TSMC, a Company Few Americans Know, is About To Dethrone Intel (bloomberg.com) 195
For more than 30 years, Intel has dominated chipmaking, producing the most important component in the bulk of the world's computers. That run is now under threat from a company many Americans have never heard of. From a report: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. was created in 1987 to churn out chips for companies that lacked the money to build their own facilities. The approach was famously dismissed at the time by Advanced Micro Devices founder Jerry Sanders. "Real men have fabs," he quipped at a conference, using industry lingo for factories. These days, ridicule has given way to envy as TSMC plants have risen to challenge Intel at the pinnacle of the $400 billion industry. AMD recently chose TSMC to make its most advanced processors, having spun off its own struggling factories years before.
TSMC's threat to Intel reflects a sea change in chipmaking that's seen one company after another hire TSMC to manufacture the chips they design. Hsinchu-based TSMC has scores of customers, including tech giants Apple and Qualcomm, second-tier players like AMD, and minnows such as Ampere Computing. The explosion of components built this way has given TSMC the technical know-how needed to churn out the smallest, most efficient and powerful chips in the highest volumes.
"It's a once-in-a-50-year situation," said Renee James, the former No. 2 at Intel who heads startup Ampere. Her company is less than two years old and yet it's going after Intel's dominant server chip business. That Ampere thinks it can compete is a testament to stumbles by Intel, and TSMC's ability to benefit from those mistakes. It's been a decade since Intel faced major competition and its 90 percent revenue share in computer processing will again deliver record results this year. But some on Wall Street are concerned, and rivals are emboldened, because TSMC has a real chance to replace Intel as the best chipmaker in the business. Last year, the Taiwanese company amassed a bigger market value than its U.S. rival for the first time.
TSMC's threat to Intel reflects a sea change in chipmaking that's seen one company after another hire TSMC to manufacture the chips they design. Hsinchu-based TSMC has scores of customers, including tech giants Apple and Qualcomm, second-tier players like AMD, and minnows such as Ampere Computing. The explosion of components built this way has given TSMC the technical know-how needed to churn out the smallest, most efficient and powerful chips in the highest volumes.
"It's a once-in-a-50-year situation," said Renee James, the former No. 2 at Intel who heads startup Ampere. Her company is less than two years old and yet it's going after Intel's dominant server chip business. That Ampere thinks it can compete is a testament to stumbles by Intel, and TSMC's ability to benefit from those mistakes. It's been a decade since Intel faced major competition and its 90 percent revenue share in computer processing will again deliver record results this year. But some on Wall Street are concerned, and rivals are emboldened, because TSMC has a real chance to replace Intel as the best chipmaker in the business. Last year, the Taiwanese company amassed a bigger market value than its U.S. rival for the first time.
Chip Maker not Designer. (Score:5, Informative)
Intel Designs and makes their own chips. TSMC just takes your designs and makes the chips. Which is a perfectly fine business model, but comparing Intel to them isn't really the same. As Intel puts a lot more R&D in designing the chips then making them.
Re:Chip Maker not Designer. (Score:5, Insightful)
Nope, most of the R&D work is in the fab, not the microcode. Making the chips work reliably is the hard part.
AMD is currently shipping 7nm chips thanks to TSMC, Intel is stuck at 10nm.
Re:Chip Maker not Designer. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Everyone who follows this even a little bit already knows that Intel's processes are the real thing, and everyone else's numbers are measured with parallax and a fat rubber ruler.
Not that this normally matters, as you point out. It only matters when some idiot comes along crowing about how Intel has been "left in the dust".
It's also the case that Intel is designing tr
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I'm not even going to count the pathetic i3 they trotted out and relegated to the bottom end of the Chinese market.
I don't think they even make it any more, they never did manage to get the defect density to a commercially viable level. I think they essentially just bulldozed that fab line and went back to square one.
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It seems that the modest 10% difference was enough to do Intel in, because they were right up against the limit of what deep UV can do. TSMC was a bit more conservative and that saved the day. I think. Because we don't really know yet that TSMC 7nm actually did ramp up successfully. Apple supposedly has weak sales for Iphone XS, but is it really because customers don't want it, or is it that Apple can't produce it?
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Intel was/is very good at it.
Not as good as a company that entirely specializes in it.
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Think this might be a company worth buying stock in?
Re:Chip Maker not Designer. (Score:5, Informative)
Intel's "10nm" is the same as 7nm. In fact, one of the dimensions is even 7nm, and they could have just measured from that side and called it 7nm. The numbers don't have meaning.
You're conflating chip design with process design. Obviously, the company that owns the fab has to do the process design. And that is separate from the design of the chips.
You were wrong as soon as you decided to start with the word "nope." Obviously, Intel does R&D for process, and for the chips they make, so they're doing a lot more R&D than a company that designs a comparable process, but not the chips. The difference in business models, and the fact that they're both competing on the latest generation of process, guarantees that Intel must be doing more R&D.
The mystery in your comment is why you single out microcode to represent the whole chip design process.
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What are you talking about exactly? Because no one has seen a successful run of this process yet. The only [wikipedia.org] Cannon Lake part is a partially failed product with a disabled GPU/bad thermals/and no advantages over a comparable mobile Kaby Lake CPU.
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Don't get confused about the difference between process and product.
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It is a three-dimensional shape, with orthogonal T sections. Any number you choose between 7 and 15 is equally valid and imprecise.
When is 10 nm smaller than 7 nm? (Score:5, Informative)
Each company seems to be measuring a different thing when they report a process is "x nm." So while you can compare nm within a single company's offerings, you can't compare them between different fab companies. TSMC and Samsung's 7nm processes leapfrogged Intel's 14nm process (37.5 million transistors per mm^2). But they're still behind Intel's 10nm process.
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Their 7nm process is really just down to 7nm, but most of it is over 10.
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Intels 10nm is not even there that much (and already 4 years late), they produce a handful of very simple chips. TSMCs 7nm is pretty much the same ans Intels 10nm, both are marketing numbers anway. The main difference, TSMC is producing already millions of rather complex processors for Apple, Amd and NVidia and others while Intel had a stockholder launch 4 years late producing a handful of the simplest celerons they have with high failure rate and apu disabled to keep the stockholders calm.
2019 will be inte
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What on earth gave you that idea? You are suggesting Intel pays a handful of code monkeys more than they spend building and developing custom materials and hammering at cutting edge physics with insanely expensive built from scratch equipment and then retrofitting that into fabs? You must be kidding.
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... Intel puts a lot more R&D in designing the chips then making them.
and yet, there's still not a chip on Intel's horizon that won't be susceptible to Spectre/Meltdown. Seems to me the R&D is pointed in the wrong direction.
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Oh, have you been getting their memos? Do share!!
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Maybe not "intrinsically vulnerable", but certainly very difficult to get right. I mean, ever other designer of high end speculative execution CPUs but AMD also had Meltdown problems, and all, Intel, AMD, ARM, IBM mainframes and POWER, are plagued with Spectre bugs, and almost certainly will be for a long time.
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Re:Chip Maker not Designer. (Score:4, Interesting)
You are correct but you can compare Intel to TSMC plus its customers who are doing their own design work. The article did so.
Historically, the company has squashed rivals using a research budget that dwarfed anything else in the industry. But TSMC’s approach is even undermining this advantage.
While Intel still outguns TSMC in capital spending on new plants and equipment, the tables are turned when you combine the research budgets of TSMC customers like Qualcomm, Apple, Nvidia Corp. and Huawei Technologies Co.
According to Goldman Sachs, the combined budgets of TSMC’s customers are not only larger than Intel but the gap is increasing. By 2020, they will spend almost $20 billion, according to its estimate, at least $4 billion more than Intel.
IMO, the rise to dominance of TSMC's business model is inevitable and probably being driven by the industry's fall off of the Moore's Law curve.
For decades, companies have been able to keep increasing the capabilities of their product by just buying the next-generation general-purpose chip. They got lazy in the process. I'd say this transition occurred in the '87-'97 time frame, a time when the need for engineers to design custom hardware plummeted in favor of buying COTS. But the general purpose approach is starting to fall short of the increases necessary to drive new consumer purchases.
But innovation is still possible. Our laziness has created a deep untapped well of performance growth that can be had by equipping the domains to create domain specific designs. If we can reignite domain-specific engineering, many domains can achieve order of magnitude changes in performance by rolling their own designs.
TSMC is enabling the larger of these domains to achieve purpose-built silicon designed by the domain's engineers for the domain.
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dominance of TSMC's business model is inevitable and probably being driven by the industry's fall off of the Moore's Law curve
Mostly driven by the mobile ARM market eclipsing the x86 PC market. But flattening of Moore's law is certainly a contributor, it means everybody is working with exactly the same fab equipment, it all comes from the same place.
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Obviously these are not comparable companies. We're comparing the efficiency of a vertically and horizontally integrated manufacturing models.
TSMC has proved that sticking to your knitting is a more efficient business model than Intel's vertical integration. In the past it was always Intel's Wintel-fueled R&D budget that kept it one process node ahead, but the ARM wave gave TSMC a comparable budget and they focused it more efficiently. With TSMC now a business of comparable size and growing faster, ther
Intel was always primarily a marketing brand (Score:4, Interesting)
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When even Weird Al parodies you [youtu.be] then I guess you know you are popular. =P
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The difference is, running macOS, Windows, Linux or OS/2 actually makes a difference compatibility wise. Intel vs. AMD, not really (there were some differences at the cutting edge, like SIMD, but most software waited until those were pretty standard anyway.)
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Duh - that's why they did (or anyone else would) create their powerful "Intel Inside" brand: to create perceived value where there is little actual difference between themselves and their competitors. See also: Nike, McDonalds, Red Hat, etc.
It's not only chips (Score:5, Interesting)
Last year, the Taiwanese company amassed a bigger market value than its U.S. rival for the first time.
I am afraid the USA is [quickly] becoming an entity of little consequence. It's sad. When we lost manufacturing to China, folks here were ebullient, saying we surrendered cheap labor intensive jobs to China. They were happy that when it came to technology, we are "up there."
From this piece, it now appears that we're not safe. All our president can do is to apply sanctions - which hardly work by the way.
Given that china still owns a significant amount of our debt, we're surely in trouble.
Not so long from now, Russia and China will introduce the C929 [wikipedia.org]. Then our serious remaining industry will be threatened.
Suggestion: Let's stop fomenting chaos in far away lands and concentrate on making the USA a beacon of prosperity once again.
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Given that china still owns a significant amount of our debt, we're surely in trouble.
That could actually be worse for them than it is for us.
There's a saying: if I owe you a thousand dollars, I have a problem. If I owe you a trillion dollars, *you* have a problem.
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Given that china still owns a significant amount of our debt, we're surely in trouble.
That could actually be worse for them than it is for us.
There's a saying: if I owe you a thousand dollars, I have a problem. If I owe you a trillion dollars, *you* have a problem.
Well, that is actual debt though.
Holding bonds isn't the same as giving a loan, though; you get no power over the bond issuer. Defaulting only means people wouldn't want to buy that bond in the future.
Also, the US government issues the bonds, and they all get purchased. What the market does with them after that doesn't even affect the US Government. There is no reason for the US Government to care who buys them. Only a country that has limited demand for bond purchases would need to care about that stuff.
Wh
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Re:It's not only chips (Score:4, Interesting)
Meh. Airbus is a European company, and competes head-to-head with Boeing. The difference between one main competitor and two is not nothing, but it also isn't the end of the world. Besides, Boeing is also competing with companies like Bombardier (CRJ) and Embraer, with at least four more regional jet makers starting to gain popularity as well. Sure, those companies build only smaller, regional jets, but every one of those routes is one that could have been flown by a 737, but wasn't. The implication that Boeing is somehow going to go from no competition to crushing competition is kind of silly in that context. They have a *lot* of competition already, and one more player almost certainly isn't a big deal.
Also, I've seen Russian manufacturing quality control, and I've seen Chinese manufacturing quality control, and I wouldn't fly on a plane built by either one of them unless there was an American company running the show, with employees doing random drop-in checks to keep them honest. I've seen way too much appallingly bad quality control (we're talking loose screws rolling around inside, unauthorized part substitutions causing a 70% DOA rate, premature failure caused by overheating critical components while soldering, etc.) out of Chinese manufacturers to trust them with my life. And Russian heavy industry seems to do well up until they start cutting back on the rate of manufacture, and then those last few off the line are death traps.
If they make it fifty years without a significant uptick in crashes, I *might* start trusting them. And even then, it would still just be a "might", not a "will". And that's also true for any airline. They're going to be very wary of any new manufacturer until it has proven itself.
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Also, I've seen Russian manufacturing quality control, and I've seen Chinese manufacturing quality control, and I wouldn't fly on a plane built by either one of them unless there was an American company running the show, with employees doing random drop-in checks to keep them honest.
Your sentiments hardly matter given that when it comes to human space travel, our government currently relies on the Russians at 100%. In fact, when it comes to rocket engines, the USA also relies on the Russians.
All it will take is appropriate financing and the rest will be history. Americans used to say the same about Japanese motorcars in the early 80s. The story is very different now given that GM is busy closing factories now.
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Utterly false, except for that for first stages, one batch of mothballed NK-33s Orbital Sciences used/is still using for a while for their Antares craft, one of which caused a nasty total failure in 2014, and is to be replaced with the RD-181.
ULA uses the RD-180 for the Atlas V, a tremendously successful albeit now expensive rocket, with 78 successful launches and one partial but not complete low orbit failure for the NRO, an arra
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Indeed, the recent failures of the Russian space program are precisely what I was thinking of when I expressed concern over the quality control in Russian heavy manufacturing.
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What about an American airplane run by Asians? Say a Boeing 737 Max?
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It sounds like concerning competition for the 737 until you realize that the design has long outlasted what was intended, and they're only doing small amounts of R&D for the new models. And even though it uses a lot more fuel than the regional competition, it also gets lower insurance rates because of its service history. It is easy profit for Boeing.
Lots of western companies with quality manufacturing are competing, and Boeing mostly wins due to trust. I don't doubt airlines who simply can't afford Boe
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Boeing is competing with neither. They more or less own Embraer now and the CRJ line will last for just a few more years.
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Heh. Fair enough. I hadn't noticed their controlling stake in Embraer. I wouldn't rule out Bombardier, though. The Global 7500 is going to ruffle some feathers on the bottom end, and if some of those enhancements make it into a future CRJ cabin upgrade, it could shake up the mid-range, too.
Re: It's not only chips (Score:2)
Bombardier found out that they don't really have the resources to manufacture modern jets, hence the sale of the cseries to airbus.
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Airbus and Boeing don't reeeally compete if you look at the way they position their airplanes. The planes stair step each other in capacity never really competing head to head.
Then why does Boeing have models with overlapping capacity from the 737 all the way up?
The only "stair step" is that Airbus has a giant monstrosity bigger than anybody wants. But for the whole range of planes that actually sell, everything is competing with multiple other offerings.
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Did you know that Russia was always building aircraft? Apparently not.
They always cost less to buy, too. And yet. ;)
Expect that plane to be very popular; in China.
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It's sad. When we lost manufacturing to China ...
Over the last 30 years, manufacturing in America has doubled [marketwatch.com].
The "deindustrialization of America" is one of those things that "everybody knows", but is actually nonsense.
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That's a fool's errand. The only way to put the American working class back in manufacturing is to raise the cost of everything in the U.S. drastically. That would cause an inflation. Interest rates would rise, government deficits would rise even faster than the King of Debt, el Presidentie Tweet ever hoped for in his wildest dreams.
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It's our working class that's been devastated.
Actually, they haven't. This is another thing that "everybody knows", but is not true.
Working class incomes, adjusted for inflation, have stagnated since the 1980s. Stagnation means they stayed the same, not that they declined.
Is it a problem that working class incomes have stagnated, especially when people higher up the income ladder have prospered? Sure, most people would agree that is a problem. But by using hyperbolic words like "devastated", you aren't contributing to the solution.
China doesn't really own that much of our debt (Score:3)
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Check the deficit figures, it ain't the military busting the budget. It is the blue hairs and I-have-to-get-mine mentality.
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Manufacturing in the U.S. is roughly north of $2 trillion a year. 2nd to China out of a roughly $19 Trillion economy. China's manufacturing is roughly $6 Trillion. Theirs is about 42.6 % of their GDP, the U.S. is roughly 10 % of GDP.
So the U.S. has lost manufacturing, I suppose you could argue it went to China. But the SE Asian countries are attempting to do to China what some argue China has done to the U.S. That's one of the reasons China is swaggering around the S. China Sea claiming to have the Biggest
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Initially, the engine is likely to be supplied by Rolls-Royce or General Electric that already have products in this class.
And the most expensive part of the plane will still be made in the US or Britain, as will probably most of the other components that you would attach to these engines.
And also I fail to see what the C929 has to do with TSMC. Plus Taiwan and China are currently very different places / political bodies.
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LOL you're one of those fossils who still think that if you get rid of sexism, everybody throws their money in the air and starts doing drugs?
You know the 60s happened, right? You were there, I can tell by the sound of your dribble. And you know the world still exists, right?
The 1950s might not have actually been the paragon of enlightened culture. I know, I know, too shocking to consider.
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The superiority of the US is based on a rule of law that protects freedom and property rights. There are many aspects to this, but one that has come to my attention recently is food supplements. Many things available over-the-counter in the US require a prescription in the EU. Of course, many drugs that require a prescription in the US are available over-the-counter in Mexico, but Mexico has other flaws and entrenched corruption.
Most places in the US it's easier to start a business than other civilized coun
This article is confusing (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't get what this article is trying to say. TSMC is about to dethrone Intel ... how?
In value? TSMC's market cap is half that of Intel.
In innovation? TSMC is a manufacturer of outsourced chip designs ... think a Chinese factory that produces car parts for Ford. The article references the combined research budgets of Qualcomm, Apple, Nvidia and Huawei. That's cute, but what does it have to do with anything? In real life, those budgets don't actually "combine." They're all competing against each other. Does the outsourced manufacturer benefit from having all these customers? Sure, but so what?
Intel, meanwhile, designs its own chips, which still dominate the PC and server industries. It also makes chipsets to go along with these, and most processor customers use these integrated chipsets these days. Add to that wireless devices, compilers, SDKs, and all the other stuff it produces that comprise an entire ecosystem.
Does Intel face challenges? Sure. I don't think anybody can argue that it's kinda fallen on its face in the mobile market. But does anyone see AWS or Boeing approaching TSMC to produce custom CPUs tailored for specific workloads?
So in that sense, you might as well say TSMC is about to dethrone IBM. It just doesn't make any sense to me.
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And doesn't Intel still make what are pretty much the best Ethernet chips. They work, and are well and openly documented? And if you don't need the highest performance, aren't their on chip GPUs also good on both metrics?
Anyone have some real facts, or pointers to the quality of AMD's current chipsets? I've heard ugly mutterings, but have no knowledge, still using stuff that's many years old now.
The bottom line is volume (Score:2)
What the article didn't emphasize is that Intel's main market is internal consumption (Intel-branded chips), while companies using the foundry model that TSMC pioneered sell to the industry as a whole. (I note that Intel does have a small, and not successful, attempt at a foundry business [intel.com].)
Intel must amortize the cost of its IC process development, plus the cost of new fabs every generation, based solely on the revenue it can generate from the sale of its own chips, while TSMC can spread that cost over th
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and the Japanese are taking over the CPU architecture too.
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the cost of building a single fab doubles with each process generation
That really needs a law, named after somebody.
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TSMC is about to dethrone Intel ... how?
TSMC already dethroned Intel in fab capacity. TSMC is now in the process of dethroning Intel in transistor density, and after that comes dethroning Intel in clock frequency.
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But does anyone see AWS or Boeing approaching TSMC to produce custom CPUs tailored for specific workloads?
Yes, Amazon's Graviton for one.
Magic rocks (Score:2)
About Ampere (Score:3)
That Ampere thinks it can compete is a testament to stumbles by Intel, and TSMC's ability to benefit from those mistakes.
Maybe. But from personal experience, I can also say that they might just be stupid. I work in IT for a Fortune 500 company. I never name them here. We do a lot of software as a service type things. We're pretty good at what we do and in some areas we are likely the top dog for US based solutions. The business segment I support isn't sexy at all. But every year we have to deal with multiple startups who try to take our business. Many fail. We often see new companies say they can do everything we do for half the cost. Half the cost? Sure. But in reality they do like 1/3 instead of everything we do. So we have customers who leave over cost and then come back because our competitors really suck. Again, this is just not a sexy business segment in what I work with. This isn't it, but imagine you work for Turbo Tax. You don't just have H&R Block, Tax Slayer, etc. to deal with but every year some punk upstart company says it can do taxes better for way less than you charge. How much better can it really be? Either tax software works or it doesn't. You can't really make it "better". But we still have competitors who claim that this somewhat stagnant business can be done better and cheaper. And every year we watch as they go out of business.
Another problem I've seen with startups is the "We can't possibly fail because we're geniuses!" attitude. Most startups do fail. I know a guy who has spent most of his IT career chasing startup glory and failing. He does make really good money, but he's always having to find a new job with the next startup. The older product I still support was started by a successful startup that my current employer bought out. I can tell you that a large number of people associated with that startup left us within a year or two of the acquisition going through and they went to a few different new startups that various people associated with the original company started. All those startups failed. And a large number of those people returned to my employer, tail between their legs. So sure, maybe what is said about Ampere is true and will happen, but I'm not ruling out that it's a dumb idea and they'll fail at it.
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Mini "free trade zone" (Score:2)
Hsinchu, Taiwan is also a mini free trade zone. It's fenced off and guarded. What goes in gets shipped out and not taxed.
It's been around for quite a long time (over 20 years that I know of). I've visited the area.
They really know what they're doing. They have on campus dormitories for employees if they choose to live there (and work long hours).
Note that this is NOT mainland China and is a sort of democracy. China insists they're a rogue colony though and this has been an item of contention for severa
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Clarification: Hsinchu is not all fenced off, only the development TSMC and associated areas. They call it "Science Based Industrial Park".
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This can be elevated with proper trade negotiations. Also for the most part if your chip designs are that sensitive for national security you better have your own Fab. Now the part that can be fixed with trade negotiations is to be sure that the company doesn't go ahead and make a spinoff product based off your IP.
Re:um... yeah... (Score:5, Informative)
if your chip designs are that sensitive for national security you better have your own Fab.
ROC is a solid America ally, so there isn't much "national security" risk. American defense contractors can't afford their own fabs.
Now the part that can be fixed with trade negotiations is to be sure that the company doesn't go ahead and make a spinoff product based off your IP.
ROC does not require any IP sharing or joint ventures (ROC != PRC). If they are fabbing your chip, you give them your masks, not your VHDL/Verilog source. With the mask, they could make direct copies, but not "spin-offs".
Of course, if they are caught ripping off their customers, their $190B market cap would quickly go to near zero. So they have a pretty big incentive to behave.
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if your chip designs are that sensitive for national security you better have your own Fab.
ROC is a solid America ally, so there isn't much "national security" risk. American defense contractors can't afford their own fabs.
Right up until the PRC decides to heat up the civil war again and end it in their own favor...
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The PRC might try to finish off the ROC before we can get a carrier there, but worse than the carriers for their schemes are our hunter-killer subs. Unless they figure out something the Soviet never could, it won't take many of them to turn it into an all air affair. Which might be part of their plan, why they've emplaced so many short range missiles, they might hope to beat down the ROC's defenses and get enough airheads in place that they sort of win by default, maybe?
Getting back to the topic at hand,
Re:um... yeah... (Score:4, Interesting)
The PRC might try to finish off the ROC before we can get a carrier there
Taiwan already has WAY more airpower than a single American carrier, and islands don't sink.
The main purpose of the carrier would be to act as a tripwire, ensuring American involvement if it is attacked.
A sea or airborne invasion of Taiwan is far beyond the current capability of the PLA. It would have to be bigger than D-Day. In June 1944, 90% of the German Army was in Russia. Of their soldiers in France, most were focused on Calais. For the PLA, there would be no "second front" nor any deception about landing points. They don't have even 1% of the amphibious capability that the USA+UK+Canada possessed in 1944.
Airborne invasions have a very poor track record. Crete was a pyrrhic victory, the Normandy jumps were successful only because they linked up with troops advancing from the beaches. Arnheim was a failure. So was Dien Bien Phu.
China could go nuclear, but that would likely bring American retaliation. If Taiwan ever feels like they can't count on America, they could build their own nukes in, maybe, a month. Remember, every country that has ever made a serious attempt to build a nuke has succeeded on the first try. As one of the most technologically advanced countr^H^H^H^H^Hregions in the world, Taiwan would have no problem.
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I don't see any scenario where we retaliate with nukes. To quote that PLA general from memory, we care more about Los Angeles that we care about Taipei.
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Airborne invasions indeed have some poor records, but Crete still succeeded.
Crete barely succeeded, and the Germans never again did a large scale airborne operation. The allies drew the opposite lesson, and expanded their airborne capabilities, but this was largely because they didn't realize the level of casualties the Germans had absorbed, or how close they came to being defeated.
Crete was lightly defended, and the British and Greeks were caught totally off guard. They had lost much of their heavy equipment the previous month during the fighting on the Greek mainland. There we
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The PRC might try to finish off the ROC before we can get a carrier there
Taiwan already has WAY more airpower than a single American carrier, and islands don't sink.
The main purpose of the carrier would be to act as a tripwire, ensuring American involvement if it is attacked.
A sea or airborne invasion of Taiwan is far beyond the current capability of the PLA.
Why would China care about occupying Taiwan? They could simply bomb it out of existence without risking their troops. There are no defense systems that could prevent the military annihilation of Taiwan, and the US military also cannot do anything to prevent this.
However, there are three things that currently protect the military status of Taiwan:
First, Taiwan doesn't have anything that China doesn't already have much more of. Perhaps China doesn't have a TSMC, but a Chinese takeover of TSMC would kill th
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> they could build their own nukes in, maybe, a month.
It would take more than a month. They would need nuclear reactor grade fuel, and would then have to convert one of their civilian nuke plants to work as a breeder reactor. They would have to design and implement their own manufactured equipment to handle the plutonium and shape it into nuclear weapon components. And they would still need to live test their weapon design.
The gov't team developing the materials & the bomb would require bureaucra
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ROC = Taiwan, officially the Republic of China (ROC)
PRC = China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC)
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Negotiations can get agreements but since they don't admit to doing this as it stands... good luck with that.
Oh they might not use it where it is obvious, or in the US but you can bet they are studying and using your IP
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Also, most all chips are sensitive for national security.
Re:um... no. (Score:5, Insightful)
The "T" in "TSMC" stands for "Taiwan." We might worry that TSMC might share IP with the government of the Republic of China, for whatever good that would do anybody, but the odds of them knowingly sharing IP with mainland China (the PRC) is substantially zero. Not only for ideological reasons, but also because the PRC has SMIC and other TSMC foundry competitors. TSMC has a substantial lead over them at the moment, and would like to keep it that way.
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"knowingly", perhaps not. But how do you think SMIC got started?
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My experience is now 18 years out of date, but as of 2000 AD, extracting gates from layout is a process that is or can be automated for a large part of any chip. RAM blocks are obvious. Much of the chip can be reverse engineered by repeated application of manual analysis and automated layout-to-gate computer analysis.
That said, your EEPROM and fuse objection is entirely valid, and having a clue to what the chip is actually supposed to do is very important.
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(and doesn't care because security isn't their job)
Well they probably care a lot about the integrity of the designs, if you could compromise the masks it probably takes only a minor adjustment to create a hardware backdoor. Of course this is more three letter agency level hack than a script kiddie, but the prize is potentially huge as no code is safe if the hardware can't be trusted.
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As others have noted, it depends on who's designs they're fabbing, but the answer is that everybody who's designing high end, state of the art out-of-order with speculative execution chips has screwed up royalty. All of Intel, ARM, and IBM, both zSeries (lastest mainframes derived from the System/360) and POWER have Meltdown problems. All including AMD have much more sinister Spectre problems.
So everyone in the ind
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Only a very tiny part of ARM offerings has that stuff, and it seems they licensed most of it just to produce high end designs for specific customers.
I have dozens of ARM processors within 10' of me, across multiple families, and none of them have out-of-order speculative blah-blah, they're all pretty standard RISC chips. The deepest pipeline is 4 stages, in-order.
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Indeed, but are any of those chips within 10' of you competing with Intel for the desktop and server markets, or could they in theory do so (especially for the desktop)?
BTW, I remember reading that there's pretty much one ARM chip in every SD/SDHC/SDetc. card. I assume this is one way we get "billions and billions" of ARM CPUs shipped every year.
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Could a desktop CPU run the code running on the ARM chip at the same speed? No. Not even close. The worst-case latency of that desktop CPU is so bad, if you used it to power your keyboard you'd be missing keystrokes.
It is just a constant stream of "squirrel!" and "whatabutt?"
You were making an accusation against ARM. I pointed out it wasn't true. Now you're talking about desktops.
Yes, lots of people use ARM chips in desktops and servers, but no, that doesn't have anything to do with which chips are vulnerab
Re:What did they expect? (Score:5, Informative)
There is no historical evidence of the creative aggression of women on any level that has meaning in the large. Every device and entity that they occupy was created and pushed forward by men.
You write this on a comment thread about the fab AMD is using? AMD, the company headed by Dr. Lisa Su? The company that's going to cause Intel to lose a double digit market share percentage in 2019? For the second time in the company's history? That AMD?
She joined the company in 2012, became CEO in 2014, and is widely credited with driving the company to commit to and complete the Zen architecture. She took over from Rory Read, a business wonk who did businessy things... and drove AMD into the ground in the process by failing to invest in new development. She's a match for Dirk Meyer, the CEO prior to Rory Read who gave AMD their first big lead over Intel with the Athlon family.
It may be that men have created more things this way than women, but it's not "creative aggression" so much as it is risk-taking. Men take more risks than women. They have to, to reproduce it nothing else. Many of them fail in their aggression. Enough succeed that stuff gets made. But across the spectrum of risk-takers, there are women right up there at the high end of the spectrum, right along with the men. Dr. Su is one of them. So no, not "every device and entity".
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Lisa Su is also a very smart person, who did a degree because it was the hardest degree she could do. Compare that to the average business shifter who does the degree for money and because other degrees are way too hard.
Thats probably also the main difference between Su and other CEOs of other companies. First she is exceptionally smart. Secondly she comes from an electrical engineering/processor design background and knows the stuff she is having produced first hand and not only the business numbers third
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A classical example of the reduce costs for the next bonus, is microsoft where the testers of the Windows team were fired to a huge percentage to cut costs, the results were shoddy buggy rolling releases.
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You can't expect Zetas to understand that Betas select the Alpha from their own numbers, and that you have to be a Beta before you can be an Alpha, and you have to also have support from the other Betas.
They're so far below all that, the Alpha just looks like a Godhead to them. So they worship.
Zetas also rarely get to breed, so they don't have experience with the other sex and they get really distracted by their presence. This is one of the (many) reasons why the Zetas are chased off before the Betas get do
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That has got to be the biggest pile of horseshit I've ever read about women in the workplace, at least based on my experience.
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Time for today's English lesson. In this context, "prove" means "test", as in "The proof of the pudding is in the eating."
The idea that an exception would confirm a rule (the common misunderstanding) is pure nonsense. Garbage. False.
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I read some time ago, probably after they completely dropped the ball after totally slaughtering Intel with their K8 microarchitecture and interconnect technologies, that over time, AMD has never made money for their shareholders. They create a big hit, like their 486 bas
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ARM has the same exact security problems, right down to one of their latest designs having a Meltdown variant. Of course, the overwhelmingly vast majority of ARM chips are in-order, some superscalar like the Pentium before you get to their fastest designs, which of course are the only ones that can compete with Intel for processing power. No real joy for Intel haters, everyone in the industry has failed, AMD except for Meltdown, IBM both mainframe and POWER including Meltdown.
Also, I've never heard that A
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It would be very, very bad if their high end fabs got trashed or destroyed in a PRC attempt to take over the ROC. Everything would be messed up for a while due to inevitable trade disruptions with the mainland, but other countries can spin up discrete parts and low end silicon fab lines (for discrete transistors and the like, and for those a lot of outside China fabs could probably just up their output) faster than high end fabs.
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They're giving up and the customers of the defunct fabs are now TSMC customers.