Comment by nomilk

3 months ago

Had to look up what TSMC meant (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company).

What would Apple's next best option be if a war rendered TSMC unavailable?

12 comments

nomilk

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martinald  3 months ago

There's an amazing book on Apple in China all about this issue (and more). It's a great read and I'd highly recommend if you're interested.

Also Chip Wars is really good. I may be confusing which one is which because I read them back to back, but they overlap!

colechristensen  3 months ago

>What would Apple's next best option be if a war rendered TSMC unavailable?

Onshore TSMC fabs followed by Intel fabs.

Properly motivated, I think Intel and Apple could do a lot relatively quickly.

  • throwaway31131  3 months ago

    TSMC in Taiwan has a significant share of the wafers produced by the world every month. If those wafers were not produced the global economy would suffer badly.

    It takes years to bring a fab online. Fab 21 in Arizona took 5 years to enter mass production from ground breaking. Some believe it could be done in two but that’s yet to be demonstrated. Then there are the wafers themselves. The total time it takes to process one wafer at the single nm scale is around 100 days.

    So realistically, even if one makes up their mind to make a fab fast, you’re looking at 3 years before you have your first sellable wafer.

45764986  3 months ago

If a war rendered TSMC unavailable it would crash the global economy. There is no next best option.

  • astrange  3 months ago

    Samsung, Intel, SMIC are not incredibly far behind. TSMC is the best because we (the US and its customers) trust them more than its competitors and so fund its R&D and license them more exclusive technologies.