as forcing a certain number of chips that currently go to TSMC to go to Intel.
This is my thought on it too. I don't think this is meant to be a political win so much as US intelligence views chip manufacturing extremely strategically. I also don't know about what will happen to TSMC. But the US has been pushing for US made GPUs as well. This goes back to Biden's admin as well.
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/us-govt-pushes-nv...
And the current administration is unlikely to help Taiwan in the event of said invasion.
Texas Instruments and Microchip: Am I a joke to you?
As far as I know none of them manufacture anything resembling a replacement for a Xeon, which is relevant to national security because those are uses in military applications.
I'm surprised to see on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microchip_Technology that Microchip does in fact have fabs. I thought it was fabless! Its fabs are in the US, but the assembly and test facilities are all across the Pacific.
Neither of them make high performance CPUs or GPUs
I see it different. The loser is the taxpayers. The loser is the market, which is less and less free. When there’s no incentive to run your company correctly… we get another company not run correctly.
How to run a company correctly?
If the argument was for protecting Intel, then the US government should be placing huge orders with Intel for solutions that will fund R&D and allow the company to regain its position as a foundry. They should be tapping into the defense budget. DARPA should be involved. This was an opportunity for petty extortion and a step towards socialism.
A large bulk of CPU orders comes from Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. Want to say 50% of all AMD revenue is datacenters, and the Hyperscalers represent the largest chunk of that.
Government involvement is the fastest way to corrupt the purpose of an organization, hollow out its soul and quickly get rid of all the competant people. There's a reason that the DOGE findings made a laughing stock of government employees.
> There's a reason that the DOGE findings made a laughing stock of government employees
Can you point out which specific findings? Ideally ones that are substantiated and not just one off tweets.
Depends on the implementation.
Switzerland owns its energy companies and its public transport company. Hugely successful.
Huge order for... what? DoD's needs for chips are quite modest in quantity. Truth is that the US Gov doesn't need the volume which requires Intel to keep afloat.
It is not socialism. Socialism is when the workers control the means of production. Not a fat windbag mobster president and his thugs.
so.. shouldn't US take stake in TSMC instead?
What good would that do if China invades Taiwan?
And now China knows the US expects this and it also knows the US does not expect to stop China, so China knows that it can expect the US to do very little. It's game theory turtles all the way down...
Edit: I think it's a misconception that China cares much about fabs in Taiwan. It wants unification.
It also means that China can expect the destruction of Taiwan's fabs to hurt the US less than China.
Combine that with the US's ability to unilaterally destroy Taiwan's fabs, and it sways the calculation a bit