> If that is the cost of keeping the value within the western economies, we should pay. Plain and simple. I'd even argue it's cheap.
No, that is not the cost of keeping "the value" within western economies. It would be the cost of granting the US a leverage against the collective west. The US proved to be a very unreliable and outright hostile partner. At this point, it is not clear whether the US is more hostile to the collective west than the likes of China.
It might be, but it's also pretty stupid to use that as a selling point to convince the west to welcome that play as something remotely in their best interests. It isn't.
Right , just to remind that China is the country that supports Proxy wars with west ( Ukraine ), supports Iran , a country that placed tariffs on whole industries, like cars, software , spy and buy technology to replace anything advanced.
A country willing to cut mineral supply anytime they don’t like anything is good partner and friend of EU , lol, how delusional someone can be ?
Even current US Administration sends Patriots and military support to Ukraine, while China is sponsoring WAR, help Russia to keep up with war killing people around the world.
China can end that war in 1 week if they really want.
US spent fortune to protect collective west while countries like Germany almost dismantled their army in the past.
Very rational thinking , sure. China will wipe out entire west with technological superiority in the next decade or two without west being united.
The US has committed more than its fair share of war crimes and notably even voted against the 2025 UN resolution condemning Russia for the Ukraine invasion, while China abstained from the vote.
China may potentially be able to stop the war, but at what cost? They've been licking their wounds and rebuilding their nation at breakneck speed for the past century, and it's only recently that they've finally reached a critical stage with innovations on all fronts. Going against one of their two allies now would be pretty ill-advised.
The US has also been very erratic, while China's current goals seem to be fairly consistent: reclaim everything they lost during the century of humiliation.
perhaps lot of european people need to have a wake up call. Europe is involved in a proxy war of China vs US. where EU associate member is fighting with china proxy, Russia.
Other proxies are Iran with their satelites, without china neither Iran or Russia would not survive current wars they sponsor agaist west.
as much as I hate current US admin, they push to increase NATO spending etc.
> perhaps lot of european people need to have a wake up call.
You haven't been paying attention. Even to this thread.
Let me be very clear: The US proved to be a very unreliable and outright hostile partner. At this point, it is not clear whether the US is more hostile to the collective west than the likes of China.
Therefore, let the US keep their backyard TSMC. It changes nothing. It helps nothing. It is not to be trusted.
> The United States is about half of the "collective West", the EU being the other largest single body.
The EU represents 27 sovereign states. NATO has 32 members. The US population is around 75% of the population of the EU.
And now decided to break off political, diplomatic, economic and defense ties.
I don't think this fact dawned upon you people. I mean, recently the EU basically banned the US defense industry from supplying EU's armed forces, which was unthinkable only a few years ago and it takes place during a rearmament push to prevent Russia's imperialist agenda. You can't whine about isolationism and still expect partners to still consider you relevant.
> It changes nothing. It helps nothing. It is not to be trusted.
Not when people are being absolutist rather than taking the situation for what it is and doing the best they can with it.
Tariffs or no the US wants back in on the construction/manufacturing industry. This is something that should be seen as a good thing. I just wish the EU was so visionary but we're worried about recycling plastics (when we don't use the plastic) or curtailing bad think (rather than open dialogue)...
> Not when people are being absolutist rather than taking the situation for what it is and doing the best they can with it.
The US is threatening NATO partners with invasion and annexation, not to mention the moronic tariff war, and you come here talk about "absolutist"? Pathetic.
Your country has threatened, out of nowhere, to annex my country - until now America's oldest and most steadfast ally - or failing that to destroy our economy until we capitulate.
I do not feel united. And, echoing you, how is that not unreliable?
> Right , just to remind that China is the country that supports Proxy wars with west (...)
The current US administration directly and very overtly threatens two NATO members with invasion and annexation.
I personally can't interpret Trump administration's insistence on supporting Russia on all fronts alongside its enthusiastic push to completely cut military support for Ukraine as anything other than something far more damaging to the collective west's protection than whatever support China or even North Korea is providing to Russia.
There is no way to spin this: the US is the biggest threat to the collective west, not only by reneging on their obligations towards their allies in general and NATO in particular but also by it's clear and very overt threats.
China is actively supporting the Russian army. They don't want Russia to lose.
The Russians won't stop in Ukraine.
It can't be more clear than this which country is a greater danger to the West.
> Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told the European Union’s top diplomat that Beijing can’t accept Russia losing its war against Ukraine as this could allow the United States to turn its full attention to China, an official briefed on the talks said, contradicting Beijing’s public position of neutrality in the conflict. https://edition.cnn.com/2025/07/04/europe/china-ukraine-eu-w...
> China is actively supporting the Russian army. They don't want Russia to lose. It can't be more clear than this which country is a greater danger to the West.
The Trump administration is overtly cutting support from Ukraine while pressuring Ukraine to capitulate to Russia. At the same time it's also pushing for sanctions to be lifted and economic times with Russia to be normalized. Trump went to the extreme of pressuring the G7 to admit back Russia.
What do you call that?
China supporting glorified golf cars doesn't hold a candle to the damage that the US has done to peace in Europe and the collective west's interests in security.
The US is in fact increasing support right now. Trump lost his patience with Putin.
You also underestimate the Chinese support. The war would have been over in 2023 if it wasn't for China.
> The discovery of a Russian decoy drone made up entirely of Chinese parts is another indication of the growing wartime relationship between Moscow and Beijing.
...
Beyond components, China appears to have provided Russia with at least some complete weapons systems. In May, we reported that Russia was using a new Chinese laser system to shoot down Ukrainian drones. https://www.twz.com/news-features/new-russian-drone-made-com...
US has been a reliable partner post WWII for 95%+ of the time. Making Trump administration representing 100+ years of US history isn't exactly a fair comparison.
Sure , trump administration trying to protect associate members of eu is not as good partner as China who directly support Russia , Iran and other country trying to wipe west, very logical
Sure, trump administration threatening members of the EU of war (economic or territorial) counts as "trying to protect". No dissonance in that whatsoever.
Don't worry they're just upset that the cheap toys from foxcon suicide plants are going to get out of reach.
Once everything dies down the people complaining will find something else to moan about.
Prices will normalise regardless of where things are manufactured that's the result of supply and demand. If people aren't willing to pay a bit extra maybe they never really needed luxury good X.
Ofc there's fools who over optimized their supply chain in the name of "modern economics of growth" and they'll get a wake-up call about stability and not bowing to shareholders. It's just a shame for most that that lesson will be in the form of layoffs and bankruptcy vs a CEO digging deep and personally reinvesting back in the company they're supposed to believe in.
But the signs are not good that the US will become more trustworthy again any time soon. The only back pressure on trump seems to be MAGA conspiracy theorists who look - if it’s possible - even less reliable than trump.
If you consider all US "friends", that is NOT the case. And not a Trump thing either, or even a Republican thing. USA is quite happy in screwing with "friends", if it will benefit some random lobby.
There is a quite long history of USA doing coups, sabotage, and so on, against its own "friends".
I don't think most people would contest the 100 years you mentioned.
If we look at the military investments US did since Clinton(so, last 30 years), you'll notice a trend of looking after it's own interests before the ones of the world. An example is the lack of investment in destroyers to patrol the seas, while at the same time the focus shifted to super-carriers which are good for one thing: obliterate a single, powerful country.
This is not just Trump, but everyone after Bush Sr.
There are 78 Arleigh Burkes completed, six in the build stage, and 15 on order.
There were only 31 Spruances and 4 Kidds.
That seems like an investment in destroyers, and much more capable ones than it's predecessors at that. Argubly more capable than even the Ticonderoga.
But maybe you mean something else I'm not groking.
If something happens to Taiwan, we won't regret being able to produce these chips domestically. If AI keeps growing like it does, it might even trigger a conflict.
I think realistically the US is unfortunately never going to protect Taiwan. There's no way I see it getting into an unwinnable hot war with China over territory so close to the mainland. If China sent troops to secure the Taiwanese fabs, how could the US possibly dislodge them without destroying the thing they want to protect? The focus on the CHIPS Act by both recent administrations seems an admission that they don't expect to rely on Taiwan's production long term. The question is will China sit back and let TSMC complete factories in the US, or will it invade Taiwan first? I've seen estimates that Beijing expects to surpass Taiwan's fab abilities in as soon as five years, so perhaps they don't even care about the US acquiring expertise that will be obsolete by the time it is built. Hopefully a knowledgeable individual can correct my extremely limited understanding of this issue.
> how could the US possibly dislodge them without destroying the thing they want to protect?
I would instead assert that it is very likely that the US would destroy the fabs rather than allow China to gain control of them through an act of aggression.
The doctrine of mutually assured destruction has been around a long time. The international players are familiar with it.
The current U.S. leadership is so chaotic and seemingly uninvolved in strategy that predictions about whether/how MAD would play out are difficult to make.
I highly doubt it. Taiwan would destroy their own fabs before someone else did. But that's likely unnecessary, China would be unable to operate the fabs anyway and they've already stolen the relevant information and are trying to recreate it. TSMC would get their experts out of the country and their trade partners would simply stop supplying the vital materials.
And mututally assured destruction has nothing to do with the US destroying an industry in Taiwan. MAD specifically refers to the idea that superpowers cannot engage in nuclear war against one another without also being destroyed themselves, because of a Nuclear Triad.
For "Mutually Assured Destruction" to be in anyway applicable, you'd have to say that the second that the US destroyed "Chinese" fabs (Taiwan), China would destroy American fabs. Thus, the US would not attack China without risking itself. The US making targeted strikes on Taiwan is one sided destruction. But to be clear: MAD doctrine is specifically about fullscale thermonuclear war.
All the best to war games seem pretty bleak given the relative salience of the issue between US & China.
Being a small island it’s much more of a zero sum / all or nothing fight than say Ukraine where at some point they can agree on a line on the map for Putin to walk away with a territorial partial win.
Lot of headwind for US between ship building, distance, whether Japan allows usage of bases, total manpower, Chinese ship killer missiles, authoritarian dictatorships willingness to throw manpower into meat grinders, etc.
Not that it’s a slam dunk for China either - beach landings are hard, and their war machine is largely unproven.
The most likely outcome is Taiwan or US destroy the fabs in event of invasion.
I think this is the reality behind the past relative world peace; international dependencies. Russia got away with a lot of shit because most of Europe thrived on their cheap gas and oil. Many countries are in debt with each other or have valuable assets (gold, nukes) stashed with each other.
There used to be open war between European countries every 30 years or so. That hasn’t happened. So mission accomplished?
And before anyone says it’s because of nukes or superpower protection or whatever, there has been plenty of wars on the periphery of the EU during this time. The balkans, Cyprus, Egypt, etc.
>There used to be open war between European countries every 30 years or so. That hasn’t happened.
I meant how did that ensure peace between Ukraine, Russia and EU? It clearly didn't even though EU was buying shit tonnes of gas from Russia, and Russia was buying shit tonne of aerospace parts and stuff from Ukraine. War still happened.
[..edited out the Yugoslavia argument..]
All the proof shows "peace through trade" does not work. The only thing that works is "peace through strength", which then you can use to enforce and defend your own favorable trade policies for you and your close allies, which has been the US's MO since 1945.
> Yugoslav wars started in 1991 and ended in 2001. Russia invaded Crimea in 2014. Are these wars not "European" enough?
Well, Ukraine, Russia and the former Yugoslavian republics that had wars are not part of the EU, or were not at the moment they had their wars. And even though all neighbouring countries trade with the EU, their economies are much less interdependent than those of the EU countries because of the lack of free trade and freedom of movement.
So this supports the idea that the EU does prevent wars rather than invalidating it.
I didn't caricature your words, so please don't do it with me.
Of course the US plays a part. But they don't have bases everywhere so it's not that obvious why it would explain why France and Luxembourg get along fine but Serbia and Kosovo don't, is it? Or Turkey and Greece, which both host US bases.
The discussion wasn't about getting along fine but about economic ties preventing wars, since Russia and Germany were also "getting along fine" till 1940 when they suddenly weren't.
And Luxemburg has nothing that would prevent France form invading them if they wanted to, economic ties or not. Economic ties might even be a negative for your protection since economic ties have to be negotiated but if you invade the other party you own their assets and economy and don't need to negociate any ties anymore.
The only thing prevents war is a strong military force.
>>The only thing prevents war is a strong military force.
Why hasn't France invaded Luxemburg then? They would be met with close to zero resistance and no other EU state would attack them militarily for it. You must be able to see that there are other factors preventing war other than military force?
Because they're a developed, civilized, self sufficient democracy, so they have more to loose than to gain by doing that in modern times.
My point wasn't that they aren't, my point was that they can do it if they want to, and no trade is gonna stop them, they just don't want to because they don't need to.
If you want a better example look at Monaco, who had to cede to France and tax only the French citizens living there as Monaco was popular place for French elite tax dodgers. Monaco did this for France and no other country precisely because France has the military upper hand in this negotiation and could just invade them without breaking a sweat if they opposed.
Another example is when Swiss military accidentally bombed their neighboring ally Liechtenstein several times during drills/exercises, and they just apologized with a box of wine, but funny how they never accidentally bomb their more powerful neighbors France and Germany. Weird how the small kids who can't fight back always end up being bullied, amirite?
Not to insist, but... Monaco is not part of the EU. Switzerland and Liechtenstein aren't part of the EU either.
Luxembourg is, and it doesn't get bullied by its neighbours, using your words. (Not anymore at least, because most of historical Luxembourg has been annexed by its neighbours in the recent past).
> I meant how did that ensure peace between Ukraine, Russia and EU?
There lies the source of your confusion. The EU was designed to prevent wars within Europe, not between outside members. Do you think that NATO bombing Kadafi represents a failure of the EU's mission?
> There used to be open war between European countries every 30 years or so. That hasn’t happened. So mission accomplished?
thats a weird way to justify the logic. so one arbitrary datapoint is enough?
the EU has been relocated to a second tier in terms of economic importance and they have no credibility when it comes to geopolitics. does that sound like mission accomplished?
Plus, France and German economies were also connected before WW2 and that didn't stop the war. And the economies of former Yugoslav nations were very well connected, that didn't stop them going to war with each other.
What stopped the wars after WW2 was western Europe being under the rule of a nuclear superpower needing to unite against a bigger nuclear superpower next door, and the countries having democracies with separation of powers making war declarations on their neighbors impossible politically, nothing to do with economies.
So the famous "muh economies connected = no war" is a very reductionist and short sighted take that ignores evrything else.
Do you believe Russia and Ukraine are a part of the EU?
> Plus, France and German economies were also connected before WW2 and that didn't stop the war.
Even if we ignore the complete ignorance required to make that statement and take it at face value, keep in mind that the interwar period lasted little more than 20 years. The EU's inception started in the early 1950s with the treaty of Rome being signed in 1957. So at this point the EU's track record on peace is already twice as long as your reference period, and counting.
No one is saying that trade makes war impossible-- but every bit of trade is an additional incentive to not start war, especially if it affects a broad slice of the population directly (=> the average German would be much more affected from losing car exports than the average Russian from lower gas exports).
Regarding Russia:
I believe that the main mistake on the western side was underestimating Russias imperialistic ambitions combined with the almost existential risk that a western aligned, economically successful Ukraine would have been for the current regime: Russian citizens getting overtaken economically by former compatriots makes it much harder to keep the kleptocracy running; Poland is one thing, but the same happening with the Ukraine would have hit much closer.
But regardless, I'm highly confident that Russia/Putin would have decided against the war with the benefit of hindsight.
You could even argue that insufficient economical consequences (from the Europeans-- basically the other, necessary side of the peace-by-trade playbook) after the 2014 annexation were a big factor in encouraging the war in the first place.
Pretty well I'd think. Myself and many(obviously not all) people of my generation consider themselves European before their primary nationality. The idea of EU states going into any kind of conflict with each others is beyond absurd.
It wasnt the oil or gas. Europe was perfectly capable of substituting both.
They got away with it because they built up their industrial base while the west let its industrial base wither. It's only starting to dawn on our leaders (3+ years in) now that dropping the ball on stuff like steel, mortar and missile production actually loses wars and that it takes years to undo those mistakes.
The west's Achilles heel was always profit driven capitalism + a superiority complex. All China had to do was to systematically undercut the west on industrial inputs while its superiority complex held firm and the west took care of hollowing out its own economic and military potential.
Even today when the US produces ~50/year patriots for the entire west and Ukraine needs ~400-500/year to stay afloat some people are still telling fairy tales about how a lack of "will" was the only thing standing between putin and domination. The superiority complex hasnt even died yet.
Fwiw, I think theres so much demand that we could be building 10x as much and still depend on Taiwan. Chip fabs take a long time to build. Probably don't need to worry about that for at least a decade, if not two. Especially now with intel dying
True. We think about very narrowly when it comes to ICs. Mostly CPUs and GPUs, but there's a whole fleet of supporting ICs or other purpose built silicon which needs fabs, from simple capacitors, to power regulators and ASICs.
So, having them spread over is nice, but not enough.
It's probably the opposite. I very much doubt that the factory would continue to operate if the US refused to defend Taiwan. The factory gives Taiwan a huge amount of leverage.
The supply chains for chip production terminate in Asia but there aren’t many inputs that originate there (which is by design). The real value to be lost are the Taiwanese engineers themselves.
Of course it would continue to operate. The Chinese division of Arm went rogue and basically captured the entire operation from within. USA has both the engineering expertise and the incentive to do the same with an entire chip fab, if push came to shove.
The difference is that ARM is not existentially important to UK national security, whereas TSMC is existentially important to Taiwan's national security.
A TSMC fab in the US is essentially like a military base, if the US decides to take it by force the Taiwanese government can make sure there's nothing left worth taking. All of the Taiwanese employees will be loyal to Taiwan, it's their family members' lives on the line.
The only way that fab continues to operate in the event of war is if the US backs Taiwan. If Taiwan burns then that fab will go with it.
For how much longer will the United States have that expertise? Both major political parties seem intent on becoming completely reliant on importing labor, both blue collar and white collar, while giving domestic labor the finger. Boomers are already retiring by the millions and Gen-X aren't all that far behind. Outsource mania and its cheap visa labor twin had been growing since the 1990s so the younger generations have been shaped in that environment. Does the United States really have that expertise or does it simply have a bunch of guests with that expertise? Should a country have to hope that it can pander to those guests enough for them to stay and be loyal (and possibly disloyal to their homelands)? Doesn't seem very stable in the long run.
America is made up of guests who stayed and were loyal. That's the entire US population. Not sure how long of a run you're talking about, but it's worked pretty well for the past 250 years.
> For how much longer will the United States have that expertise?
> Does the United States really have that expertise or does it simply have a bunch of guests with that expertise?
The US has the expertise. I’m not totally sure what you are meaning to say with your second sentence - are you saying that only very recent immigrants or those here on various temporary visas have the knowledge or ability do do this stuff?
>> Ironically my only opposition to US chips is that we’re less liable to protect Taiwan if China invades
I'm amazed at how many people think China is going to take Taiwan by force. They're playing a long game because they want it intact. They want the people there to want to be part of China. That doesn't seem to be going very well, but how can outsiders know? But again they're playing a long game and have plenty of time so long as things are moving in the right direction.
This may be the case but China is also steadily building the specific capacity to take the island by force. Circumstances could easily change. What if they decide the Taiwanese people will never accept unification, or something unexpected happens to the Chinese leadership? The US gets heavily engaged in a different war?
In a world of US and China being at odds with each other and controlling a GPU factory each, AI for Europe, Japan, Australia, etc becomes a game of who can kiss ass better and hoping the master doesn't change the rules further.
There should be more places that can produce enough energy and have AI leverage.
> The way to reduce the risk is to diversify. Taiwan with a China risk and the US with a "US risk" is much safer than either alone.
Not really. Taiwan with a China risk means China has pressure to not change the status quo.
US with a US risk means they have a vested interest to facilitate China's imperialistic agenda to try dethrone Taiwan as a competitor in the chip market.
That, coupled with the imbecile tariff war, underlines the unacceptable risk presented by the "US risk".
Until the rest of the world actually stops using the US Dollar as their reserve currency instead of endlessly talking about it but never actually do more than some token local trades, I don't believe the rest of the world prefers Mainland China invading Taiwan over dealing with the US. People (and countries) love to bluster but their actions are far more indicative of their outlook than posturing is.
The phoebus cartel whine is bullshit - incandescent light bulbs should be limited to 1000 hours because 1) the cost of electricity used by the bulb is easily as much as the replacement bulb (in the 1920s/1930s), and running the bulb hotter makes it more energy-efficient, and 2) because running incandescents cold makes the light look sickly and awful. Light bulbs were mostly being sold by electric companies at the time, so trading one for the other didn't matter to them.
Planned obsolescence does happen, but the phoebus cartel is the worst 'example' of it.
This seems slightly inconsistent with them testing all cartel member's bulbs and fining those who surpassed 1000 hours. If shorter-lasting bulbs were better looking and more efficient their fining mechanism would be energy efficiency / appearance related.
Or require no fines at all. It's much simpler to sell a non-sickly looking bulb at the store and other companies would converge.
I wonder what the economic calculation looks like. How much efficiency would be lost by doubling the lifespan? It depends on the relative price of lightbulbs and electricity, and the cost (in time/effort/inconvenience) when a bulb blows.
> the cost of electricity used by the bulb is easily as much as the replacement bulb
This point is only relevant if 1000 hour old bulbs cost more electricity to run than new bulbs. Maybe I don't understand how old bulbs worked but why couldn't they invent ways to make bulbs run hot which also last longer than 1000 hours.
Light bulbs die because the filament slowly evaporates. If you increase the filament temperature just a little, efficiency increases quickly and life expectancy decreases quickly. They were already using the most heat-resistant metals, too. It's not sabotage, it's physics.
It's fine to complain it's a bad example of "planned obsolescence", but I hope you didn't downvote me for that (i got a few downs).
I was just talking about organization of competitive companies for price manipulation, but specifically controlled for the benefit of the public - such that we don't lose the US plant due to natural market forces.
It's why ULA is still in business despite SpaceX being significantly cheaper.
If something happens to Taiwan, the USA will have given a huge military advantage to its biggest adversary.
It's going to take decades for the USA to catch up with Taiwan, and once China has its grip on the fabs they'll only further advance them.
In an existential crisis, the chances of Taiwan's leadership doing a deal with China when it's military protector retreats from its former declarations is in no way low.
It'll be the end of American military dominance but in fitting with the US's repeated isolationist trajectory.
How did that come to be? The US used to be the world leader in chip manufacturing and that wasn't all that long ago. Why was something so critical given away so freely?
The global supply chain is now so deeply interwoven that a large geopolitical disruption is nearly impossible. It took explosives for the EU to curtail its Russian natural gas use. And there is still stiff trade with Russia today (not as much as pre war) and lots of folks exploiting the gaps in that system (Turkey, India, china).
Ah yes, Taiwán - that famously stable nation with no existential threats to its very existence.
I don’t think this is an “if” situation, but rather a “when”. There is no question in my mind - it’s simply too attractive to China. It may not come through all out war, but they will eventually claim what they feel is theirs. They operate on much more manageable time scales.
What is so attractive to attempt the greatest amphibious assault in human history just to get an island with a bunch of people
who will hate you and have nowhere to run away.
Political reunification, i.e. land > people, see PRC saying "keep the island not the people". At this point no amphibious assault needed, just blockading TW and turning into gaza via mainland munitions now that starving masses is normalized is an option too.
PRC-TW/ROC is already ongoing civil war that never ended in ratification, so legally it doesn't really matter. It's no different than ROC doing port closure policy for decades.
How do you turn an island into Gaza when the US is providing weapons to it, and not to the other side? Ukraine seems like it would be a better example.
US+co essentially incapable of resupplying TW if PRC motivated to stranglehold blockade. TW is 15 times smaller than UKR, the quality of ISR and amount of munitions PRC can pour onto anywhere in the island and adjacent waters is also orders of magnitude more than RU and resupply via water and air is basically transparent vs myriad of obfuscated land routes UKR has, PRC can trivially locked down TW airstrips and ports from purely mainland platforms. Short distances involved = extremely rapid responses, as in not enough time to unload supplies - low single digit minutes from higher end PRC missiles... doesn't even need navy to enforce a kinetic blockade. TW also 98% dependant on energy imports, 70% on calories. Better example is Cuba, if US wanted to blockade Cuba or depopulate the island, there isn't anything anyone can do about it, i.e. PRC take out some power infra (refrigeration) and water treatment plants and island basically becomes Gaza in days. Ironically, if that happens the only actor with the logistics capability to sustain island with population of TW is PRC - US airlift capacity smaller than Berlin airlift and that was... for 2m vs 24m mouths. Which is why IMO all those new fancy landing barges likely going to be used for "humanitarian" relief - realistically no one in/out of region has the surplus to arbitrarily ramp up supplies for island of 24m... except PRC since that's ~1% of PRC population, almost rounding error vs covid0 mobilization.
There isn’t anything could do about the US invading Cuba because no one has much of a blue water navy outside the US itself.
Now granted, China is getting there but their navy is still mostly brown water (by design). And in any Taiwan / SCS conflict they would have an advantage because they can use their land assets, especially air force and land based anti ship rockets, on top of their navy.
The US land bases in the region are few or dependent on the grace of the host countries. Depending on political situation they might not Ok strikes against China if a conflict occurs for fear of being drawn into the war and angering China if the US loses. The only one Id be 100% on is Japan, they’d fight China to the last.
My gist is more no current bluewater Navy, including US is scaled to fight attrition battle in a near parity peer sized adversary's backyard. On paper this applies to current USN vs WestPac. Axis JP+DE during WW2, peak USSR were both ~1/2 of US comprehensive power, i.e. gdp ppp, % of global output, domestic industry output. PRC vs US closer to ~1-2x, with some metrics such as ship or munition building... order of magnitude more. In some gaps, US not even peak JP or USSR in relative terms. Even the month long 90s Iraq curbstomp required generational tech gab (french designers leaked/compromised IADs), 5 carriers and favourable regional basing (vs westpac), unsustainably high tempo sorties... when US militarily hasn't declined to current state in terms of capitalization... and Iraq then is charitably 1/100th the size of PRC. Unless there is unrevealed tech gap that still enables asymmetric curb stomp with a much smaller force - perhaps somehow none of Chinese hardware works, which at this point likely means completely dismantling PRC kill chain, i.e. what PRC intends to do vs US.
TLDR is the potential regional balance is increasingly lop sided in favour of PRC with gap widening, i.e. US+co can't preposition hardware at relevant rate. PRC hinted their cruise missile gigafactory has capacity to exhaust/target entire current US+co hardware inventory + stockpiles with few months production. A few more months enough to comprehensively shatter critical infra of US partners in 1IC. Hence why JP likely won't fight, because ultimately they're just a larger TW, also dependant on energy and calorie imports, and main islands also entirely within umbrella of PRC mainland fires. Mainland China is much better postured to operation Starvation JP than US from Marianas (25% further, and still needed logistics from CONUS) was during WW2. And if JP gives PRC excuse to fight them then PRC will (LBH be somewhat eager) to fight to the last JPnese. If JP doesn't, then they... well survive, maybe even still keep US protection. Most likely they'll only lose Senkaku when regional dynamics reconfigure. IMO current sign of JP not fighting is stronger than JP will fight... i.e. not opening main islands to distributed AGILE basing - US basically said they need JP in TW scenario, but they need to disperse all across JP not just Okinawa and Ryukyu's for survivability and JP action so far (since Trump1) is to not. It doesn't matter what JP politicians say for security theatre, IMO JP not committed until they start heavily militarizing main islands.
1) politics
2) breaking the US's submarine detection on the pacific, so now they can essentially slip unlimited undetected submarines into the pacific (and therefore the atlantic/indian)
3) being harder to navally blockade
4) disrupt the West's military chip advantage
By your very own logic, I could argue that dictators have more carte blanche to make correct choices, where democracies are mired down by compromises and too many cooks in the kitchen.
Going to war and killing people is "a mistake". Let me rephrase it for you:
The fact that democracies are the same murderous criminal fucks when it suits their goals as are dictators. Yes the have more problem having their population to approve it but do they give a flying fuck?
In a democracy ideas are ingrained in public psyche for support. Be it Muslims/Jews/Christians good/bad, immigrants evil, abortion bad all become part of a large percentage of people's belief and changing that requires equally herculean efforts.
In autocracy, people are generally kept aloof of such decisions so you can always switch enemies from Eurasia to Eastasia and no one cares. In case of China, the value of Taiwan/Arunachal/... is mostly egoistical, based on some notion that Qing China boundaries must be restored. If tomorrow a new leadership comes and makes EU kind of setup with Taiwan, people will have no say and most won't care.
They would. The main reason has always been the location. It’s right at the doorstep of China. It’s the same reason when Russia tried to install missile in Cuba, Americans dont like that. Cuba “crisis” is actually a US centric term. Also on east coast of Taiwan, theres a deep waters, submarines can enter pacific ocean much more stealthily.
Everything else is just bonus to them. Semiconductors, supporting nationalism, you name it.
This seems more correct. It's the same reason they got involved in the Korean war - didn't want anyone to cross the Yan(?) river that wasn't an ally of China. Too close for comfort.
You have to take a look at a map to really understand Taiwan's importance.
Taiwan isn't about military proximity. It's about access shipping access. Try open up a map. Despite China having a vast coastline, they do not have access to the open seas. Every one of their shipping lanes requires passage through another nation's waters.
If a heavy conflict were to erupt, China's supply chains would be cut off via naval blockade. It's a huge risk to China, and one they've attempted to ameliorate via the Belt and Road Initiative.
That changes if they acquire Taiwan. Taiwan's importance is not of offensive, but defensive primacy.
> If a heavy conflict were to erupt, China's supply chains would be cut off via naval blockade
Or possibly the 30+ fast attack submarines sinking every military or resupply vessel in the region, augmented by a colossal amount of rapidly-deployed naval mines.
Taiwan doesn't buy them much in this regard. Why would China be permitted to use sea freight at all in a "heavy conflict" scenario? Why not just sink these vessels near their origin - why allow Brazilian soybeans to even make it out of the hemisphere?
> Despite China having a vast coastline, they do not have access to the open seas.
I didn’t realize that Okinawa is halfway between the Japanese mainland and Taiwan, and the Japanese territorial waters extend right up to the Taiwanese EEZ on account of Japan’s far-flung southern islands.
Or more accurately, the Taiwanese government also believes that mainland China and Taiwan should be unified (ie. a One-China Interpretation). But that this One-China should be under the rule of the Taiwanese government and not the CCP, which they considered an illegitimate government, up until the 1992 Consensus.
After the 1992 Consensus [1], the Taiwanese government still considered the Mainland its territory (again under a One-China Interpretation), but also acknowledges the CCP's interpretation of One-China. In practice, this meant they officially abandoned plans to re-take the Mainland, and focus on maintaining the status quo of peace and stability.
Interestingly, the Taiwanese government also used to lay claim to Mongolia in addition to the Chinese Mainland.[2]
Almost no one in Taiwan still believes that though. But China has made it clear that they will invade if the Taiwanese government changes their official stance to be that they’re an independent country.
It's more complicated than that, and I think many people in Taiwan (even some in government), especially younger folks, wouldn't really think that way anymore. While it's dicey to say so, many would support full independence.
China has wanted Taiwan long before they fabbed semiconductors. It's a matter of ego and nationalism, not economics.
It's also political: China hates that there's a Western-style democracy full of "Chinese rebels" on an island 80 miles from their doorstep. They also don't like the cozy relationship between the Taiwanese and US militaries.
Yes, they would. However, if Taiwan wasn’t as important to the world because of their chips then the world would probably not care as much about what communist China wants to do to them.
Probably, my understanding is that the primary reason China cares about Taiwan is internal pressure about the separatism. The power Taiwan has is the only reason they haven’t acted.
The upside isnt huge to China. It is mostly their pride. The downside if not everything goes to plan is huge. Could end the communist party in China. I think it is a really though decision for the communist party if they should go all-in or not.
That is not true. A topological taurus can be flat or not.
A physical taurus embedded in our 3D universe, i.e. a donut, cannot be flat. Which may be the confusion.
But video game spaces are neither logically embedded or restricted by our 3D space. All its physics, including its spacial topology and geometry, flat or otherwise, were completely up to the game designers.
And the Asteroid game designers chose a flat space.
• Two parallel line segments stay parallel, no matter how long you extend them. Or how many times they wrap around the Asteroid space. (They also never intersect, but can overlap, just as in any flat 2D space.)
• Any number and distance of moves in any two perpendicular directions, are commutative. I.e. you can change the order of the moves, and you will still end up at the same spot.
• The three angles of any triangle in Asteroid space adds up to 180 degrees.
Companies charge what the market can bear, not based on their costs. Certainly they will often use some multiplier of their costs as a starting point, and they can't sustainably charge below their costs. But if they double the price of the product and lose more than half of their customers, that's a failure to set pricing properly.
Consider the reverse direction: if a company can decrease costs, they will usually pocket the extra profit, not reduce the price they charge. Price cuts usually only happen for one of two reasons: 1) to avoid losing customers to another company that is charging less (or to entice customers of another company that's charging the same), or 2) to capture more profit if they'll earn more customers at a lower price than they'll lose due to the lower per-unit profit. (Yes, there are other reasons, but these seem to be the main ones.
For goods that are not essential to life, prices are set based on what people are willing to pay vs. how many units can be sold at that price, with the cost as a floor (absent a policy of using a product as a loss leader).
This is not an easy inference. For this inference to be true , you have to know how much of the expense goes to salaries . Also, you have to give credit to tsmc to be world class which enables them to control prices, it may not translate across industries
Its a pretty easy inference for anyone who has mfg experience. The amount you pay per worker versus the quality of work you get back is STARKLY different between US and Taiwanese companies.
As in better or worse? The Taiwanese have been making most of our chips for quite a while. Americans are not naturally more gifted individuals, most manufacturing skills are transmitted from one worker to the next.
Haven't most things been like this for a very long time? I remember when Chinese tools showed up on the shelves, people will almost always by cheaper, however with tools, there is actually a cost to cheap tools (they suck), with semi-conductors, the cheaper version works just as good in the case of TSMC.
What special quality do "western" countries have that makes it a moral obligation to purchase from them over others? Why is it a moral good to keep value from the others?
> Purchasing products made under autocratic regimes strengthens those regimes and gives them more power on the world stage.
you wouldnt be able to export anything if other people took this stance, so how would anyone make any money?
The West lives under semi-democracy (partial oligarchy) and exports autocracy.[1] It’s fine for us to prefer to live here (I do; well it’s what I know) but we can’t claim the moral highground (not that anyone in this thread has done that necessarily).
[1]: Why are these countries “autocracies”? To better resist foreign intervention.
It's not about that; Taiwan is West-aligned anyway. It's for maintaining some level of self-reliance. Also, basic economics says that trade helps the country's overall economy, but that ignores how it's not applied equally. US manufacturing towns have been hollowed out over the years.
No, I am absolutely not going to pay a 20% premium on the market. I’m sorry but I won’t. If this is really crucial to national security then the government can subsidize the premium. And I know I’m not alone, price speaks louder.
This is not about national security. This is about being more than a simple consumer. If all your society does is consume, eventually, the money runs out.
We need to have know-how, talent and all that stuff to create some value.
We're bleeding all these things by the minute, and I don't want to be around when the critical point is reached.
What a ridiculous argument. So then every single country, every single city, every street should build their own chips, their own iPhones, right? Because wouldn't want to be "a simple consumer" only!
Nobody's arguing in favor of producing nothing. We're just saying there's something called comparative advantage and it's about maximizing efficiency. The US has no business manufacturing chips for strictly economic reasons. But when you consider national security concerns it looks different
Where is that idea coming from that you will be able to choose? Like there will be 2 versions of the same product on the shelves with one reading made in the usa and 5-20% more expensive? That's silly
The argument wasn't about chips specifically, but contributing in general. If your city has a workforce that produces something, you can use the money from selling that stuff to buy, for example, food.
If you don't, in western countries, mostly the welfare state steps in. And that's okay, we humans are social animals and I wouldn't have it any other way. But the welfare state has to be backed by productivity. Food and other stuff has to be produced by someone.
And when we're talking about international relations, if your exports don't cover your imports, eventually you'll go bankrupt.
You're applying macroeconomic theory to microeconomics and it isn't working. individuals will broadly try to maximize their own productivity and minimize their own costs. I'm not gonna pay an extra 20% for the same product everyone else is getting cheaper when my individual contribution to "national economic health" is a drop in the bucket. If that's what society wants then we'll have to tax and subsidize our way there. That's just how macro works
I think you're oversimplifying the argument in order to win internet points.
People of like minds and compatible values can and should work together and form agreements to allow each other to specialize in some ways and play to each others' strengths.
But in the West, our values are not compatible with the Chinese government's.
The government doesn't pay for things, we do through our taxes that they spend. So... instead of paying a markup on just your own consumption, you want to be taxed to pay for the subsidy on EVERYONE'S consumption?
We are the government. It's us doing the spending. You can vote to change it. And if we ever outlaw paid lobbying then voting will be even more effective.
It's calorie dense and exceedingly easy to store for long periods, providing us with an extremely high degree of food security. That said I agree with the sentiment that farm subsidies could probably use some improvement.
Americans are not in need of high calorie density, and 90% of this corn isn't being eaten anyways. Rice is easier to grow, eaten readily by more of the world, easier to store, easier to transport, etc. - there really isn't a great argument for corn.
But it could be. I don't have to consume the canned food in my basement for it to provide food security in the event of a natural disaster.
I'm finding exact numbers difficult to come by but rice requires noticeably more water to grow. Dried corn kernels are approximately equivalent to dried rice when it comes to storage and transport.
There really isn't any sensible argument for switching from corn to rice in the US midwest.
It’s not being stored. There’s no “strategic corn reserve”. What is not being consumed by people or animals gets turned into biofuel - the worst kind of fuel from thermodynamic perspective and one that would never exist without market distortion.
Which means that the US is continually producing far more potential food than we actually use. That constitutes a form of food security. What it gets used for instead - be that animal feed, chemical feedstock, fertilizer, etc - is largely irrelevant.
Are you certain there's no strategic reserve? If not there probably ought to be. Seems like a rather cheap form of insurance in the bigger picture.
The argument you’re making works just as well for any other crop. Productive land is the asset and the security, not the corn itself. In fact, growing the damn corn everywhere degrades the soil. We might as well grow wheat, rice, legumes, etc. Besides path-dependence there’s little reason for corn dominance.
Agreed that it's the active land use, not a specific crop, that matters from a food security perspective.
Disagreed otherwise though. Soil degradation is due to people cutting corners to save money. Rice requires significantly more water. Wheat and oats don't have the same shelf life. Legumes are likely comparable but how do they stack up against corn for things like animal feed and chemical feedstock?
The reality is that corn is an extremely practical crop regardless of its lack of political popularity of late.
It would be un-American to do anything other than what you're suggesting.
There's nothing that represents American values more than respecting the market, and supporting a non-competitive player is the kind of manipulation that could have had all kinds of negative implications, both now and in the past.
Enjoy not buying any chips next time there is a supply chain hiccup. If COVID didn't teach you this lesson, I don't think you're teachable.
If you're making a product one of the considerations you make is how robust your supply chain is. If you fail to make that consideration you will get eaten by the organizations that do, on a long enough timescale.
First, high-end chips have essentially a single global market. Compared to the value of the product, transport cost is negligible. If a TSMC Taiwan factory has an oopsie, all its customers are going to be buying from your local US plant - so you are still ending up having to deal with the effects of a significantly higher demand. AMD unable to ship? Expect Intel to go out of stock rather quickly as well.
Second, the chip manufacturing supply chain. Having a local chip factory is nice and all, but where is that factory getting its supplies and equipment from? Most of it does not come from the US, so during another COVID your local chip factory might still be forced to shut down. This also applies downstream: what use is a fancy high-end CPU if you can't find anyone locally to produce all the trivial parts you need to support it? Who is going to manufacture those trivial-yet-essential $0.05 connectors and $0.001 capacitors or resistors? That has all been outsourced to Asia decades ago.
A single US plant isn't going to do anything for your supply chain robustness. You're going to have to rethink the entire chain and each step is going to be 20% more expensive, so better prepare for a doubling or tripling of the final product price.
Local factories are nice for the defense industry, where the confidentiality needs due to national security might warrant the premium. But regular consumer chips? You'll be paying a huge premium just so a politician can get a couple of favorable headlines, often without there actually being a significant impact to the local economy.
Manufacturing of the trivial items can be brought online in a reasonable timeframe. The lead time on a modern process node on the other hand is measured in years, and that's when you already know what you're doing. China still hasn't achieved state of the art even after everything they've invested over the past 20 years or so.
> You'll be paying a huge premium just so a politician can get a couple of favorable headlines
You're paying a premium to reduce the cross section of risk that your local economy is exposed to. The cost savings of globalization do not come without their own downsides.
Why are people showing up to tell other people they'll be sorry if they don't pay more for the same product now, but are also absolutely opposed to subsidies by the government?
I already own a perfectly adequate computer for my needs. In every possible way this won't affect me, and infact so long as the cheaper product is available for purchase it still won't affect me. If I'm a business I'll be 20% better off then other local businesses by continuing to not buy local anyway. If I'm consumer...well I'll just have more stuff I want.
And so on in this way you might want to go read up on The Tragedy of the Commons in economic theory and then reflect on what one of the primary roles of government actually is.
Intel is a great example of the fact that between stupidity and low-integrity behavior as a default, the people in charge fuck up in ways that the man on the street would get right.
Defense is starting to get a blank check with fairly bipartisan support for the first time in at least 30-40 years and it's centered on semiconductor supply chains. There has never been a better time to secure the fucking funding, have ASML send twice as many people as they already have, and power through it. The market is whatever you want and the margins are whatever you want: in a functioning system? You fucking do it.
And while I will believe that Intel has suffered serious attrition in key posts, there's no way that the meta-knowledge of how to debug "we don't have the fabs running right, who do we hire, what so we need to give them to get it done" has evaporated in 5-10 years from the singular source of this institutional muscle memory in the history of the world.
The failing here is more like a failing in courage, or stamina, grit, something. It's a failure of the will to do the right thing for both the shareholders and the country.
> It's a failure of the will to do the right thing for both the shareholders and the country.
They've been doing the exact right thing for the shareholders: squeezing the living shit out of an asset (x86/64) for decades while cutting anything interesting or competitive to the bone to give shareholders more money. Money spent on something that could really have been competitive is money not sent to the retirement fund that keeps John and Jane Q. Public swinging in more ways than one at their golf course retirement community in Florida.
The problem is, you can only do that for so long. There is a minimum spend to remain a competitive company with regard to being able to market products to consumers. Executives don't have a fiduciary duty to create the best possible product for consumers to look at and potentially buy in the marketplace, but they do have a fiduciary duty to shareholders to meet an earnings projection. If these two activities can coexist peacefully, great. If not, the first activity stops while the company gets gutted.
It's not actually good for the shareholders unless you have a divisor which is effort. Intel is a semiconductor company, investors that want to invest in treasuries or Exxon or whatever is considered extreme low-beta (ha, maybe not Exxon anymore, maybe Visa) have every opportunity to do so.
The most expensive, highest-margin, technically advanced and risky business in the world is for investors who want that in their portfolio. If they wanted to milk a dying industry on the way down they would go buy Disney stock.
It is very clearly in the interests of long-term investors in Intel to maintain a commanding position in fabrication: it's been the secret sauce of the company since the very beginning, it's never been more in demand.
This idea that companies are obligated to do what will deliver some little bump in the stock price in 90-180 days is everything from not how the rules work to just a lazy meme for people who don't want to earn their princely salaries.
Much more complicated than that though market price action dynamics do play a role in corrupt corporate governance at some remove.
Different market participants will be trading on different signals, sentiments, or theses, and this will influence everything from the order types they use to the hold time of the instruments in question.
But one of many things they all have in common is that they know that what other people think about the future affects the price right now: an intuitive proof of this is that if some major announcement is made about e.g. trade policy, and the market deems it credible, you will see instruments transact up or down in price immediately.
In any effort to go deeper, one must be wary that this goes from market microstructure to Ito calculus to voodoo real fast, a closed form solution would be an infinite money machine! But a reasonable jumping off point might be the notion of a Keynsian Beauty contest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest
The TLDR is that hold times across like 13 orders of magnitude (rumor has it a cutting edge FPGA fielded by someone like Optiver or HRT or Virtu can pull a whole ladder in 20-50ns glass-to-glass, so whatever Buffet does divided by that) the market still in some sense reflects expectations about the future: it's "priced in" in trading parlance.
"Too late" has some ways you can use it meaningfully in finance, but it's not in the sense I take you to mean above.
The fiduciary duty is whatever the shareholders make of it, there is no need for it to be just monetary. If they were planning for long term instead of short term profits they would be making sure the company is still the world leader in 25 years. But since big investors are either pension funds or hedge funds (aka greedy bastards) you get earnings above all else.
They've been doing the exact right thing for the shareholders: squeezing the living shit out of an asset (x86/64) for decades while cutting anything interesting or competitive to the bone to give shareholders more money.
I would quibble with the exact right thing phrases but otherwise agree. Intel indeed followed a formula which is intended to and often does produce massive return for some time frame. The formula is indeed "gutting the company" - squeeze every part of an enterprise and return the results as profits. Whether destroying the companies long term prospects is worth these short term profits is a complex calculation.
A managers' duty is to promote long term value and stability, actually, but return enough short term profits and you trump that long investment income.
There are orhanized ways to wind down a business unit or even a whole business and convert the salvagable assets into shareholder value, these range from corp dev / M&A activity all the way through bankrupcy and bondholder seniority.
And in the days when fraud or "fraud-adjacent" behavior carried serious costs? When violating the social contract around pensions and severance and stuff had real reputational costs that followed the principles around? People used them when necessary. You sold off the assets sometimes.
But beginning with the LBO "innovation" in the 80s and running a line through Milken and shit all the way to the Vanguard/State Street/Blackrock "quasi-sovereign" level of PE asset capture?
People started arbing it, not by seeing value where others had missed it! By betting that Gordon Gecko had enough fans to make the arb work. "Gutting" a company slowely and painfully is in a bucket I'll call "fraud adjacent": usually not outright illegal (lotta "gray" work, gray edge), clearly not what society wants or intended, and you know it's a scam when you look in the mirror every night. i used to get wasted with these guys at Catch when I lived in NYC: they'll tell you everytging I am and more on five gin and tonics
There's no place for the word "duty" in any version of that argument unless you also use the word "derelict".
Don't think I'm using duty in any sense other than the sense than that the corporate raiders have set-up a situation where management feels forced to engage in the program of gutting they outline. All of this is part of the gutting of the US of course.
By betting that Gordon Gecko had enough fans to make the arb work. "Gutting" a company slowely and painfully is in a bucket I'll call "fraud adjacent": usually not outright illegal (lotta "gray" work, gray edge), clearly not what society wants or intended
Sure, but if society doesn't intend this, society has to f---ing do something. Clearly it's not.
IE: if the only legal obligation of management is promoting maximum legally possible valuation over time, "squeezing" still makes sense if there's enough money to be had. The only way to change this is forcing the issue in some fashion or other.
That's because they're in a death spiral caused by gutting.
At a certain point, you hollow yourself out, and you can't recover. Top-level talent doesn't want to work at a place that doesn't have a real shot. So things just... peter out.
The climate of uncertainty under Trump inhibits long-term investment, whether in chip fabs, car factories, or anything else. He has reminded us all of something that's really always been a problem: whatever one Congress or one POTUS supports can be undone by the next.
Usually opposing parties have had the common sense not to immediately hit the undo button once they take office. E.g., Biden leaving most of Trump's previous nutty tariffs in place. But "common sense" isn't on the agenda these days. We are, to all intents and purposes, under attack from within.
The decline in what we expect of our leaders has been going on my entire life and the contrast between 20 years ago and the present is stark.
In 1998 Meriwether and the rest of LTCM nearly crashed the economy, needed the Fed to get involved, and they were personally ruined, guy never opened a ten thousand dollar bottle of wine again and probably never had anything again. Shortly thereafter, Jeff Skilling took out offices in 9 cities and pension plans all over the country with shady accounting. 24 years in prison (reduced later to 14). Ebbers/Worldcom 2002: died in prison.
By 2008? Zero prosecutions. Bonuses the next year.
Around the same time Clinton got caught lying about chasing (consenting and of age) skirt in the Office: nearly ended his presidency, definitely ended his policy agenda, real consequences and he caught a shooting star to avoid far worse. The public was not going to accept it, Congress was not going to let it slide on either side of the aisle. Today? Something like that barely makes the press. You have to be accused of sex trafficking to even get an investigation started and everyone will probably walk.
The idea that this became uniquely bad in January, or even 2016 is demonstrably untrue. At some time in the last 30 years we started accepting leadership who are dishonest, nakedly self-interested, lie without consequences, enrich themselves via extraction rather than value creation, collude with no oversight, and sell out the public.
This is a completely bipartisan consensus on these norms. Speaking for myself, I think Trump represents a new low, but not by much, he's just the next increment in what history will probably call the Altman Era if his ascent to arbitrary power on zero substance continues on it's current trajectory.
It's not even centered on the US. I personally think the Internet just desensitized us all.
Reasons for that are easy to come up, imo chief among them being web2.0 (social media) and the ever increasing degree with which people exaggerate everything just to get a reaction.
Under that context, what's a little skirt chasing compared to what people usually say about the politicians? And how are you gonna remember he did something a few months ago, when so many more extreme things have happened since?
Really, I feel like social media will be considered the most destructive force to society in 20-50 yrs
30 years ago in the US, there were a handful of major TV news outlets, and most people got their news from one of those and/or a newspaper, of which there were also a limited number.
The thing about those sources is that for the most part, it wasn't really economically viable to alienate half the population by leaning hard right or left. Any reduction in audience would likely translate to a commensurate reduction in advertising revenue.
Today, there are many, many sources of 'news' available in various forms around the internet, and of course people are free to choose what to pay attention to. This means it's entirely feasible for each source to cater to a particular viewpoint, even at the expense of definitely alienating half or more of the theoretical potential audience.
I theorize that the reason for this is that people have voted with their feet, balanced sources aren't as profitable and that's why there are fewer of them. It makes sense, a more balanced take on events is by definition not nearly as sensational, and almost always requires more mental effort on the part of the listener.
That by itself would probably be enough to explain the current situation, but on top of that, we also have the fact that many people receive the above mentioned information via algorithms designed to feed them more of what they already like (i.e. agree with) and nothing else, which of course only amplifies the effect further.
I have no idea how we get out of this situation (or if in fact we will), but in my mind it's not surprising at all.
The cracks in the media were already visible 30 years ago. Conservative talk radio was taking off, people were beginning to call CNN "Clinton News Network", and Fox News was right around the corner. There was clearly an appetite—and a market—for partisan news. This was further fueled by the growth of national radio and TV networks that were less beholden to capturing local audiences.
I think the internet just supercharged a change that was already well underway.
Agreed. And Democrats were fucking stupid and decided to just ignore all of the systems Republicans were putting into place over decades. There are multiple conservative think tanks who approve supreme court nominations and spearhead Republican policy. They have been working on it for decades. It's unfortunate that the only political party in this country which can look to the future an make long term plans is the one most likely to follow the Nazi party into the history books.
Unfortunately, the policies you get from any party that is disciplined over decades in putting long term power plays ahead of good governance is ... more long term power plays.
I usually can think of at least a few plausible/possible solutions to most problems. But I am not at all sure what the Democrat's right response should have been.
However, a severe lack of legal tolerance for businesses that use technology to super-scale poisonous conflicts of interest, like surveillance backed ads and media feeds algorithmically manipulated for addiction/attention behavior would have been part of it.
Zuck should have been put away for life a few accidental genocides ago. (IMHO)
It’s almost like the correct action to take would be a Luddite-style wrench-in-the-works. Sabotage in service of humanity. And as an added bonus, think of all the electricity we’d get back!
It's like watching the public discourse devolve into ever more screaming and posturing.
The only winning move is not to play.
Sometimes I find myself thinking about that experiment with the perfect rat paradise.
The overpopulation got so bad, the normal social functions of the rats started to break down and the rats started acting like sociopaths.
Sometimes, I think that's what we're doing to ourselves by exposing the average human to millions of voices through the internet.
Of course, ironically, I'm ignoring my own advice and still engage with the Internet.
Though I mostly keep to HN and some IRC.
The mouse utopia experiment is mostly fake and researchers who reproduced the experiment didn't see any of those behaviors: https://gwern.net/mouse-utopia
It was just as wrong as predictions about human overpopulation like Malthusianism
But you're doing more then that: even in what you call a crisis you are refusing to engage with specific issues, resorting still to generalities and calls about "both sides".
Like there are any number of extremely specific issues which are not "screaming and posturing" unless you're dead set on not talking about them.
Huh? "Both" sides? I didn't even think about any sides, much less specifically two of them. My comment wasn't even necessarily about online discussions concerning politics.
It was just as much about, for example, the way people show off their fake-successful influencer-lifestyle or something like that. The ways that social media causes bad feelings like jealousy, for example.
We populate our corporate leadership with non-founders so highly compensated that actually succeeding does not matter to them. They've already "won" at the game, and they spend a lot of time posturing with respect to each other. They set the membership criteria for the "club", reinforce each others' positions, and use the ability to bestow membership to manipulate the political system away from regulating or taxing them.
The rot has been going on for a lot more than 30 years. Try 70 years more like. LBJ openly cheated on his wife Lady Bird while he was in office and he never suffered any consequences for it. Eisenhower was the last good president.
The child sex ring that was uncovered in 2008 resulted in ludicrously light consequences and then after a repeat offense in 2019 was systematically ignored until now.
> Around the same time Clinton got caught lying about chasing (consenting and of age) skirt in the Office: nearly ended his presidency, definitely ended his policy agenda, real consequences and he caught a shooting star to avoid far worse. The public was not going to accept it, Congress was not going to let it slide on either side of the aisle. Today? Something like that barely makes the press. You have to be accused of sex trafficking to even get an investigation started and everyone will probably walk.
>Around the same time Clinton got caught lying about chasing (consenting and of age) skirt in the Office: nearly ended his presidency, definitely ended his policy agenda, real consequences and he caught a shooting star to avoid far worse. The public was not going to accept it, Congress was not going to let it slide on either side of the aisle. Today? Something like that barely makes the press. You have to be accused of sex trafficking to even get an investigation started and everyone will probably walk.
The same President Clinton, with the same Congress, repealed the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999 and thereby effectively legalized much of the next 26 years of corporate malfeasance, starting with much of what enabled the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. And when they did this, it was popular and politically nonthreatening.
They heavily pushed the idea that the opposition could not have legitimacy. Gingrich did it through the exercise of power and Limbaugh did it on the airwaves. It wasn’t just that the opposition was wrong or bad for the country, standard democracy stuff, but that the opposition had no right to hold power at all. Once you start thinking that legitimacy is based on which side you’re on rather than who you are or what you do, you won’t care about bad leadership as long as it’s yours.
Falwell and Reed were the genesis of modern conservative disgruntlement rooted in tribal identity. Limbaugh and Gingrich used that as fuel for deconstructing civil administration after the '94 regime change.
Couldn't agree more. And we see the continuation of this stuff today in Trumpist assertions that the 2020 election was rigged, simply because there's "no way" that Biden could have won over Trump.
Trump's entire rhetoric relies on this tactic. Anyone who disagrees with him or tries to shut him down should be impeached, jailed, whatever, because they shouldn't be allowed to exercise their power against him, no matter how legally they wield it.
It just makes me so angry to hear Vance say things like "judges aren't allowed to control the executive's legitimate power". Yes, they are! That's literally one of their jobs, specifically enumerated in the constitution! But that's the tactic: train people to believe that the judicial branch is not legitimate when it comes to executive branch decisions.
Intel's C-suite is gonna pick up this line of reasoning soon! "It's not our fault the stock crashed and the fabs don't run and TSMC is eating our lunch, blame Trump instead!"
Trump causes uncertainties in some areas but I would not say that fab investment or factories is one of those areas. The democratic president after Trump has pretty much kept the exact same course as Trump, even going so far as continuing to build the border wall that Trump started, continuing the tariff behavior as you noticed too and certainly they will continue to want chips factories at home in the US. That much is already clear when you look at what the democrats say and do. I would struggle to find anything other than deportation or tax schemes that the next president will change. And even there.. it's not like the democrats changed the so called Trump tax cuts "for the rich" when they were in power.
One main area that comes to mind that democrats will attempt to change are social issues like policies around sports for trans people or bathrooms or POC/LGBT specific funding. As much as they (quite hilariously) keep telling everyone else to stop caring about this supposedly fringe issue, that's really the first thing they will probably try to reimplement. I still remember how Biden, in his ~1st week in office, immediately implemented farmer funding specifically for POCs. It's so absurd but this seems to be what they care about most, essentially on its face racial policies.
It's more a huge part of messaging from conservatives about liberals. And that you think otherwise indicates your media bias. Democrats respond to Republican cultural issues. As they should. When Republicans state that immigrants are eating your cats and dogs you'd better well fucking address the nonsense otherwise people like you start thinking Haitians are actually out there eating people's pets.
> no matter how bad Trump gets, at least he doesn't claim yet that the sky is green
Just coal then?
Trump speaks nonstop nonsense. His policies don't even make sense to what is left of the Republican Party that isn't "all with him".
The left does get shrill about equal rights, but then, the people they aim to protect have been persecuted. I mean people actually brutalized for just being themselves - and I am talking about friends and family and ambulances, and surgeries after surgery. And now, Trump's idea of finding balance is to continue/resume denigrating many classes of people. So that's not an issue the Republican party comes out ahead on right now.
I personally don't understand why anyone would label themselves right or left. Group identification is disastrous for balanced thinking. Like noticing the left is shrill, but not noticing the right's idea of balance is to ignore or celebrate second class treatment for millions of people.
Group identification is also ruinous for any kind of actual innovative thinking, as apposed to ideology. Reality and reason have nothing to do with political power alignments. The runaway centralization of power within the two parties has become the biggest impediment to US competence.
> Defense is starting to get a blank check with fairly bipartisan support for the first time in at least 30-40 years and it's centered on semiconductor supply chains.
Really? Because:
> During Donald Trump's 2025 speech to a joint session of Congress, the president asked House Speaker Mike Johnson to “get rid” of the subject act.[190]
Only if that activist investor acts with decisiveness, vision, long-term goal orientation, and demonstrates consistently high-integrity behavior.
What has much more commonly produced good outcomes in such situations is robust public-private partnerships like the ones that produced the semiconductor industry in the first place. Run the list of innovations in strategically key technology and what will you find at one remove in every instance? The DoD, NASA, the Labs and ATT more broadly, the university system.
It's always a public/private partnership during periods of explosive value creation when the stakes are high, and it's always a private sector capture orgy during periods of extractive stagnation like the present.
If you have any evidence for the claim that "many parts of DoD" are being exploded/defunded, it would be really interesting to see that. As far as I can see, just the opposite is true; the military industrial complex looks like it's increasing in size and scope.
The recent budget cut about 5% from the DoD research budget.
A lot of cash is going to be redeployed towards tilting at the windmill of domestic ballistic missile defense… while we’re watching a war in Ukraine where cheap drones are demonstrating that most major weapons platforms are functionally obsolete.
We've had crime season gilded ages before. We've had trusts and corruption before. I agree that on present course and heading we are not going to make it out of this one in anything like the position we're accustomed to, but it's not impossible and frankly it wouldn't even take that much.
Forums like HN full of senior technologists and future founders are disproportionately high impact. If the tone around here shifted a little to stop excusing what YC has become and start embracing how it all started?
Shit like that adds up. geohotz had that post a few weeks ago about this late capitalism internet shit, he was pretty deep in with the Effective Altruists and he got it together. I said at the time and I'll say again, you get a few more people like that to sober up? pmarca and lex and people? Maybe even pg?
Intel needs a full-time board that gives a shit about whether the company succeeds. You could populate that board with nearly any combination of capable founder types and you'd get far better results.
The current board is a pack of cargo-culting epitaph writers.
They're a particularly egregious example of what corporate governance has become, but they're cut from largely the same cloth as the rest of our leadership class. Maybe a little dumber than average, a little more short-sighted, but devoid of any notion of obligation?
I forget the name of the speaker guy who has this turn of phrase, but whatever the merits of his overall platform this hits perfectly: "People doing well today are using every means at their disposal to decrease their accountability while increasing their compensation. If you don't compensate people based on the responsibility they are willing to undertake, you will get a world run by people like this and it will look like the world you live in right now".
Imho activist investors are usually about cutting investment in the future, maximizing the current accessible profits, collecting a wad of cash, then letting the company die while moving off to be active on another board.
Intel's fab issues are overstated in my opinion. They were stuck on 14nm for a very long time because they bit off too much with 10nm. People act like that means ALL research in nodes smaller than 10nm must have stopped, but that's simply not true as research into tech and materials needed for smaller nodes happens in parallel.
It's also noteworthy that GAAFET being a complete redesign of major parts of the manufacturing process levels the playing field significantly. A big example of this is Japan's Rapidus which was founded in 2022 and has managed to invent (and license) enough stuff to be prototyping GAA processes.
Intel's 18a process seems to be quite good. It's behind TSMC in absolute transistor density (SRAM density seems to be the same as N3E), but ahead on hard features like BSPD and maybe on GAA too. I suspect that they didn't push transistor density as hard as they could because BSPD and GAA tech were already big, risky changes.
We'll have a much better idea of Intel's fab future with 14a and 10a as they should show a trend of whether Intel's fabs can catch up and pass TSMC or if they run out of steam after the initial GAA bump.
I think their problem is less about material knowledge to shrink nodes but about development tooling to make chip design more efficient, scalable and allows experimenting with more new approaches/allows larger shifts without planing years ahead for it.
TSMC by collaborating with many different customers with different needs had a lot of insensitive to not just create powerful tooling for one kind of CPU design approach but also being very flexible to allow other approaches for other needs. And AMD has repeatedly interrelated on their whole tool chain and dev. processes for many years while Intel was somewhat complacent with what they had.
And a bunch of the recent issues with CPUs internally dying sound a lot like miss-design issues which tooling should have coughed (instead of looking like fundamental tech/production issues).
From what I could gather while I was inside (2010-ish, but not directly involved with chip product lines) there was just incredible hubris company wide. "Intel Architecture is the best because we made it and we're the best" essentially.
They were wasting a ton of time and effort eagerly trying to convince Apple to put IA into phones despite obvious failures to deliver power-effective chips (Atom being the result of these efforts from what I understand). They were spending a lot of time and money trying to start up like a junk ware app-store thing for PCs that they could use OEM relationships to peddle, as if the PC ecosystem belonged to them the way that Android did to Google or Apple's ecosystem to Apple, not realizing that if anyone has that power it's Microsoft (but they also don't).
It was pretty shocking coming from a hacker/cyberpunk culture where everybody had been dunking on Intel designs for over a decade. (I personally had been waiting for an ARM laptop since around 2000.) A lot of leadership I got to interact with were business/people-people types that truly seemed to believe that the best product boiled down entirely to social perception of status and has zero basis in reality. Basically the company seemed to be high on the Intel Architecture's accidental monopoly over personal computing thanks to PC-WinTel becoming so dominant (and Apple's later capitulation) and seemed to believe that it was all because of their "genius" Intel Inside marketing campaigns (which were pure social status signaling, but with an effect of avoiding price competition with lower-cost IA rivals AMD,Citrix,VIA and holding power over OEMs rather than being responsible for the market situation around IA in the first place).
Maybe something in the Hillsboro/Beaverton area's water? Both they and Nike seem to entirely consist of a diet of their own farts.
It also probably didn’t help with that arrogance issued, that ARM laptops were tried… more than a couple times, and didn’t generally work out. I mean, these new Snapdragon things might be good. But Intel successfully fended off multiple generations of Surface RT devices from their pseudo-partner Microsoft, from 2012 until recently.
Of course, one could have done an ARM Linux device at any point in that timeline, but using efficient software is apparently cheating.
agreed, but that was often not necessary a hardware issue but a ecosystem issue and Intel executives maybe not seeing/realizing that is pretty incompetent
On one side you had the whole windows was absolute garbage on ARM until very recently, and needed Apple to show them how to have a low friction support extension/transition. And if you instead shipped it with Android or Chrome OS it supposedly didn't count anymore (except a lot of non tech afine consumers have replaced home desktop/laptop with a tablet anyway (cheaper and does everything they need)).
On the other side there was a best technical fit/best customer fit mismatch. Best customers where tech enthusiasts which want to try out new things and can live with a bit of friction (if it's small enough) and are also often willing to pay _slightly_ more. But the best price/product fit is the low (initially, then to mid) end devices except they aren't really that interesting for enthusiasts and due to low (initial) production quantity also not necessary that cheap either and for the people which normally buy this devices buying a similar priced android tablet is most times just better and with a bit of effort you can get an even better x86 PC, through with many 2nd hand/hand me down parts.
and outside of 1) means to pressure MS for better deals, 2) Steam Deck/OS, there just weren't any meaningful large/well known hardware producers shipping with Linux (yes Lenovo and Dell do care (do they still? idk.) for Linux compatibility in _some(few)_ of there expensive business focused lines. But outside of exceptions in 1) don't ship with it so no "normal" consumer pics it up, and Linux shipping ORMs are on the larger consumer market picture just too small to make a big difference. So ARM Linux stayed relegated to niche, too.
> Intel's fab issues are overstated in my opinion.
The fact that they can't use their own fab for 30% of their products [1], all of which are those that require power efficiency and compute performance [2], suggests it is not overstated.
This isn't very surprising. Intel has already been making their GPUs at TSMC for quite a while now (I believe using N4). Porting and validating that GPU to Intel fabs would be expensive and take a lot of time.
There is talk about the next version of Arc using 18a. If it does, I'd expect Intel to move that generation's compute tiles to 18a as well.
Has it been confirmed that the compute section is exclusively TSMC? My limited searching turned up nothing definitive and wasn't clear about if there would be a mix of 18A and TSMC N2 in all processors or if this was a contingency plan for increased volume or if this was a fallback in case 18A falls through.
Apple does not nor have they ever made displays. Intel on the other most definitely makes CPUs. That's the difference.
Apple just recently moved back into the hardware space after farming everything out since the iMac gen2 days. Hell, I remember the Mac clones. I miss Power Computing.
I'm not even sure you could say Samsung is a competitor to Apple anymore in the phone space, at least in the US - I doubt there's much switching going on where people are frequently enough making a decision to change ecosystems, at least for existing customers.
Samsung's competition is Huawei, Xiaomi, Oppo, etc.
Do they have foundry customers? Serious question; I remember Gelsinger's IFS announcement and that they had some launch partners, but haven't seen much since.
On an emotional level I want to root for Intel (like most of the nerds here, they fabbed a good chunk of the magical elements of my childhood).
It seems difficult to figure out if they are getting back on track, though. They always seem to just be a couple years from finally catching up to TSMC.
I used to say "Never bet against Intel", it was because everytime they seemed to be behind they would pull something out and regain the loss in short order.
But so far nothing of the sort has happened for a long time. If feels like ever since Ryzen landed, they have been desperate to catch up but keep tripping on themselves. Losing Apple, while inevitable, has made them look even more irrelevant. They still do decent stuff for the most part but there isnt anything really exciting.
I do like what they are doing with Arc GPUs but it is clear those are loss leaders and it isnt really gaining that much traction.
Alas, this is a story where we will have a better understanding in five years from now.
I'm not very knowledgeable on all those technical points. How does this explain what I see as a consumer? I built a PC last year and went with AMD while historically I've gone with Intel. For a similarly performing CPU it seemed that AMD was cheaper and more power efficient.
The rumor is that Intel might not offer 18a to external customers rather than getting rid of 18a itself. A lot of this seems to be due to their design libraries still being quite proprietary and not much to do with the viability of the process itself.
It's not about how soon 14a and 10a come out, but rather about how good they are when they arrive. 14a will be competing against TSMC A16 in late 2026 and 10a will be competing with TSMC A14 in late 2027. The measure of Intel's success will be whether they are gaining or losing vs TSMC.
On the customer front, I think customers are probably necessary to offset the ever-increasing R&D costs and an extra year or two to work on making their libraries more standardized may be best for everyone.
They're not scrapping 18A. Panther Lake is slated to be manufactured on 18A. The rumors are about Intel giving up on finding Foundry customers for 18A, and instead targeting 14A for Foundry.
>What I really want to know, from someone who does know: Is Intel cooked?
I dont know if I count, but at least I wrote about TSMC before most if anyone knew much about TSMC. Which is when Apple brought them to spotlight.
It depends on how you define or count as being able to compete with TSMC?
If Intel technically leapfrog TSMC and their 18nm is better than TSMC 20nm this year but;
It is 30 - 40% more expensive.
It has lower Gross margin, or even negative margin.
It has much lower volume and capacity.
It is slower in ramping up capacity for future capacity planning.
It has limited IP range for its foundry.
It has less packaging options.
It does not have other high speed, low power or analog node options.
At what point does it count as competing? Because right now there isn't a single metric that Intel Foundry is winning. And they are feeling exactly the same as Global Foundry or AMD when Intel Foundry advancement is getting all the oxygens.
And even if they did, with a magic wand got them to compete with TSMC on every single one of the item above, in medium to long term there isn't a single chance Intel could compete with their current board and management.
TSMC leadership and management team is Nvidia's level great. I cant think of any other tech company that could rival them. Their only risk is China.
They don’t really need to be better than TSMC, they need to be one node behind and roughly competitive on price / performance.
The first year of TSMCs latest process goes to Apple. And the second few years are booked completely full. There is room for Intel if they can just get in the ballpark of TSMC.
"For a long time, gate length (the length of the transistor gate) and half-pitch (half the distance between two identical features on a chip) matched the process node name, but the last time this was true was 1997"
I'm not into hardware but I remember when AMD was sneered at, and all real CPUs were Intel. Then Ryzen happened. My meta conclusion is that its super hard to tell when someone is done, and it can change quickly.
Or not. Sometimes it if looks like terminal decline, it simply is terminal decline.
These things go in cycles and predate Ryzen by a lot. The late-model Pentium 4 chips were overheating power-guzzling garbage compared to the Athlon XP, and the Athlon 64 was a serious competitor to the Core 2 series. Ryzen is the current incarnation of AMD coming into vogue in desktop, but it's not like it took them 40 years to get there.
The last time I built a PC was around a decade ago but I always bought AMD simply because they were cheaper for equivalent performance in the middle. Getting an adequate CPU for hundreds of dollars cheaper than the higher-end Intel chips meant that I could afford the second-highest-end GPU that NVidia had at the time. This made a lot more sense for gaming workloads as $300 towards the GPU had a much bigger effect on frame rate than $300 towards the CPU.
These days iGPUs run pretty much any game I care to play so it doesn't matter.
My desktop is now about 12 years old with a 1650 GTX GPU. Still does everything I need perfectly fine. It is funny seeing some lower powered offerings with iGPUs that run circles around this thing. It is looking like my next machine will probably not have a dedicated GPU, at least at first. The intergrated stuff is pretty decent when the newest games you have are about 4-5 years old or just target lower specs.
In the past we had only x86 and they were produced by AMD and Intel, no other serious competitor left. Of course in that market it will swing back and forth between these two. The stronger competitor will not go for the kill due to government intervention.
Now we are in a different situation. There are several big competitors using ARM instead of x86. The software world is actually transitioning away from x86 in masses. Apple does their own CPUs better than Intel. AMD outsourced production already. Everybody is pumping money into TSMC who are are already ahead of Intel and they are moving faster.
Either Intel gets a really really lucky run with their new technology or they need to split off the foundry business. The government may put it on life support until TSMC themselves may run into serious problems.
The better way into the future may be to split up TSMC in multiple redundant and competing companies.
The K6 line was a functional CPU but I wouldn't call them "excellent". The K6-III was basically a K6-2 with integrated cache, much the same way the Pentium III was a Pentium II with integrated cache. Despite the fact that AMD tried to replicate Pentium branding on the K6 line, they very much competed with Celerons in terms of market place and performance.
Indeed that's how they were marketed where I worked (Office Max) and were priced and spec'd comparably to the Celeron based offerings from IBM, HP, and Packard Bell.
Another issue with the K6 line was they were always a generation behind at a time when Intel was rapidly rolling out technologies like MMX and SSE. Intel coordinated with software manufacturers and had launch day examples that presented significant performance gaps between the CPU lines.
The K6 also had a shorter execution pipeline than Pentium so it struggled to hit 400mhz when Intel was approaching 500mhz. That's why the Athlon was such a shock because it arrived at 700mhz and stomped everything.
Looking back at the K6 line now, they likely perform far better then they did at the time because software eventually got around to supporting the hardware.
Minor correction. Athlon arrived at 500MHz, 550MHz and 600MHz. But they were still a big shock when they arrived. They were the first chip in a long while to really take on Intel and succeed.
The 650MHz came two months after than, and 700MHz another two months later. 6 months later 1GHz! It is easy to forget just how rapid performance increased in the late 90s.
I'm trying to reconcile that with my memory. Pre-launch the AMD rep approached the electronics salesmen where I worked and offered us a deal to purchase a K7 700mhz for like $200. It came with a Biostar motherboard, a brand I'd never heard of back then.
I remember it was a K7 700 because it was the first from scratch PC that I ever built. Everything before and probably since has been a Ship of Theseus.
"AMD Athlon 500-600MHz (bulk) price display. The product is scheduled to arrive in mid-July, and reservations are being accepted. However, there is no specific arrival schedule for compatible motherboards yet."
"the K7 revised "Athlon" has been given a price and reservations have also started. The estimated price is 44,800 yen for 500MHz, 69,800 yen for 550MHz, and 89,800 yen for 600MHz."
"AMD's latest CPU "Athlon" will be sold in Akihabara without waiting for the official release date on the 17th is started. All products on the market are imported products, and 3 models of 500MHz/550MHz/600MHz are on sale. The sale of compatible motherboards has also started, and it is possible to obtain it alone, including Athlon"
K6-III was never excellent. It was a short lived overpriced option for desperate socket7 users unwilling to do the sensible thing and upgrade whole platform (brand new Celeron 300A + 440BX motherboard cheaper than just the K6-3 cpu alone). Paper launch in February 1999 with first real chips shipping in March. First K6-3 to show up in Japan was K6-III/400 at hilarious 35,500 yen = $295! https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/990313/p_cpu.ht... This is the price of full Pentium II 400MHz or over four almost year old by this point and still faster Celerons 300A.
K6-III/450 24,800 $236 haha whats up with that price? Either AMD stopped shipping already and its leftovers or its a sucker tax for ss7 owners wanting to max out.
Looks like by the time Durons showed up nobody was bothering to stock K6-3, only 3 vendors in Akihabara had them. Those crazy prices werent limited to Japan, Poland September 1999:
Pentium III 450MHz 1260 $308
Pentium II 400MHz 943 $231
Celeron 366MHz 348 $85 (300A missing from the list, but was still available and selling cheaper)
K6-III/450 1108 $271 HAHA
K6-III/400 877 $215
K6-2/400 397 $97 haha
K6-2/350 230 $56
For a brief moment in 1999 AMD pretended K6-3 was equal to Pentium 2/3 and tried to price it accordingly but market corrected them swiftly. There was a 1/3 performance gap between K6-3 and overclocked Celeron.
Everyone thought AMD was done. Intel is going through a difficult transition, but if they can make 18a /14a work and keep improving their GPU line we could be having the same conversation about AMD in 10 years.
AMD lost their foundry business on the way. To keep the foundry competitive you need a lot cash rolling in or you're out. Either they become competitive soon, somebody keeps pumping billions in for many years, or they're out and lose their foundry.
Intel as a brand may survive in some shape or form but it's not looking good for the foundry.
I used to be a die-hard Intel customer, and recommended to everyone that asked me what to but, to buy Intel. That has changed. Now it's price/performance that matters more than brand. Intel also had a few missteps that made the brand lose a bit of its luster.
My most recent computer is AMD Ryzen based, but we just bought an Intel-based Dell for my partner because the price/performance was better than comparable AMD machines at the time, possibly due to a sale. But the Intel chip is a lot faster than my laptop, so now I'm a little bit jealous of the Intel machine.
I do have repeated, annoying instability with my Ryzen 5900X desktop. I find AMD to have a much narrower setup window in terms of memory speed, timing, etc. and that is before any kind of overclocking. And the motherboard / bios firmware situation always seems a bit more sketchy for AMD.
Maybe it is just bad luck on my end, but I have not had those issues with Intel in the past or currently.
It's bad luck on your end. I have 3 AMD-based "desktops", never had a single problem with any of them. I just throw whatever memory in and it just works. These are being used more as servers than desktops, with large RAID arrays, HBA cards, tape drives, etc. They're consumer-level systems - Ryzen 7 5700G, Ryzen 5 2600, Ryzen 7 7800X3D.
I have 2 intel/dell laptops and thinkpad/amd 14s laptop. Both Dells (a workstation-class 22 core cpu and a more power-efficient one) suck massively when compared to amd ai-something-something-ryzen.
What's worse, intel drivers are a mess on linux right now. Dell xps 13 plus is the worst laptop I had in a decade, and that's after owning every Linux-preinstalled Dell XPS 13 ever released.
What i mean is that it's relatively hard to find an intel laptop that would be meaningfully faster than an amd one. For a while Intel was surviving on quality software but even this moat is drying out.
The Dell Intel-based laptop has an Intel Core i9-13900HX @ 55W TDP. 24 cores, 32 threads, scores 43,067 on passmark. The AMD laptop I got has AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS @ 54W TDP, which scores 28,632 on passmark and I paid about the same price for it as the Dell about one year earlier, around $1200. At the time we bought the Dell, it was faster than comparable AMD based laptops in the same price range, and that was surprising to me too, but that's what happened. Trust me, I searched for the best deal, but the Dell being on sale at the time made it the best choice in terms of speed and features.
FWIW, Apple M4 Max 16 Core scores 43,818 on passmark and runs at 90 Watts TDP, so Intel certainly is competing on speed, as well as TDP.
If you're comparing laptop to desktop keep in mind a lot of those top out at 5 to 45w (gaming) and desktop chips are 45-65w to 300w (threadripper) and have a lot more cooling behind them.
Keep in mind Keller joined AMD during their dark period(Bulldozer?) and helped work on Zen.
He later noped out of Intel shortly after joining. Whatever he saw, either in leadership or product, had to be pretty bad in my opinion. AFAIK there's been speculation, but nothing really concrete.
Switching to TSMC broke their negative feedback loop, though. In the past AMD could be relied on to somehow not have the money to invest in their fabs at some point, resulting in another Intel era.
Nowadays, there will be another process node from TSMC. If AMD doesn’t pay for the R&D, TSMC’s other customers (like Apple and… actually, Intel) will instead.
Yup, though it's been never such a good run for them by far. Granted things were moving much faster back then overall, but amd has been dominating for 7 years now.
AMDs fab in Dresden was highly respected as the most efficient fab in the world back in it's day. AMD really took off after they purchased NexGen and rolled out the K6.
> A big part of AMD's turnaround was going fabless.
Part of it, sure, but they were still fabless and in the ditch before Zen. Unless you're referring to going with TSMC instead of GloFo as going fabless.
Yes, but that contract was a result of going fabless and spinning off GloFo into its own entity longer before Zen. AMD went fabless in 2009 during K8 lifecycle. Since then, we had an entire dynasty of failed bulldozer CPUs. I fail to see how going fabless helped them?
What helped them is putting the right people in charge of Zen design and intel fumbling 10nm due to their own hubris.
The point is that AMD didn't really go fabless in 2009. They didn't own the fab anymore but were still tied to it, so they were not free to exercise the number one advantage of being fabless until much later.
In your mind, company that as a contract with a fab is not fabless? Do you think AMD can just stop ordering from TSMC today and call it a day?
AMD was fine with having GloFo as a fab until 20nm process. They were already behind, but not terribly.
AMD even used TSMC for their CPUs and GPUs before Zen. Ontario was fabbed at TSMC in 2011.
Point is AMD as free to shop around. Only in 2016 the agreement was amended that GloFo would be preferred for 14nm and 7nm, but since they decided not to work on 7nm, it freed up AMD.
AMD and GloFlo split in 2009 but AMD wasn't able to start actually manufacturing their chips with other foundries until 2019 when GloFlo got downgraded to only providing the IO die for Zen 2. This is because AMD was contractually obligated to continue using GloFlo for that time as a condition of the split.
Zen 2 is also where Ryzen went from "exciting and competitive, but not top of the line" to actually giving Intel a run for their money in more than just highly multithreaded workloads.
Improved architecture put AMD within striking distance of Intel and the move to TSMC allowed them to pull ahead.
turning anything around when designing chips is at year process. just going from a fully designed chip to shipped is ~2 years in the absolute best case.
Intel is more than just fabs. AMD spun off digital foundry forever ago and just uses TSMC, no reason Intel couldn’t do the same. At this point their fabs are a liability. They have a new leader who’s from a semiconductor manufacturing background so I have some faith they’ll give up on the pursuit of next gen fabs and focus instead on their IP. There’s a huge opportunity in their GPU segment. They’ve gone from a joke to competitive in a couple years, and they offer more VRAM for the dollar. They could tailor towards AI and really get some traction there.
Intel outsourcing their core product line is also a massive liability. It's just a different kind of liability.
I personally think the world's reliance on TSMC indicates that fabs are critically important infrastructure. And operating a world class one provides a company with a ton of leverage with governments and other businesses.
I think it also shows that fabs who only have one customer (ie, Intel) aren't as competitive because they can't provide as much scale and are more sensitive to that customer's success.
Intel's fab would be doing much better if it spun it out a while ago and was making Intel, Nvidia, and Apple chips right now.
If Intel's fabs has been spun out and operating at arms length from Intel's chip design side, then Intel's fabs would be dead. The guaranteed volume from manufacturing Intel's CPUs is all that's been keeping their fab side going. If they had to depend on customers who were actually sane and free to take their business elsewhere, Intel's fabs would have long since chased off all their customers with unfulfilled promises that next time they'll have a working process.
What Intel process from the last decade would have been enticing to Nvidia or Apple?
Samsung comes in a close second in terms of tech. GloFo is also still floating around though lagging pretty bad AFAIK. Micron has it's own fabs that they are actively developing (in fact, they are building new facilities right now).
What TSMC is is cutting edge. That's why everyone that needs top performance uses them.
GloFo simply decided to stay at 14nm because beyond that, manufacturing costs actually increase, not decrease, and everybody wants the best, not second best.
They are now but they weren't always. I don't know much about hardware these days, I gleefully walked away from embedded development over a decade ago, but what I believe is that you don't really want to forecast to hard on any single player too far into the future.
Samsung is still in the game at the STOA level, but a distant second. But maybe it’s the nature of the industry that one winner takes all for a number of years at the top end. After all, Intel was the only game in town for decades.
Right but at some point does Nvidia use their muscle and block TSMC from making chips for anyone else? The demand for GPUs is just increasing too rapidly for this to make sense.
Apple was TSMCs biggest customer (25%) and nVidia is 2nd (12-15%). The bigger thing being that between the two, they lock up most of the bleeding edge process capacity and leave everyone else fighting over older processes.
>> Intel might still run fabs, but they'll be mostly contracting them out to people who want cheap ASICs and 10 year old fab tech.
Intel fabs have never had to be as cost effective as others. They were selling top end chips for top dollar for decades. I bet there are 10 other companies that can make 45nm chips cheaper than Intel can on their old equipment. I could be wrong.
> They have a new leader who’s from a semiconductor manufacturing background
That's the precious leader. The new CEO is not from a semiconductor manufacturing background. His main claim to success is leading a company that built EDA tools.
They are bringing a lot of that “liability” online in the next few years. You’re ignoring strategic context - as long ad intel maintains domestic fabs it will not be allowed to fail
> ... I have some faith they’ll give up on the pursuit of next gen fabs and focus instead on their IP.
The problem with Intel is that they are so short sighted and they change direction and focus very quickly. Intel will adopt these seemingly great ideas that require 10-20 year strategies, invest heavily in them, and then abandon them 5 years later. They always measure initiatives against their core CPU line and if they don't show similar profitability in the short term then they defund and eventually cut the programs entirely.
So we're just going to hand control of the US supply of semiconductors completely over to TSMC, Samsung, and the Chinese fabs in the works? That seems incredibly short sighted and reckless.
The top of the market will go GPU and the bottom will go ARM, and the middle will be an ever shrinking x86 market share. The few places that will need heavy CPU resources will be the same people who can apply pressure to Intel's margins.
The process of chip making will look very similar in the future, but the brand of the CPU will matter less every year. Intel's not "dead in five years", but Intel will definitely cross the point of no return in that timeframe. Shifting a big company's focus is more difficult than growing another company who already has the right focus.
I think they have a lot of potential in the dedicated GPU space, but that is a consumer market so profit margins are smaller and they have potential in the low-to-mid-end market so even less margin. It's really sad as the competition there would help consumers.
the sad thing is, it was predictable. Wintel and other monopoly-like deals/situations had removed the need to compete/stay on edge from Intel. They then noticed it too late and made mistakes when trying to course correct/having to much innovation dept to effectively course correct screwed them up big
At the same time AMD again and again re-invented and optimized their development flow and experimented with alternative approaches and did not shy away from cooperating with TSMC and implicitly through that Nivdea and other (sometimes also Intel). Intel on the other hand AFIK got stuck on a approach where they had a edge over AMD but which was seem to have turned out to be somewhat of a dead end.
what is interesting is how TSMC has so far avoided the same kind of trap
- by having competing customers and having deep research co-operations with all the customers they brought competition and innovation back into a monopoly in a round about way like position
- having limited capacity of the newest tech which their competing customers bit for bring in monetary insensitive to innovate
- and them being somewhat of a life line for their country put a lot of pressure onto them to not break their own innovation machine for greed (e.g. by intentionally not expanding the availability of the latest node even when they technically could)
>> I think they have a lot of potential in the dedicated GPU space
I think dedicated GPUs will be dead soon. AMD will beat nVidia with APUs that compete with midrange DGPU in performance with lower system cost. With AI using GPUs we want the shared memory of the APU rather than splitting RAM into two mutually exclusive areas - witness boards starting to use soldered ram in 64 and 128GB configurations. nVidia can't compete without x86 cores and Intel just cant compete for now.
I mean for gaming there is already the Ryzan Max+395 which already is beyond the level of low end graphics (at least if placed in a desktop where it's not heat/power throttled). But it's a bit of a unicorn (especially if you look for a system where it can run full throttle).
but I'm not sure about the beat nVidea part, nVidea has some experience with putting ARM CPUs on their graphic cards and as far as I remember on for their server center solutions there is one which pairs up graphic cards (and their RAM) over PCIe and mostly cuts out the CPU
IMHO the whole user-visible p-core/e-core thing on desktop CPUs is one of the worst decisions in the history of microprocessors. My gaming machines need to do double-duty as as build boxes, so they're just utterly unusable for me.
Why is the asymmetry a show-stopper for you? It would seem like having lots of E-cores would be advantageous for compiling, and still having some P-cores means you don't lose performance when linking.
Because Windows has a pants on head design choice where processes that aren’t the active window get shunted onto the e cores regardless of whether they are doing lots of work or not. I halfway suspect that this is intended as a market segmentation trick by MS
I find it somewhat ironic that many years ago HP’s PA-RISC chips were fabbed at Intel because contractually they had to supply chips due Itanium not yet taping out.
But maybe it was more of an early foreshadowing. I had a housemate that worked on their internal CAD tools and it also sounded like a bit of a mess with NIH syndrome. (20+ years ago)
Smart people know to choose AMD. OEMs heavily favor Intel for the brand recognition. It's the same on the workstation side, though AMD's market share has been rising quite fast (it's apparently at a 36.5% share) so I'm unsure if system integrators will keep pushing their Intel SKUs so heavily.
So they're not cooked, but they're certainly not doing well and barring a massive jump in performance or efficiency, they're not going to be making a recovery any time soon.
Intel announced new GPUs back in December and seven months later they’re nowhere to be found. I’m pretty convinced at this point that the company has some systemic issues that prevent them from being competitive at any level.
Yes, Intel is cooked. I think they won't recover anymore. Their fab business' fate will be similar to Global Foundaries: a second tier supplier of old tech nodes.
I see them the same as GE, Boeing, etc. They culture from the top down is screwed. It will take years to undo what has been ingrained in the corporate machine. They will likely survive but as a shell of their former self. They'll probably spin off some promising business related to AI or embedded.
I was disappointed with their offerings and went with AMD for my latested build. I don't know too many people who have built PCs recently, but the few I do know who have or are planning to, everyone is planning to use AMD. Similar to the GE example, it seems many people would recommend LG or Samsung appliances over GE.
Apparently this happening was well telegraphed by people in the industry.
A friend used to send me articles regularly from Semiaccurate in the mid 2010s. I thought it was "alternative truth" but it turns out to have been more, uh, accurate than I thought.
Some of us have been pointing out Intel was in a systematically impossible situation even back when they had that process advantage, now almost a decade ago.
Quite simply imagine being dropped in as CEO of Intel in 2015. Could you have prevented the malaise of today?
Intel made mistakes. TSMC can make mistakes. TSMC is also in geopolitically risky Taiwan. I'm not counting out Intel yet.
They're also very unpopular online so it's tough to find solid unbiased info about them. Like is the stink about 18A true or do people just want to hate on Intel?
Intel’s chances of being a foundry for others are close to 0. It does not matter how good their process technology is. The problem is that Intel was an IP thief in the 80s and 90s; being a foundry requires trusting Intel with the exact IP Intel was known for stealing and nobody wants to take the risk.
There were lawsuits against Intel for IP theft in the news 25+ years ago. It is hard to find articles on them these days as web searches are biased toward recent events, but I was able to find this:
Intel Financial Engineering & Operational Missteps is what led to this.
"Over the past 10 years, Intel engaged in financial engineering, primarily through significant stock buybacks ($53 billion in 2011–2015) and stock-based executive compensation, which diverted resources from innovation and contributed to its lag in semiconductor fabrication. This financialization, as critiqued in the 2021 report, is a long-term factor in Intel’s weakened competitive position"
They were not caught by corporate raiders (feel free to provide names of outside investors that caused them to stagnate).
Instead of investing in the future and paying top dollar for top employees, the Board paid the shareholders (even 20 years ago). They never even tried to compete for the best employees, and instead let them all go to Alphabet/Apple/Amazon/Meta/Microsoft/Nvidia/Netflix.
As a data point of one, and one that really doesn't know much about chip fabs, I tend to see the "Intel Inside" sticker as a warning. I have no idea how they ever win back consumer trust.
Yes. I can give you a non-technical answer, since HN is ostensibly business as well.
Intel fired the one CEO that spoke both engineer and business, and Gelsinger could have been their Lisa Su. They fired the only talented CEO they've had for years.
This will be fatal.
Gelsinger was the scapegoat for 20+ years of inability to compete with foreign companies, no matter how much money was poured into them. They used American exceptionalism as a cover to defraud shareholders and any government that invested in them. They used the relationship of AIPAC and Congress to build a fab and R&D lab in Israel (inserting yourself into global politics to make a buck is always spicy) at low cost to them.
Taiwan became the capitol of electrical engineering in the world, and is a shining example of how to survive and thrive in a post-war era, and it absolutely shows. They caught up to Intel and zoomed right past.
Gelsinger's crime was try to do what AMD did: they didn't have a fab that could make their chip BUT they had a fab that made chips that people wanted AND the foundry could take that work and survive if they legally split. GloFo is now the third largest semi foundry in the world today, and when it was part of AMD, it very much wasn't; I can't quite remember, but 5th or 6th? Something like that. GloFo is #3, TSMC is #1, Samsung is #2, and Intel could very well be that #4, and push out UMC (#4) and SMIC (#5) in the secondary chip foundry market.
Gelsinger could have split Intel into Intel and IFoundry or something, and Intel could have profited on IFoundry taking off and taking external work. Right now, IFoundry can't compete on top nodes, but _could_ steal work from all other fabs for secondary larger nodes. Having a working 12 nm competitor as well as a working 7nm competitor is big business, which Intel currently has _ZERO_ of (since they don't take external contracts). Gelsinger was big on this potential revenue stream.
Gelsinger's other crime was being part of the negotiation between TSMC and the Biden administration for the CHIPs act money: part of what built the TSMC fab right next door to Intel's in Arizona was Biden and Intel money. Intel was investing in it's future by playing the American exceptionalism card again, but now in everybody's favor. We _all_ benefit from this. Gelsinger wanted to have _somebody_ fab the chips, and if its good enough for AMD, Apple, and Nvidia, its good enough for Intel.
There is zero indication that GAA 20A is ready, and Intel has a history of having leadership that says such-and-such is ready for it to either come out several gens later, or just vanish off the roadmap. Gelsinger's other OTHER crime is admitting to this and changing the direction of the Titanic before it hits the iceberg, for the CEO that replaced him just to steer right back into the iceberg.
I have _zero_ faith in Intel's leadership if they can't bring Gelsinger back. Tan, Gelsinger's replacement, is a former board member. I have no reason to think he is not just going to further poison the company. Tan has not spoken about any plan that indicates he understands Intel is not competitive, Intel cannot competitively make 100% of the tiles, that Intel's Foveros tech stack is extremely valuable because the only truly comparative alternative is TSMC's CoWoS tech family and superior to it and people are willing to throw money at that problem but they can't license it as long as IFoundry is part of Intel.
Intel has been in Israel since 1974. Intel Fab 8 was built in 1980 in Jerusalem... There's over 30,000 chip engineers and nearly 200 semiconductor companies there, now.
Intel came to Israel mostly because Dov Frohman (one of Intels first employees who had worked with all the founders at Fairchild and also the inventor of EPROMs) pushed to establish an Intel dev center there when he moved back home.
At the time, EPROM tech was Intels most profitble product until the 8088 and 8087, which were designed in Israel at the dev center (along with many of their chip designs).
Yep, Dov Frohman's contribution to tech is well known and very appreciated.
Edit: Look, to whoever is out there on a downvote spree, I don't care if I get downvoted, man, but wild you'd just downvote people talking about a guy whose won multiple IEEE awards, has patents to his name, and has left his mark on EE, and isn't even the focus of the discussion at hand.
I am no expert in Intel, but in my view, Gelsinger lost the faith of many by being unrealistically optimistic.
Of course a CEO needs to be optimistic, but he promised (in 2021) zettaflop systems by 2027 (the worst example I remember). Did anyone believe that could happen?
His over-optimism gave the whole "5 nodes in 4 years" supposed path to leadership a weird flavor, like it must be somehow a bit of a con even if it gets technically achieved.
I mean, if I thought I had a plan to be the guy who saves Intel from it's own mistakes, I'd be optimistic too.
Also, I looked into the claim when he had said it, apparently he was being intentionally misleading about it, and the press tried to ask what he meant: he was speaking tensor performance on future enterprise Arc card products at datacenter scale, ie, AI bait.
In early 2021, Nvidia's compute flagship was the A100, 19.5 FP32 MAD TFLOPs, but the misleading number they quote in marketing is the tensor performance of 312 TFLOPs of FP16 accumulates. That would be about 3.2 million of these at tensor perf.
Skipping H series, in late Nov of last year, their new flagship is the B200. 124 FP32 MAD TFLOPs, 2250 tensor FP16 accumulate TFLOPs. That is now 445k cards to reach zettascale if using tensor cores. You won't be fitting ~1400 GPU-laden machines in a single datacenter, but the number is becoming more manageable.
They improved, in 3.5 years, 7.2x.
Lets say Nvidia does this again. 3.5 years, again, would put you in early 2028, and they manage another 7.2x win: that could be 62k cards across 7.7k. That absolutely is doable in a single datacenter.
The problem is, and this is where the prediction actually falls apart, not that its impossible: We don't know what future Arc cards look like, nor enterprise ones. Battlemage is an improvement over Alchemist, so the tech *is moving forwards at, but either Celestial or Druid was supposed to introduce the enterprise compute card variants, but that seems to be dead, and no indication either of those lines will even see the light of day now. The new CEO seems to be hard set on making Xe for iGPU only.
I can't find any hard numbers on Intel's tensor units, but apparently they're actually competitive. I can find the normal FP32 MAD numbers, and it ends up that Intel is 13.5w per TFLOP and Nvidia is 8 and both companies have equal efficiency in transistor usage. Assuming Intel made a B200 competitor, and assuming the higher power usage is due to voltage (Intel B series voltage is similar to Series 40's voltages, which is a lot higher than equivalent enterprise/pro series cards), Intel could be making a card that's somewhere in the ballpark as 2/3 as good for the same power usage.
So, in the end, yes, I don't agree with his claims of future Zettascale at Intel by 2027. I don't think he was wrong for the industry as a whole, however. If he would have said, say, 2030, I don't think we would be discussing this, that certainly would have been doable if he was at the helm and they kept doubling down on Arc every gen and everything went according to plan.
Cooked in the short/medium term, yes, but remains to be seen in the longer term. I feel like they’re ironically in the same position AMD was in before AMD spun off Global Foundries: not being able to keep up with the new nodes on the manufacturing side, which also drags down the design side. They could follow the same playbook and sell off the foundries, which will be a blow to their pride, but should free them up to compete better on designs alone.
Why is the government bailing them out then? Is that just good money thrown after bad?
Regardless, it seems like the company leadership should be gutted (the same could be said of Boeing) and the company given over to a new technically-grounded leadership team.
What is the alternative, except dependence on foreign countries for key economic inputs?
Betting some on Intel is very wise when the alternatives are, as I see it: 1) investing in TSMC building fabs and creating more of an employee knowledge base and skill base on shore, 2) hoping a US-based startup gets enough traction to grow.
Agreed on leadership. But selecting leadership teams, especially technically-grounded leadership teams is extremely difficult. Which is why companies revert to non-technical leadership so often.
Throwing good money after bad sounds like something governments are prone to do. Dysfunctions tend to grow as those who benefited from corruption have more money now to spend on more corruption.
Since Intel has been mismanaged for so long I don’t know how many good lower level employees they managed to retain, I doubt much would be left if they properly cleaned house.
Texas Instruments would like to say hi. You don't need SOTA chips for weapons, but exotic capabilities to process data and interact with the radio and infared world.
Isn't building a TSMC factory in US a violation of a "don't build your home on someone's else land" principle? US will be able to shut down or even nationalize the factory, full of expensive equipment, at any moment. It's like lending a goose with golden eggs to your neighbour.
A lot of the more complicated equipment in TSMC fabs (e.g. EUV equipment) is from Europe.
Building a fab is no mean feat and loss of infra is a major blow, but it's certainly not impossible to build these fabs in the West, just not economical. You are not starting from scratch.
They actually haven’t meet the requirements to get CHIPS funding, and they kinda got screwed with a military deal reducing the amount CHIPS allocated for them if they do.
That being said the government will likely not allow them to fail completely out of the foundry business for geopolitical reasons
I believe that was a reaction to the global chip shortage during COVID. An investment in domestic chip production capabilities not a bailout for bad moves.
Intel was looking bad but not the dire state they’re in now.
How can you call it "Intel bailout" if it benefited many semico companies?
>The CHIPS Act primarily benefits semiconductor manufacturers and related industries by providing substantial funding for domestic chip production and research. Companies like Intel, TSMC, Samsung, and Micron have received significant grants and loans to expand or establish new manufacturing facilities in the United States.
>The act authorizes roughly $280 billion in new funding to boost domestic research and manufacturing of semiconductors in the United States, for which it appropriates $52.7 billion
>The act includes $39 billion in subsidies for chip manufacturing on U.S. soil along with 25% investment tax credits for costs of manufacturing equipment, and $13 billion for semiconductor research and workforce training, with the dual aim of strengthening American supply chain resilience and countering China
I don't think the current Republican leadership has any opposition at all to handing over lots of government money to large business to do things!
The problem is that they are far too incompetent and have zero clue about tech, and only understand real estate, that simplest of business that can be executed with mere lizard-brain intelligence.
Tech is also about small startups disrupting large giants, which is completely antithetical to current Republican leadership ideals, where the wealthiest get all gains, regardless of who does the work.
It will take many years of full-on Democratic leadership to reconfigure the Republican Party back to a somewhat innovation-friendly business party. Meanwhile the Democrats, under Biden, were by far some of the most business-friendly politicians we have seen in perhaps a century, spurring massive investment in factories and industry, mostly across red states. But because it's a politically incorrect fact, it never gets reported.
It irks me that the current administration points to the steel industry doing well as an example of bringing jobs back to the US. Like great you’ve made an uncompetitive industry more profitable at the expense of every downstream user of that material. Doing the very opposite of what should be done. We’re getting to the point, and have passed it in a few industries, where it’s more expensive to buy raw inputs in the US than refined outputs from China. That is a level of insanity that cannot last.
And to put some numbers on it, there are ~100k steel jobs in the US. So we have kneecapped a ton of other industries impacting millions all to maybe save 100k jobs.
Seniconductor manufacturing was effectively centrally planned via SEMATEC and before that via de facto stewardship by things like the the Labs and later Intel as a vehicle for national policy.
This neat little dichotomy between "free market capitalism" and "centrally planned socialism" is a cute story but also complete fiction. In "capitalist" countries the government basically always runs R&D during any period of time when the stakes are high, and in "communist" countries there are always markets, and they are always sanctioned to some degree.
All of the foundational progress for American leadership in high technology was centrally planned and administered, all of it one way or another: through ATT, through NASA, through the DoD, through the universities. Value creation occurs under the watchful eye of the DoD.
Once in a while we go on an orgy of extractive wealth transfer like now, instead of creative innovation like usually, and the top industry guys always fuck it up. And on cue, yeah this is going great.
A lot of countries honestly should be taking this approach. Fabrication is just too important for national security. At least some domestic production is critical.
Tech-wise places too much premium on the ISA. Modern processor design is fairly orthogonal to the ISA being exposed.
Intel could make exciting RISC-V relatively quickly if they wanted to; what stops them and other companies like this is the strategic asset they perceive their existing ecosystem as.
There's a nice interview with Mike Clark where he talks about this a bit. His take basically matches this. He says that, in his view, any efficiency benefits of ARM are just that's been the market for ARM. In his view, if x86 had a market motive for ARM levels of efficiency, they'd be able to deliver it. But, historically, the x86 market wants performance more than efficiency, so that's what it gets.
I don't think so. For example, if an ISA requires a strict memory ordering, this makes the architecture more complicated than an ISA with relaxed memory ordering, although the latter is a pain to write code for.
Itanium is irrelevant to this discussion. x86 works the same as its ARM and RISC-V competitors: a fairly compact, abstract language which describes a program, which depends on an instruction decoder to translate the abstract instructions into microarchitecture-specific instructions. VLIW is a huge departure from that.
When people say "ISA doesn't matter", they mean that the "legacy cruft" in x86 doesn't matter (that much) and that x86 remains competitive with other similar ISAs. It doesn't mean that the difference between VLIW and traditional ISAs doesn't matter. ISA paradigm still matters, just not the "syntax".
By all accounts I can find Itanium performance was good, perhaps even great when writing assembly. It seems to reinforce the point that ISA doesn't really matter.
But let's be clear: Of course ISA matters. It's just as trivial to make a bad ISA as it is a bad syntax. But does the ISA of modern superscalar processors matter? Probably a bit, but certainly not a whole lot.
It wasn't good vs peer competitors at the time (HP-PA, DEC Alpha, IBM RS/6000, even MIPS). And it was very expensive. Huge die. It was an expensive, strange thing, that didn't have the necessary 2X peer performance advantage to offset those issues.
But not because of its ISA. I mean, to first approximation everything is a "flop" in semiconductor architectures (or really in tech in general). The population of genuinely successful products is a tiny fraction of the stuff people tried to sell.
In this particular case: ia64 leaned hard into wide VLIW in an era where growing transistor budgets made it possible to decode and issue traditional instructions in parallel[1]. The Itaniums really were fine CPUs, they just weren't particularly advantageous relative to the P6 cores against which they were competing, so no one bought them.
[1] In some sense, VLIW won as a matter of pipeline architecture, it only lost as a design point in ISA specs. Your Macbook is issuing 10 arm64 instructions every cycle, and it doesn't need to futz with the instruction format to do it.
VLIW came with an implication that static scheduling would win out. The deeply OoO chips you see now have a very different architecture to support that: Itanium was much more a DSP like thing.
Even in VLIW, DRAM fetches are slow, instructions have variable latency and write-before-retire register collisions require renaming. Itanium would have gotten there at some point. OO isn't an optional feature for high performance systems and that was clear even in the 90's.
Out-of-order architectures are inhumanly complex, especially figuring out the dependencies. For example, can we reorder these two instructions or must execute them sequentially?
ld r1, [r2 + 10]
st [r3 + 4], r4
And then consider things like speculative execution.
Honestly to me it seams like optimizing compilers and out-of order CPUs are actually doing the same thing. Can't we get rid of one or the other?
Either have a stupid ISA and do all the work ahead-of-time with way more compute time to optimize or don't optimize and have a higher level ISA, that also hs concepts like pointer provenance.
The current state seams like a local minima with both having ahead-of-time optimization, but the ISA does it's thing anyways and also the compiler throwing much of the information away with OoO analysis being time-critical.
The compiler doesn't know the dynamic state of the CPU memory hierarchy and you don't want it to. Even the CPU doesn't know until it finds out how long a load will take.
Meanwhile the CPU probably can't do a loop invariant hoist in a reasonable way or understand high level semantics.
Fewer transistors and pipeline stages required for the decode unit, which is a real but moderate advantage. And it turned out the window was very narrow and the relative win got smaller and smaller over time. And other externalities where VLIW loses moderately, like total instruction size (i.e. icache footprint) turned out to be more important.
ARM is easier than x86, but not really. VLIW instructions also encode the superscalar pipeline assignments (or a reasonable proxy for them) and are required to be constructed without instruction interdependencies (within the single bundle, anyway), which traditional ISAs need to spend hardware to figure out.
Really VLIW is a fine idea. It's just not that great an idea, and in practice it wasn't enough to save ia64. But it's not what killed it, either.
The problem with ia64 was that if you had 1000 legacy applications for x86, written by third-party contractors, for many of which you don't even have the source, then ia64 must be 100x better than standard CPUs to justify rewriting the apps.
And by the way that's why open source makes such migrations much cheaper.
> It's at the microcode that the ISA lives and that's changeable.
No, it's not. In modern high-speed CPUs, many instructions are decoded directly, without going through the microcode engine. In fact, on several modern Intel CPUs, only one of the instruction decoders can run microcode ("complex") instructions, while all the other decoders can only run non-microcode ("simple") instructions.
It would be more precise to say that it's at the "front-end" part of the core (where the decoders are) that the ISA lives, but even that's not quite true; many ISAs have peculiarities which affect beyond that, like flags on x86.
It was my understanding that even direct coded instructions are still translated by the microcode into the actual signals to allow for errata patching since the P6 architecture and to maintain a common ISA target within a family of processors with diffferent physical characteristics.
A lot of people misunderstand why companies outsource to Asia. It’s not just about cost—it’s actually more so about manufacturing expertise.
Asia has a massive pool of highly skilled manufacturing talent, and that kind of deep expertise is something the U.S. is quickly forgetting.
So my question is: with TSMC building a fab in the U.S., are Americans actually getting retrained in real manufacturing skills? Or are they just being taught to push the buttons TSMC tells them to push?
I dunno, it still sounds like a cost thing. Somehow all the places where people have "the right skills" happen to have very low wages, as long as they're stable countries. And some professions like automaking were much bigger in the US before they started outsourcing due to cost (unions factored in).
There's a big difference in manufacturing between operators (the ones pushing the buttons), and plant engineers and designers. Assuming the process has been designed and built correctly, the button pushers can push buttons, and identify when not to push the buttons, and that's fine.
The US has plenty of manufacturing operations much more complicated than building CPUs, so of course we can do it. Manufacturing expertise in Asia (as I understand it) comes down more to macro-level processes, where different components might be built or raw ingredients sourced near each other, so further assembly can be done easier than any place in the United States.
The US has plenty of manufacturing operations much more complicated than building CPUs
It's my understanding that this is not the case. That CPU (and similar) manufacturing is considered one of the most complex processes humanity has ever developed. What are these plenty of manufacturing operations that are more complicated?
It really depends on which part of the process you focus on. CPU manufacturing is highly automated and not particularly logistically complex. You're correct that the machines used are just about the most sophisticated things ever built by human hands, but once they're installed and configured the process is fairly straightforward.
Compare this to, say, building a car. Much less automation, much simpler end product.
Was the US ever a major manufacturer of even pre-IC solid state electronics?
I was born in 1978 and was really into Heathkits and breadboard projects and stuff when I was a child and early teen. My dad was (and still is) an analog electronic engineer and gave me lots of surplus oscilloscopes and frequency counters and other coolness too. I distinctly remember often seeing "Made in Korea," "Made in Japan," "Made in Taiwan," etc. on circuit boards and chassis assemblies. The single word "Korea" was very common on components. This would have mostly been stuff from the late 1970s and 1980s.
At the very least it seems like electronics from at least the early-mid solid state era onward into the IC era has always been a globalized industry with a globalized supply chain. I feel like you've got to go back to vacuum tubes to find self-contained nationalized electronics industries.
Back then as now a lot of stuff was designed in the USA and Europe but manufactured elsewhere. Just like Asia has a ton of top tier manufacturing and logistics talent, the US and Europe have a ton of top tier design engineering and coding talent.
I still do agree that there is strategic value in making sure the US at least has some domestic capacity to manufacture leading-edge chips and electronics, not just to maintain some talent here but in case a major global conflict breaks out that deeply fractures all these supply chains. Same for Europe and any other country. China meanwhile would do well to develop its own domestic software and design talent pool.
It was called silicon valley for a reason. From the 1950s until the 1980s, the US was the dominate manufacturer of integrated circuits and the the origin of most fo the technology.
Everything started to globalize starting in the late 1970s to early 1980s which really kicked off with the end of the gold standard and the Volker Shock.
The Japanese and Germans, which had IC industry already, picked up steam and started to export as the economics changed.
China, Korea, Vietnam, etc. are recent entries (2000s)
I see the point being made here, and yeah 5%-20% extra for what amounts to insurance against geopolitics isn't too bad, but doesn't this all fall apart when China catches up?
That 5%-20% is worth it now because no one else can fabricate competing chips. In a competitive market, 5%-20% can be the difference between having the price edge or not. I understand why the USA wants TSMC to manufacture outside of Taiwan, but perhaps it makes sense to move it not the USA but, say, Mexico?
Chinese car companies seem to be slowly but surely rolling American car companies in international markets with great value at low prices. The move in this market evidently isn't to move manufacturing away from Mexico at a 5%-20% increase in price.
In the chip market there's less immediate competition, but I can only imagine it'll come. Hopefully economies of scale would have removed this extra 5%-20% by the time China catches up?
> I see the point being made here, and yeah 5%-20% extra for what amounts to insurance against geopolitics isn't too bad
Well that is an insurance only for the US. As a european, I feel safer, or at best neutral, knowing my ships are made in the Taiwan rather than the US, so having them more 5-20% more expensive is not competitive.
With all their antagonizing of allies, and predatory privacy laws, and repeated espionage on allies, the US has disintegrated any trust other parties have to buy things made there.
As a European I would like geographically and politically dispersed production lines for one of the most important products of the 21 century. Domestic production would be idal, but whatever we can get is a plus.
Because Taiwan is a small, earthquake prone island perpetually on the brink of invasion of a superpower 180 kilometers away. And antagonizing, predatory privacy laws and espionage is also an issue with CCP, however we still import a lot of electronics and semiconductors from there.
Credit where credit is due: Australia, UK, New Zealand and Canada are all doing their major parts in espionage on each other and everyone else as a service as part of Five Eyes.
As a European myself, I am pretty miffed that my fellow Europeans keep acting like we're not leading the charge when it comes to spying on each other.
What are you going to do when China invades Taiwan, though?
If rumors are to be believed, TSMC will scuttle their fabs before they fall into Chinese hands. Even if they don't, or fail to execute, Taiwan-based chip production will be disrupted for years.
Bet you'll be happy that TSMC has fabs in the US, despite your understandable misgivings.
With China, the issue isn't really the quality of the product. It's the geopolitical issues.
Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and other countries even Philippines and Vietnam don't want to depend too much on China. A lot of island disputes and so on and so forth.
My guess right now is that China will never catch up because Europe, US, Australia, and many other developing countries will avoid depending on China critically. This doesn't mean 0% would buy from China but it'll never become a critical dependency.
> My guess right now is that China will never catch up because [..]
The problem China is big enough to catch up just by it depending on itself + some cheap mass consumer market outlets to even further scale production.
Like they have 1408 Million people ~3times the US and their education system tries (at least of paper) to give everyone a chance to reach silence excellence iff (and only iff) they are noticeable above average (but also due to the form of their education system for people which certain kinds of approaches to thinking which is a major handicap they gave themself accidentally). Like either way with that population size, priority on catching up on chip production, willingness to steal science (through it's not like the US doesn't have a habit for that, too) it's just a matter of time until they have some truly genius people put into the right kind of position with the right kind of resources which will close the gap step by step.
It's a real shame that the U.S is alienating it's allies through aggressive economic policy. Maybe we'll find ourselves on the wrong side of that economically resilient policy.
Oh they will catch up as TSMC amd Samsung are running out of steam and Intel is imploding. There's nothing better than motivating China to take on this monumental effort than thd tariffs and export controls.
> “I think the economics of it are we have to consider the resiliency of the supply chain, I think we learned that during the pandemic — the idea that you think about your supply chains not just by the lowest cost, but also about reliability, about resiliency, and all those things. I think that’s how we’re thinking about U.S. manufacturing,” [AMD CEO Lia Su] said to Bloomberg’s Ed Ludlow.
This almost sounds verbatim what U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent told Bloomberg yesterday, so take the headline phrase “worth it” in that context.
A 5-20% markup on CPUs isn't the worst thing, but those still need a mobo to socket into and as far as I'm aware we still don't have much capability on the availability of boards. Are there any companies that are spinning up board production, or even just broader consumer electronics in general (arduinos, pis, general controllers and the like)?
Not really shocking considering how Japan likes conglomerates.
Hyundai makes cars and military weapons and probably thousands of other things that aren’t even related to each other, don’t know if they still make computers.
To nitpick: Hyundai are Korean but the Korean Chaebols are in many ways even more dominant than Japanese Keiretsu (fmr. Zaibatsu) are. Mitsubishi would be a good Japanese example.
Large Asian companies tend to have their fingers in lots of different pies.
I haven't been to Asia in a while, but at one time, Hyundai made both computer chips and bulldozers.
Mitsubishi once made computer chips, and had a bank, and an art museum.
There are companies that own both department stores and subway systems.
America used to have a fair amount of this, but it was more common during the Industrial Revolution. Companies that owned both railroads and summer resorts. Oil wells and banks.
Even as recently as the 1990's there were companies that owned both pipelines and fiber optic networks. Toasters and television networks.
Maybe not, but if the entire country doesn’t have the ability to manufacture it, then it’s still going to be a strategic weakness when push comes to shove. The entire exercise of doing more chip manufacturing in the U.S. is about maintaining national competitiveness and independence. It’s certainly not about cost. So I think it’s a good point that investments should made to be able to onshore the entire stack rather than just the top end.
Or we could strengthen alliances with our neighbors and potentially shift some of that burden to them. Trying to move everything here is not feasible. We simply do not have the human capital or willingness to manufacture every low level widget in the world.
What this administration is doing is not a recipe for success: trade wars with everyone, immigration crackdowns, and unpredictable tariff policy.
EDIT: Oh and hinting at invasion (Greenland, Canada) doesn't help either
But Taiwan or the rest of Asia is still a problem given the tensions in the area. If China did something it could seriously effect supply even if it wasn’t an attack on whichever country was supplying us.
We need friends making things in Canada or the rest of the Americas or Europe or Africa or some other place that isn’t China or directly under their thumb.
Even without action by man. The wrong tsunami or whatever could effectively wipe enough out everyone would be screwed.
We need geographical diversity too. The existing alliances we’re burning to the ground don’t solve that.
Yea, I work in the industry. There are players, but not exactly bountiful. Really the backbone of American electronics manufacturing is military spending. If the defense budget went away, there would be close to zero PCB manufacturers left. China makes higher quality boards, faster and for dramatically less money.
This applies for any manufacturing industry to be honest. US shipbuilding capability is so limited compared to China. It's only surviving because of military spending, but not in a healthy way. US made ships are of lower quality and cost much more, compared to European countries. It's the same for cars, busses, airplanes. Whole US policy is blocking the entry of busses manufactured outside NAFTA. US government is keeping Boeing alive by sending POTUS to marketing trips etc etc.
If there is a reason to want to in-house the fabrication of chips then it seems silly to not extend that to at least the boards that house them, otherwise we wind up still being reliant on an international supply chain which seems to defeat the purpose.
Even if it was just motherboards in particular and not others, that seems like a necessary step in securing the supply chain and if we only do that for national defense the benefits of competition likely won't extend to consumers that are still exposed to trade taxation.
Worse - to manufacture usable boards, you need everything from the CPU socket and northbridge chip down to the dust-mote-sized discrete components that are mounted on it. Plus RAM, and ...
'Most all of which falls square into your "low tech and low profit", from a right-thinking* American company's PoV.
Not to say that a saintly American company could do much better, if it tried to swim uphill against America's vastly-higher cost of living (vs. the countries where most of that stuff's manufactured). And other problems beyond its control.
Agreed, though its realistically much more than four. We have to make going to college a good idea again. That's not a cultural shift that'll happen overnight.
PCBs are relatively easy to make. But there's a whole supply chain of plastic bits and pieces, screws, materials, etc that the MBAs decided decades ago should come from the lowest cost region.
The article doesn’t say, but I assume these are SOTA AI chips? If so, it’s a huge deal that American can build them.
Another interesting point:
> AMD and larger rival Nvidia Corp. recently gained a reprieve on restrictions imposed on shipments of some types of artificial intelligence accelerators to China. It’s still not clear how many licenses will be granted — or how long the companies will be allowed to ship the chips to the country, the biggest market for semiconductors.
It sounds like they’re trying to give China some chips but not as many as American allied countries. I wonder if they’re trying to get China “addicted” to western AI chips to hurt Chinese chip manufacturing development?
They can make advanced chips in Arizona, but the bleeding edge is in Taiwan. Arizona can make TSMC’s 4nm process, but in Taiwan they’re doing 3nm and ramping up 2nm.
It's TSMC and Taiwanese state policy is to lag the US fabs bu couple of years as they don't want to lose their strategic importance and their protection that comes with it.
Export restrictions work similarly to tariffs or subsidies. In the long term they limit domestic products from global competition. DeepSeek comes up with more efficient algorithms out of necessity to compete using lesser hardware. Companies with deep pockets like OpenAI will be first and best, but only for a limited period if they don't invest in efficiency as well as capability.
That is certainly what they are lobbying for and I think I agree with the lobbyists for once. Huawei is shaping up to become a strong competitor if left at it and it's probably in the US's best interest to just let Nvidia and AMD sell to China to maintain the hardware monopoly for longer.
Exactly what most AI researchers would have predicted, if you force like 30% of the worlds top ai researchers to use something other than CUDA, they’ll work on improving the tools for something other than CUDA.
It’s wild the same administrations would argue for restricting access to the US market for tariffs to strengthen domestic production, would not believe that severely restricting exports to the Chinese market would strengthen their domestic production
If anything I could see the Chinese government moving to blocking import of Nvidia and AMD accelerators as time goes on. They can't afford to right now but you can bet they want to.
> I wonder if they’re trying to get China “addicted” to western AI chips to hurt Chinese chip manufacturing development?
This has nothing to do with that. It was part of the deal made with China recently in Geneva. The U.S. needs what China has (rare metals), and China needs what the U.S. has (SOTA chips).
> (rare metals in a place where nobody cares how they're harvested as opposed to the ones in North America that can't be mined due to ecological concerns)
It's really not just ecological concerns and tbh the mining really isn't that big of a deal. It's entirely the processing that is the problem, ecologically sure but mostly technically. Without the Chinese machines that do the processing because yes, you guessed it they are the only country in the world that makes most of them, you end up more than 20-30% less efficient. At that point on the world market you just aren't competitive at all.
This is all assuming you can get past the NIMBYs to build the plants in the first place.
Yeah this reads like an attempt to push the "made in America" narrative the admin wants. "Things will cost more but it's made in the US" And this is good because...why? It's not about broadening the supply chain to the consumers benefit. It's about avoiding the disaserous tariff strategy which the company isn't even paying in the first place.
What would be good for the rest of the world is if there were SOTA chips that were not produced by the US nor Taiwan. Frankly, even the ones produced in Taiwan are under US control.
The world needs a healthy diversified CPU/GPU chip market. At least there is ARM on the CPU side, but it's not nearly enough.
To a degree sure. I think a common architecture should be prioritized to ensure software portability. Similar to x86/x64. Where anyone can make hardware for the platform and porting software is much easier. Returning to the old days of every computer have their own unique architechture is not a good idea. Just caused insane fragmentation and nobody could truely invest in a computer without being worried about not getting certain products or software.
CPU space is definitely easier to disrupt but the GPU space requires a HUGE investment and you're fighting uphill against proprietary technology like CUDA that has become industry standards. Intel, Qualcomm, Samsung and Google have made inroads with budget to mid range which is the highest selling segment. But to compete with Nvidia or AMD on the high end you either need a whole datacenter or many years of R&D with very little return for a long time. Apple would be on this list but they have siloed off themselves entirely.
Where could it be? The places with abundant energy are where these things establish. US is about at the lower limit. Korea, Taiwan, Japan. China has SMIC and Huawei. But Europe doesn’t have enough energy to run air conditioning. They’d struggle to add more industry. India has power shortages. Africa isn’t reliable. Australia? South America too unstable.
That's a good point. I don't think it's a good idea for corporations to come in and set up stable energy sources to then hoard it themselves. Would be similar to Amazon setting up shop in Cartolandia. And long time investment plans like China's Belt and Road Initiative don't necessarily benefit the host country as much as it benefits the builder.
Branching out supply chains and industry is a big problem to solve effectively because it touches so many different pieces.
It's not that dire, but energy costs in the EU are quite high compared to the US. US retail prices for electricity average 13 cents per kWh.[1] The EU's average is around 28 cents per kWh.[2] The only EU countries with advanced fabs are Germany and Ireland. In Germany, retail electricity is 35 cents per kWh. Ireland is almost as bad at 31 cents per kWh. Industrial plants tend to pay lower rates and can supplement their grid consumption with things like on site solar, but that's also true in the US.
When (not if) China invades Taiwan, those Taiwanese-made chips will disappear overnight. Even if China takes over the TSMC fabs intact, they'll be disrupted for years.
So sure, right now we might not want to pay that 20% markup for US-made chips, but 20% will be cheap if the only operational TSMC fabs are in the US.
I wouldn't want to pay 20% extra for US-made chips. The US threatened to invade a close ally and started trade wars for absolutely no reason. Paying extra to give the US even more economic power seems like a lose/lose situation to me.
I'd rather see America hooked on the same supply as everyone else to make sure they stop China from invading Taiwan. Our shared weaknesses force governments to cooperate, which is a win in my book.
Capital expenditures are the dominant cost for semi fabs. Labor is actually relatively small. For example, "just" a tester machine, which tests parts before final, cost $5-10M each, and there are usually rows of these machines as far as the eye can see.
The question is: what’s AMDs margin? 20% manufacturing cost maybe well below 1% of the total development cost. So, not a deal breaker at all.
It seems to me that long term having fabs in the IS is net positive for the economy: more jobs, more localized supply chains, more local expertise, etc etc
The manufacturing cost is emphatically not only 1% of the total development cost. Particularly for GPUs, the high bandwidth memory and manufacturing costs are a significant portion of the product price.
> The manufacturing cost is emphatically not only 1% of the total development cost.
I have no idea what is the manufacturing cost of a 800 mm^2 die is, but I am sure it is lower than the development cost.
> Particularly for GPUs, the high bandwidth memory and manufacturing costs are a significant portion of the product price.
HBM is not manufactured by the GPU vendor, it is an off-the-shelf component that AMD buys like any other company can. Thus, the cost of HBM is tallied in the BOM and integration costs (interposer, packaging, etc).
800mm^2 die would roughly cost 300-350 usd axcoeding to [1]. That's the Taiwan price and dor N4. This doesn't include the memory or the package. The silicon cost for N3 is close to 2x.
Well, seems that increase of 20% for US-based manufacturing on a base cost of $350 is $70. MSRP of 5090 is $1,999. So, on shoring will result in 3.5% increase in MSRP, which is nothing.
You can get much more then a 5%-20% higher price from the kind of customers which really care about US production (I mean like government, CIA, NSA, which also get stuff like AMD systems with hyper threading disabled or special treatment wrt. management units in a CPU etc. I don't mean people caring for the US, for that target group, from what I have seen over the years, I guess, 5% can work 20% is tricky).
I wonder if chips are literally shipped or just flown.
The extra transport cost might not matter for these precious chips. A tray full of Epyc or Blackwell dies is an insane number of potential revenue per kg.
Leading-edge chips are flown almost every time. The opportunity cost of 6 weeks at sea is too high for a chip which can't flow out of the fab fast enough to meet demand.
Shipping the chips back to Taiwan to be packaged so they can then be shipped back to the United States for sale is a positive? What are you talking about?
You can't go all the way in one step. Having built domestic chip capacity is positive for the US, even if domestic packaging capacity isn't there yet. It's obviously not a desirable situation long term.
What’s positive is that we have state of the art domestic manufacturing with potential to onshore more and more of the required supply chains, building/educating local expertise, etc etc.
Ocean shipping is very very cheap. Less cost in money and energy to ship a chip across the ocean than for you to drive to best buy to buy the phone its in.
There are moves being made to test ships with modern "sails". Here's a paper published about a cargo ship fitted with 4 sails in 2010. The findings are interesting with it achieving up to 25% better fuel efficiency when using the sails.
No, much less pollution. It costs less carbon emissions to ship from Shanghai to California and back then for one person to drive 10 minutes to the store in their personal car.
then 5 pounds of chips on the way back is worth millions of dollars so it can be flown on a passenger jet or fedex jet that is already going here. or a boat and take up 3% of a container
Honestly I thought they might be even more expensive than this 5%-20%, it's good to see that it's not a 100% more expensive. While it seems we've learned some lessons about supply chain resiliency, I'm sure there's a number that puts the brakes on this thing.
Probably because they aren’t human labor intensive and most of the costs of fabs are in construction and equipment, and almost all of the expensive lithography stuff comes from ASML (a Dutch company)?
The EUV light source comes from ASML which is indeed Dutch. Although the technology (zapping tiny droplets of tin with a laser as they fall through space) was largely invented in the US. It's an extremely complicated and expensive kludge but it works.
Doesn't this type of thing prove that we can just... start manufacturing things domestically if we really wanted to? Which would presumably be when it actually makes sense to do so? But it mostly doesn't right now, so we mostly don't.
There are certainly benefits to being able to make something down the block and quickly iterate. But that's a different thing from industrial scale production. And if we really wanted that benefit wouldn't we just... do it?
The article doesn’t say why the chips have a cost difference. The wafer cost of advanced nodes is ~$30k per wafer. Is the wafer cost different or is the yield different and hence the reason for the variance of 5-20%? All else being equal (same die size/design on same process) I suspect that a large part of the cost difference is yielded cost due to maturity of operations at the Arizona fab. Taiwan has had many years to optimize operations. You see this for any product initially when it moves to a new production site.
We can speculate. But I bet the fact that the supply chains needed by a US plant stretch across the globe (mostly back to Taiwan, Japan, and Germany) has something to do with that. In Taiwan, supply chains are local. Things like wafers might not be produced in the US yet.
You can hop in a car and visit them. In the US they are across the Pacific and in a very different/inconvenient timezone. It's a 15 hour gap. 9 am in Arizona would be midnight in Taiwan. And there's the anti meridian running through that so it's a day later over there as well. And the business days barely overlap.
I bet all that adds some friction in day to day operations. Lost time, shipping delays, miscommunication, etc. There are solutions to this, of course. But I'm sure that adds complexity to an already complex business. So, limiting that overhead to just 5-20% sounds pretty good to me.
The supply chain is already dispersed, even outside Taiwan. Particularly as we move from single die devices to MCM, many processes are outside of Taiwan. JCET is in Singapore and Amkor is in Arizona and Korea for example. There is some cost to the logistics but it’s kind of in the noise on a per device basis. The cost is in the processes themselves. It is a gigantic pain to manage but it doesn’t not add such a high variable cost.
Semiconductor companies need gross margins of around 65% to grow and be able to invest in development of the next node. So this large additional variable cost really can’t be shrugged off as you suggest. If so, Ms. Su wouldn’t have mentioned it at all.
The article quotes the CEO saying yield is comparable:
>TSMC’s new Arizona plant is already comparable with those in Taiwan when it comes to the measure of yield — the amount of good chips a production run produces per batch — Su told the audience at the forum.
The overhead cost of a fab is fixed. So hard to understand why that would have such a wide variance. It may be true that the facility hasn’t been fully amortized so in principle it’s more expensive to make chips there. I can understand it being more expensive for many reasons. However I wouldn’t expect the cost difference to have a large variance. 5-20% is a very large range if the yields are comparable.
They brought in a bunch of process engineers from Taiwan to set up thr same processes.
It's the limited and expensive talent pool, construction costs etc. resulting in a difference. Americans do earn at least 2-3x more than someone in Taiwan for a given role.
The 5-20% range likely reflects TSMC's yield learning curve in Arizona, with costs trending toward the lower end as the fab matures and defect densities approach those of Taiwan's established facilities.
Even 5% more expensive means 80% of people buy the taiwan version for $475 instead of $500.
20% more expensive and 99.9% of people buy the $500 one instead of the $600 one.
Never make the mistake of falling for people's virtue signalling and pay attention instead to how they actually apply those virtues (spoiler: saving money is the #1 acted upon virtue, being far stronger than any other).
There's many fields where paying 10% extra on parts is more than worth it for shorter and more reliable supply chain. Not to mention probably better for the environment as well. The price for parts is often a small piece of the overall costs.
Seems other agree with me on that:
> And while many companies fear that moving their manufacturing to the U.S. would cost significantly more, some experts estimate that wafer production at the Arizona site is only about 10% more expensive compared to Taiwan. Despite that, the company says that its customers are willing to pay a higher price, with production already sold out until late 2027.
Also interesting that many of the new tariffs settle down to around 10%. That seems like a good balance for the US, and also similar to what European tariffs have been for many industries.
IMHO, the idea of entirely free trade is as dumb as excessive trade barriers. It's like trying to model people as purely rational agents. We're not. It's a decent starting point but we need perturbative models based on empirical information of human biases.
The ideal solution for tariffs is likely a distribution function with a peak around 5-15% with a steep drop off toward 0% and a longer tail for higher tariffs. Because 0% just leaves you open to any market manipulations of malicious foreign actors and corporations looking to offshore for a few cents of profits while higher tariffs lead to increasing protectionism and local companies becoming lax and inefficient.
That would just so happen to align well with these extra cost to manufacture in the USA in this instance.
This is the manufacturing cost, not the retail MSRP.
_Never_ make the mistake of assuming a market is perfectly efficient and any corporate savings along the way will be passed along to the consumer.
When Apple or Google comes along and buys out next year's total TMSC output, that 80% of people will just have to buy whatever is on the shelf at the time.
The manufacturing cost is 5%-20% more expensive. That doesn't say much about what AMD is going to do with the prices they charge customers. They may be able to absorb that cost, albeit with lower margins, and may choose to do so for exactly the reason you state: people won't buy it if they can get a more or less identical product elsewhere for cheaper.
Whether or not AMD is motivated to eat that cost is another question, of course.
If other people agree with Lia Siu about supply chain resiliency, presumably what will happen is that they buy from both. Maybe they buy more from Taiwan, but the effective price will be somewhere between the two.
If the US can maintain even just 5-10% of production volume, that's a huge win IMO. It means the US has a foundation of knowledge, equipment, and supply chains to expand on in the event of an emergency.
Taiwan is in a precarious position, which is a huge liability for "western" powers. And a liability for us is effectively also a liability for Taiwan, considering we are their protectorate. North America and western Europe are comparatively safe.
Virtue signaling? What are you talking about. You seem to have an axe to grind.
Cost increase in a single part doesn’t necessarily mean the cost of the device needs to go up. If a CPU costs 120$ instead of 100$ like that of a competing device 300$ device you can always sell yours for 310$ and make less margins. Things have to get subsidized in the short term if we are going to get domestic production up.
Supposing TSMC has similar margin and cost structure for chips made in the US and Taiwan, what does a 5-20% price increase means in term of production cost?
A 20% premium for one of the pillars of a modern economy to both repatriate engineering knowledge as well as be significantly less threatenable by your primary geopolitical enemy would be money very well spent.
Like, as more of the supply chain is reshored will that continually increase cost because reshoring is intrinsically less efficient or will it decrease costs because the increased cost of just reshoring the fab part of the supply chain costs more due to less proximity and integration with the existing supply chain?
I definitely agree, but the next challenge is how to support that long-term investment?
Businesses that rely on the chips will see an increase in cost; and that means passing the cost down to their customers (or having less to invest on their own R&D).
In the short term, chips would just be 5-20% more expensive in the US compared to anywhere else. They'd need to raise the tariffs a bit more, though, to make sure there's incentive to increase production to a level that can satisfy demand.
In the long term, it would provide the US with an independent source of chips, and eventually allow them to let go of any plants to protect Taiwan from China.
Nothing but delusion. Time to throw a wrench into this party.
1. The estimates are never accurate; after subsidies dry up expect 50-200%.
2. I will buy used before I buy new to cut costs.
3. American manufacturing is trash; I will never buy GM/Ford/Chrysler/Tesla; no matter how much you try to force me to. Intel falls into this category. I'm supposed to just accept on faith that building a tsmc fab in the US is going to "just werk"? Nah.
4. I don't care if it's "Made in America"; what I care about is price to quality and performance ratio. Which as we all know the Americans have gave up on (ahem Ford and only manufacturing trucks, etc). Intel has been getting it's asshole rocked the past couple years and it has home field advantage.
5. I care what Linux runs; and if China and RISC-V take off and are lower price point I'll buy that before I spend anything on US "American made chips".
6. I don't care about "ccp bad"; fuck off with your propaganda. You realize Taiwan is an island state of China right? Seems like good idea to let them setup shop in US? Good job you played yourself.
7. The "rare earths" to make these chips come mostly from China. China will counter like they already have screwing over Micron and Intel (and soon tsmc).
8. Apple will mark up whole price; not just chip price. The consumer will pay for the entire shift of the supply chain not just the cost to manufacture. Even in best case of 5% your 2,000 laptop is now minimum 2,100; yea, the average American can afford that... People can't even afford to eat fast food anymore and some idiots in here think they can pay more for something they don't give a shit about? Lol
9. You first; just like with the idiots that bought Teslas (which are the lowest and worst in quality of all cars manufactured). Meanwhile I'm still driving my second car (Japanese btw) after having bought in 2019 (and the one before lasted 20 years).
10. This reeks of the anti Honda shit I would see during 2008 PvP of US auto industry because they failed to innovate. And guess what no propaganda saved them and they still can't compete in the market.
11. Intel is on life support, and tsmc is supposed to what...?
Haha, thanks. People have a myopic view and think that "American made" automatically equates to sales. I have a friend that makes in the US toys, but the markup is over 200% more of something similar that you'd find in the store; they're entirely custom. These are sold exclusively in the US. Tons of complaints on price too and how they aren't cheap enough. Best part, she can't even pay her bills with what she does sell. Every single person peddling this narrative will never put their money where their mouth is. It will result in massive loses and stagnation of innovation in the industry.
I run an AMD NeoCloud. People are extremely price sensitive and due to the competitive nature of the industry, I'll likely be the one absorbing this increased cost.
I see what she did here. That's just for silicone, not for the ready to use product. I expect the final US-made CPU available for sale cost to jump significantly higher than 20%
That actually isn’t too bad, assuming it’s true. I would certainly pay 5% and probably 20% more for a product made here by American workers getting fair wages versus an overseas factory. I’ll believe it when I see it because I have a hard time believing this is possible. I would like to be proven wrong.
If they were worth it you'd already have been buying them. With that being said, glad to hear a CEO say "we have to consider the resiliency of the supply chain" because JIT as a manufacturing philosophy is revealing itself to be what it always was: exceedingly fragile, barely adequate when everything is working perfectly and subject to massive, multiplicative disruptions when everything is not working perfectly.
the concept is the same: do you do work in advance and bear the cost of storing it and maybe not using it, or do you do work as-needed and hope that the additional cost of trying to deliver immediately is less than the cost of storage and overrun? the answer seems to be the same, too, "depends on whether you have resources to spare and whether the environment is stable enough to count on immediate delivery"
Worth remembering that in the medium term, chip manufacturing will become so expensive only one leading edge provider will remain and they will require the entire world market to remain profitable.
The US cost of stationing forces, patrols, and readiness in the pacific is probably 20-40 billion USD per year. cut that huge subsidy and Taiwan ceases to exist within several years. 5%? we should really evaluate if we need a long term dependency on taiwan. It would probably be better to evacuate them all.
Sure if we just compelety ignore our treaty partners in Japan, Philipines, India, Korea and US territories in Guam, Samoa, Marianas... or bases like Diego Garcia.
It's international but I wonder how many people know that about third of ASML scanners and steppers are made in Connecticut. And all their light sources are made by ex-Cymer in San Diego.
This factory was built as a part of the CHIPS act, so it's unrelated to him. If anything Trump escalating was probably pretty bad but his willingness to pivot is probably good. I know he shit talks about the chips act though which is definitely a mistake. Seems odd given his platform is about bringing manufacturing to the US.
One has to wonder if the entire point of killing CHIPS act is so that when some of the results finally come to fruition, CHIPS seems like yesterday's news and Trump gets the credit by default with his attention-span-of-a-fly cheerleaders. Similar shape but different direction from the dynamic Republicans have been playing with inflation for the past several decades - running up the debt with profligate spending, and then when the monetary inflation finally trickles down into consumer price inflation several years later their propaganda machine goes to work pinning it on the Democrat in office.
This is why tariffs matter. Despite the US having much higher wages, and likely property and infrastructure costs, manufacturing is only 5-20% more for these high tech products.
Corporations outsourced not because they couldn't compete, but because why leave 10% on the table when we can reward the executives with that cash instead of the labor?
These plants have nothing to do with tariffs though? They were in development prior to any tariffs and were partially funded by the CHIPS act. If anything, that’s the opposite of tariffs…
My point is, the cost of goods being produced in the US is not dramatically higher, as outlined in the article. Even very basic tariffs would level the playing field and bring economic benefits domestically, without a major impact to the consumer.
Context is important here: a 20% increase in price to consumer is not going to be perceived as "not dramatically higher". Focusing on tech for a moment, we are discussing this in the context of a good that normally decreases in price annually suddenly getting more expensive.
For the sake of argument, if all goods increase in price by 20%, Americans are going to have the experience of being worse off than they were before.
This is the largest tax hike on Americans in modern times (possibly ever?). While it may take a while for people to understand the impact of policy, people generally do not like large tax hikes. I don't think it's a stretch to think people will not like this tax increase, either.
That assumes you have the means to bring the production domestically first.
This is a confluence of the previous administration having the forethought to do this, before the current administration tried to kill the CHIPS act.
If they hadn’t done that, you likely wouldn’t have seen domestic production able to satisfy the needs.
Tariffs alone are a misguided cudgel.
Also your comment about a “major impact to the consumer” ignores that this is an increase in cost just for the silicon. There’s a lot of tariffs on different parts of the actual product.
A CPU factory may (because of high margins), but, for example, a car factory may not. A factory isn't just the labour, it also requires inputs, and tariffs that change weekly means that you can't rely on being able to source the inputs reliably. When your margins are smaller, random input costs can easily sink you.
If you want to bring back manufacturing you need to consider the entire supply chain, and make sure that inputs for whatever factory you are bringing in are secure and will be equal or cheaper in 20 years. These things need to be predictable.
Also, let's not pretend the MAGA movement listens to anything other than the propaganda.
My son-in-law works for a domestic truck manufacturer (semis, not pickups). Orders are down because nobody knows how much the order will cost, because of tariff uncertainty.
Yes, nothing kills business activity more than uncertainty. High prices can be planned for and dealt with. Constantly fluctuating ones with no upper bound cannot.
And lower activity creates more uncertainty, as people get laid off, banks start adjusting mortgage rates upwards and borrowing becomes more expensive. Leading to even less activity and more uncertainty. It's a scary road to go down toying with this house of cards at the level Trump has been doing.
The ones on Chinese EVs to protect the local car industry maybe, the blanket 10% he puts on your allies and the 25% if the allies are too woke maybe not.
Reciprocal tariffs have been something many people (on both sides of the isle) have been wishing for forever... It's not normally a D vs. R thing, except right now where the D's feel a need to play the opposition role.
On the other hand... most of the tariffs you hear about aren't real and never had/will-have an impact, and are clearly being weaponized as a way to get trading partners in-line. Few actual tariffs have been realized as-of yet... but if you read the news you'd be led to believe everything you buy is tariffed all to hell.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. The Biden Admin left in-place a lot of Trump foreign policy, and Democrats (the likely next admin-party) have been wishing for tariffs for years. Currently they're playing their part as the "opposition" but I'd bet money most of the tariffs stay during the next admin.
Your point about changing every 2 weeks is sound, however.
"Tariffs won't work because we won't actually use them" is not an argument against tariffs, that's an argument against corporate control of the economic levers.
Blaming tariffs when it was the greed of Wall Street, private equity, hedge funds, "corporate raiders" that ultimately shipped manufacturing overseas. All of this under decades of psuedo-economic theory called neoclassical economics. Then this is taken further under neoliberal economic policy — "reagonomics" and "trickle down economics".
These greedy fucks in the 1970s sold out current generations so they could min/max profit for themselves and billionaire buddies. All of this at the expense of decimating: local manufacturing industries, environment, public safety nets, and sustainable living.
I'm assigning blame to the greedy corporations. If consumers have $100 to spend on an item, corporations can either make it domestically for $90, or move production overseas and make it for $80. The consumer is going to pay $100 in either scenario. Lowering the tariffs ensured that the products would be made overseas so the executives can profit on the slave labor.
I'm not attempting to assign blame to one political party or another. Reasonable tariffs to protect domestic labor should be a bi-partisan issue.
I feel like covid was only yesterday, yet it seems people have already forgotten the lessons we learned about lack of supply chain resilience. Resilience comes at a cost, and that cost is efficiency. That is the tradeoff being made here. It's not just that people want to light money on fire, or some misguided maga "buy american" nonsense.
Especially silly when the chance of China invading Taiwan is very nonzero.
You don't import apartments or even the materials used to manufacture them. Arguing tariffs drive rent prices rather than the cost of luxury consumption and corporate capex any more than the progressive income tax does is absurd.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-23/amd-ceo-s...
No, that is not the cost of keeping "the value" within western economies. It would be the cost of granting the US a leverage against the collective west. The US proved to be a very unreliable and outright hostile partner. At this point, it is not clear whether the US is more hostile to the collective west than the likes of China.
It might be, but it's also pretty stupid to use that as a selling point to convince the west to welcome that play as something remotely in their best interests. It isn't.
A country willing to cut mineral supply anytime they don’t like anything is good partner and friend of EU , lol, how delusional someone can be ?
Even current US Administration sends Patriots and military support to Ukraine, while China is sponsoring WAR, help Russia to keep up with war killing people around the world.
China can end that war in 1 week if they really want.
US spent fortune to protect collective west while countries like Germany almost dismantled their army in the past.
Very rational thinking , sure. China will wipe out entire west with technological superiority in the next decade or two without west being united.
China may potentially be able to stop the war, but at what cost? They've been licking their wounds and rebuilding their nation at breakneck speed for the past century, and it's only recently that they've finally reached a critical stage with innovations on all fronts. Going against one of their two allies now would be pretty ill-advised.
The US has also been very erratic, while China's current goals seem to be fairly consistent: reclaim everything they lost during the century of humiliation.
If that is true, perhaps the US should stop destroying the western alliance.
Other proxies are Iran with their satelites, without china neither Iran or Russia would not survive current wars they sponsor agaist west.
as much as I hate current US admin, they push to increase NATO spending etc.
how is that not "uniting" ?
You haven't been paying attention. Even to this thread.
Let me be very clear: The US proved to be a very unreliable and outright hostile partner. At this point, it is not clear whether the US is more hostile to the collective west than the likes of China.
Therefore, let the US keep their backyard TSMC. It changes nothing. It helps nothing. It is not to be trusted.
That is the wake-up call.
The EU represents 27 sovereign states. NATO has 32 members. The US population is around 75% of the population of the EU.
And now decided to break off political, diplomatic, economic and defense ties.
I don't think this fact dawned upon you people. I mean, recently the EU basically banned the US defense industry from supplying EU's armed forces, which was unthinkable only a few years ago and it takes place during a rearmament push to prevent Russia's imperialist agenda. You can't whine about isolationism and still expect partners to still consider you relevant.
Not when people are being absolutist rather than taking the situation for what it is and doing the best they can with it.
Tariffs or no the US wants back in on the construction/manufacturing industry. This is something that should be seen as a good thing. I just wish the EU was so visionary but we're worried about recycling plastics (when we don't use the plastic) or curtailing bad think (rather than open dialogue)...
The US is threatening NATO partners with invasion and annexation, not to mention the moronic tariff war, and you come here talk about "absolutist"? Pathetic.
I do not feel united. And, echoing you, how is that not unreliable?
The current US administration directly and very overtly threatens two NATO members with invasion and annexation.
I personally can't interpret Trump administration's insistence on supporting Russia on all fronts alongside its enthusiastic push to completely cut military support for Ukraine as anything other than something far more damaging to the collective west's protection than whatever support China or even North Korea is providing to Russia.
There is no way to spin this: the US is the biggest threat to the collective west, not only by reneging on their obligations towards their allies in general and NATO in particular but also by it's clear and very overt threats.
> Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told the European Union’s top diplomat that Beijing can’t accept Russia losing its war against Ukraine as this could allow the United States to turn its full attention to China, an official briefed on the talks said, contradicting Beijing’s public position of neutrality in the conflict. https://edition.cnn.com/2025/07/04/europe/china-ukraine-eu-w...
The Trump administration is overtly cutting support from Ukraine while pressuring Ukraine to capitulate to Russia. At the same time it's also pushing for sanctions to be lifted and economic times with Russia to be normalized. Trump went to the extreme of pressuring the G7 to admit back Russia.
What do you call that?
China supporting glorified golf cars doesn't hold a candle to the damage that the US has done to peace in Europe and the collective west's interests in security.
You also underestimate the Chinese support. The war would have been over in 2023 if it wasn't for China.
> The discovery of a Russian decoy drone made up entirely of Chinese parts is another indication of the growing wartime relationship between Moscow and Beijing. ... Beyond components, China appears to have provided Russia with at least some complete weapons systems. In May, we reported that Russia was using a new Chinese laser system to shoot down Ukrainian drones. https://www.twz.com/news-features/new-russian-drone-made-com...
Rossiya-1 viewer/bot sighted
The current US administration has been threatening two separate NATO allies with invasion and annexation.
Not even Russia, with their daily Russian last warnings of nuclear Armageddon, dare being that hostile.
Averaging over a large window while ignoring the trend is not reasonable.
Trust is a funny thing like that. You do have to do it all the time, but if you fail even once without extremely good reason you lose it all.
There is a quite long history of USA doing coups, sabotage, and so on, against its own "friends".
If we look at the military investments US did since Clinton(so, last 30 years), you'll notice a trend of looking after it's own interests before the ones of the world. An example is the lack of investment in destroyers to patrol the seas, while at the same time the focus shifted to super-carriers which are good for one thing: obliterate a single, powerful country.
This is not just Trump, but everyone after Bush Sr.
There were only 31 Spruances and 4 Kidds.
That seems like an investment in destroyers, and much more capable ones than it's predecessors at that. Argubly more capable than even the Ticonderoga.
But maybe you mean something else I'm not groking.
I would instead assert that it is very likely that the US would destroy the fabs rather than allow China to gain control of them through an act of aggression.
The doctrine of mutually assured destruction has been around a long time. The international players are familiar with it.
The current U.S. leadership is so chaotic and seemingly uninvolved in strategy that predictions about whether/how MAD would play out are difficult to make.
And mututally assured destruction has nothing to do with the US destroying an industry in Taiwan. MAD specifically refers to the idea that superpowers cannot engage in nuclear war against one another without also being destroyed themselves, because of a Nuclear Triad.
For "Mutually Assured Destruction" to be in anyway applicable, you'd have to say that the second that the US destroyed "Chinese" fabs (Taiwan), China would destroy American fabs. Thus, the US would not attack China without risking itself. The US making targeted strikes on Taiwan is one sided destruction. But to be clear: MAD doctrine is specifically about fullscale thermonuclear war.
The mask slips: I thought the USA wanted to protect Taiwanese democracy.
Silly me.
Because yes, a protracted conflict on the island would mostly reduce it to rubble.
The valuable bits and pieces are already equipped with a self destruct mechanism.
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/tsmcs-euv-machine...
Being a small island it’s much more of a zero sum / all or nothing fight than say Ukraine where at some point they can agree on a line on the map for Putin to walk away with a territorial partial win.
Lot of headwind for US between ship building, distance, whether Japan allows usage of bases, total manpower, Chinese ship killer missiles, authoritarian dictatorships willingness to throw manpower into meat grinders, etc.
Not that it’s a slam dunk for China either - beach landings are hard, and their war machine is largely unproven.
The most likely outcome is Taiwan or US destroy the fabs in event of invasion.
And before anyone says it’s because of nukes or superpower protection or whatever, there has been plenty of wars on the periphery of the EU during this time. The balkans, Cyprus, Egypt, etc.
I meant how did that ensure peace between Ukraine, Russia and EU? It clearly didn't even though EU was buying shit tonnes of gas from Russia, and Russia was buying shit tonne of aerospace parts and stuff from Ukraine. War still happened.
[..edited out the Yugoslavia argument..]
All the proof shows "peace through trade" does not work. The only thing that works is "peace through strength", which then you can use to enforce and defend your own favorable trade policies for you and your close allies, which has been the US's MO since 1945.
> Yugoslav wars started in 1991 and ended in 2001. Russia invaded Crimea in 2014. Are these wars not "European" enough?
Well, Ukraine, Russia and the former Yugoslavian republics that had wars are not part of the EU, or were not at the moment they had their wars. And even though all neighbouring countries trade with the EU, their economies are much less interdependent than those of the EU countries because of the lack of free trade and freedom of movement.
So this supports the idea that the EU does prevent wars rather than invalidating it.
Yes, it was all the EU economy. The 40 or so US military bases occupying the EU had nothing to do with ensuring peace on the continent.
Of course the US plays a part. But they don't have bases everywhere so it's not that obvious why it would explain why France and Luxembourg get along fine but Serbia and Kosovo don't, is it? Or Turkey and Greece, which both host US bases.
The discussion wasn't about getting along fine but about economic ties preventing wars, since Russia and Germany were also "getting along fine" till 1940 when they suddenly weren't.
And Luxemburg has nothing that would prevent France form invading them if they wanted to, economic ties or not. Economic ties might even be a negative for your protection since economic ties have to be negotiated but if you invade the other party you own their assets and economy and don't need to negociate any ties anymore.
The only thing prevents war is a strong military force.
Why hasn't France invaded Luxemburg then? They would be met with close to zero resistance and no other EU state would attack them militarily for it. You must be able to see that there are other factors preventing war other than military force?
Because they're a developed, civilized, self sufficient democracy, so they have more to loose than to gain by doing that in modern times.
My point wasn't that they aren't, my point was that they can do it if they want to, and no trade is gonna stop them, they just don't want to because they don't need to.
If you want a better example look at Monaco, who had to cede to France and tax only the French citizens living there as Monaco was popular place for French elite tax dodgers. Monaco did this for France and no other country precisely because France has the military upper hand in this negotiation and could just invade them without breaking a sweat if they opposed.
Another example is when Swiss military accidentally bombed their neighboring ally Liechtenstein several times during drills/exercises, and they just apologized with a box of wine, but funny how they never accidentally bomb their more powerful neighbors France and Germany. Weird how the small kids who can't fight back always end up being bullied, amirite?
Luxembourg is, and it doesn't get bullied by its neighbours, using your words. (Not anymore at least, because most of historical Luxembourg has been annexed by its neighbours in the recent past).
There lies the source of your confusion. The EU was designed to prevent wars within Europe, not between outside members. Do you think that NATO bombing Kadafi represents a failure of the EU's mission?
thats a weird way to justify the logic. so one arbitrary datapoint is enough? the EU has been relocated to a second tier in terms of economic importance and they have no credibility when it comes to geopolitics. does that sound like mission accomplished?
I meant with EU Russia and Ukraine.
Plus, France and German economies were also connected before WW2 and that didn't stop the war. And the economies of former Yugoslav nations were very well connected, that didn't stop them going to war with each other.
What stopped the wars after WW2 was western Europe being under the rule of a nuclear superpower needing to unite against a bigger nuclear superpower next door, and the countries having democracies with separation of powers making war declarations on their neighbors impossible politically, nothing to do with economies.
So the famous "muh economies connected = no war" is a very reductionist and short sighted take that ignores evrything else.
Do you believe Russia and Ukraine are a part of the EU?
> Plus, France and German economies were also connected before WW2 and that didn't stop the war.
Even if we ignore the complete ignorance required to make that statement and take it at face value, keep in mind that the interwar period lasted little more than 20 years. The EU's inception started in the early 1950s with the treaty of Rome being signed in 1957. So at this point the EU's track record on peace is already twice as long as your reference period, and counting.
So we'll see if anyone wants the same.
No one is saying that trade makes war impossible-- but every bit of trade is an additional incentive to not start war, especially if it affects a broad slice of the population directly (=> the average German would be much more affected from losing car exports than the average Russian from lower gas exports).
Regarding Russia:
I believe that the main mistake on the western side was underestimating Russias imperialistic ambitions combined with the almost existential risk that a western aligned, economically successful Ukraine would have been for the current regime: Russian citizens getting overtaken economically by former compatriots makes it much harder to keep the kleptocracy running; Poland is one thing, but the same happening with the Ukraine would have hit much closer.
But regardless, I'm highly confident that Russia/Putin would have decided against the war with the benefit of hindsight.
You could even argue that insufficient economical consequences (from the Europeans-- basically the other, necessary side of the peace-by-trade playbook) after the 2014 annexation were a big factor in encouraging the war in the first place.
They got away with it because they built up their industrial base while the west let its industrial base wither. It's only starting to dawn on our leaders (3+ years in) now that dropping the ball on stuff like steel, mortar and missile production actually loses wars and that it takes years to undo those mistakes.
The west's Achilles heel was always profit driven capitalism + a superiority complex. All China had to do was to systematically undercut the west on industrial inputs while its superiority complex held firm and the west took care of hollowing out its own economic and military potential.
Even today when the US produces ~50/year patriots for the entire west and Ukraine needs ~400-500/year to stay afloat some people are still telling fairy tales about how a lack of "will" was the only thing standing between putin and domination. The superiority complex hasnt even died yet.
So, having them spread over is nice, but not enough.
https://semianalysis.com/2021/08/27/the-semiconductor-heist-...
A TSMC fab in the US is essentially like a military base, if the US decides to take it by force the Taiwanese government can make sure there's nothing left worth taking. All of the Taiwanese employees will be loyal to Taiwan, it's their family members' lives on the line.
The only way that fab continues to operate in the event of war is if the US backs Taiwan. If Taiwan burns then that fab will go with it.
> Does the United States really have that expertise or does it simply have a bunch of guests with that expertise?
The US has the expertise. I’m not totally sure what you are meaning to say with your second sentence - are you saying that only very recent immigrants or those here on various temporary visas have the knowledge or ability do do this stuff?
I'm amazed at how many people think China is going to take Taiwan by force. They're playing a long game because they want it intact. They want the people there to want to be part of China. That doesn't seem to be going very well, but how can outsiders know? But again they're playing a long game and have plenty of time so long as things are moving in the right direction.
For the rest of the world, Taiwan with a "China Risk" looks like a safer bet than the USA.
There should be more places that can produce enough energy and have AI leverage.
Not really. Taiwan with a China risk means China has pressure to not change the status quo.
US with a US risk means they have a vested interest to facilitate China's imperialistic agenda to try dethrone Taiwan as a competitor in the chip market.
That, coupled with the imbecile tariff war, underlines the unacceptable risk presented by the "US risk".
Such that the market forces don't push pricing that the plant would naturally die.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel
Planned obsolescence does happen, but the phoebus cartel is the worst 'example' of it.
Or require no fines at all. It's much simpler to sell a non-sickly looking bulb at the store and other companies would converge.
They last a lot longer.
This point is only relevant if 1000 hour old bulbs cost more electricity to run than new bulbs. Maybe I don't understand how old bulbs worked but why couldn't they invent ways to make bulbs run hot which also last longer than 1000 hours.
I was just talking about organization of competitive companies for price manipulation, but specifically controlled for the benefit of the public - such that we don't lose the US plant due to natural market forces.
It's why ULA is still in business despite SpaceX being significantly cheaper.
It's going to take decades for the USA to catch up with Taiwan, and once China has its grip on the fabs they'll only further advance them.
In an existential crisis, the chances of Taiwan's leadership doing a deal with China when it's military protector retreats from its former declarations is in no way low.
It'll be the end of American military dominance but in fitting with the US's repeated isolationist trajectory.
The US companies cough Intel cough did not. Which is part of the reason they are laying off workers
This isn't really a workable argument any more. As examples:
https://apnews.com/article/north-carolina-quartz-hurricane-5...
https://archive.is/sM16Y
The global supply chain is now so deeply interwoven that a large geopolitical disruption is nearly impossible. It took explosives for the EU to curtail its Russian natural gas use. And there is still stiff trade with Russia today (not as much as pre war) and lots of folks exploiting the gaps in that system (Turkey, India, china).
If you have never read it I highly recommend I, Pencil: https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/read-i-pencil-my-family-t...
Assuming you refer to NS2 blowup, it was unused when it got sabotaged.
NS1 was hit at the same time as well.
NS2 had not been activated and NS1 was undergoing work at the time.
I don’t think this is an “if” situation, but rather a “when”. There is no question in my mind - it’s simply too attractive to China. It may not come through all out war, but they will eventually claim what they feel is theirs. They operate on much more manageable time scales.
Now granted, China is getting there but their navy is still mostly brown water (by design). And in any Taiwan / SCS conflict they would have an advantage because they can use their land assets, especially air force and land based anti ship rockets, on top of their navy.
The US land bases in the region are few or dependent on the grace of the host countries. Depending on political situation they might not Ok strikes against China if a conflict occurs for fear of being drawn into the war and angering China if the US loses. The only one Id be 100% on is Japan, they’d fight China to the last.
TLDR is the potential regional balance is increasingly lop sided in favour of PRC with gap widening, i.e. US+co can't preposition hardware at relevant rate. PRC hinted their cruise missile gigafactory has capacity to exhaust/target entire current US+co hardware inventory + stockpiles with few months production. A few more months enough to comprehensively shatter critical infra of US partners in 1IC. Hence why JP likely won't fight, because ultimately they're just a larger TW, also dependant on energy and calorie imports, and main islands also entirely within umbrella of PRC mainland fires. Mainland China is much better postured to operation Starvation JP than US from Marianas (25% further, and still needed logistics from CONUS) was during WW2. And if JP gives PRC excuse to fight them then PRC will (LBH be somewhat eager) to fight to the last JPnese. If JP doesn't, then they... well survive, maybe even still keep US protection. Most likely they'll only lose Senkaku when regional dynamics reconfigure. IMO current sign of JP not fighting is stronger than JP will fight... i.e. not opening main islands to distributed AGILE basing - US basically said they need JP in TW scenario, but they need to disperse all across JP not just Okinawa and Ryukyu's for survivability and JP action so far (since Trump1) is to not. It doesn't matter what JP politicians say for security theatre, IMO JP not committed until they start heavily militarizing main islands.
This doesn’t really hold up when looking at a map that includes Okinawa and Batanes.
Any form of government is going to make mistakes.
Going to war and killing people is "a mistake". Let me rephrase it for you:
The fact that democracies are the same murderous criminal fucks when it suits their goals as are dictators. Yes the have more problem having their population to approve it but do they give a flying fuck?
Democracies aren't perfect, but they can change, admit mistakes and adapt.
In a democracy ideas are ingrained in public psyche for support. Be it Muslims/Jews/Christians good/bad, immigrants evil, abortion bad all become part of a large percentage of people's belief and changing that requires equally herculean efforts.
In autocracy, people are generally kept aloof of such decisions so you can always switch enemies from Eurasia to Eastasia and no one cares. In case of China, the value of Taiwan/Arunachal/... is mostly egoistical, based on some notion that Qing China boundaries must be restored. If tomorrow a new leadership comes and makes EU kind of setup with Taiwan, people will have no say and most won't care.
Everything else is just bonus to them. Semiconductors, supporting nationalism, you name it.
Taiwan isn't about military proximity. It's about access shipping access. Try open up a map. Despite China having a vast coastline, they do not have access to the open seas. Every one of their shipping lanes requires passage through another nation's waters.
If a heavy conflict were to erupt, China's supply chains would be cut off via naval blockade. It's a huge risk to China, and one they've attempted to ameliorate via the Belt and Road Initiative.
That changes if they acquire Taiwan. Taiwan's importance is not of offensive, but defensive primacy.
Or possibly the 30+ fast attack submarines sinking every military or resupply vessel in the region, augmented by a colossal amount of rapidly-deployed naval mines.
Taiwan doesn't buy them much in this regard. Why would China be permitted to use sea freight at all in a "heavy conflict" scenario? Why not just sink these vessels near their origin - why allow Brazilian soybeans to even make it out of the hemisphere?
I didn’t realize that Okinawa is halfway between the Japanese mainland and Taiwan, and the Japanese territorial waters extend right up to the Taiwanese EEZ on account of Japan’s far-flung southern islands.
After the 1992 Consensus [1], the Taiwanese government still considered the Mainland its territory (again under a One-China Interpretation), but also acknowledges the CCP's interpretation of One-China. In practice, this meant they officially abandoned plans to re-take the Mainland, and focus on maintaining the status quo of peace and stability.
Interestingly, the Taiwanese government also used to lay claim to Mongolia in addition to the Chinese Mainland.[2]
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_Consensus
[2]https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/feat/archives/2024/08/25/20...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_General_Assembl...
It's whose government will get to run the whole thing.
It's also political: China hates that there's a Western-style democracy full of "Chinese rebels" on an island 80 miles from their doorstep. They also don't like the cozy relationship between the Taiwanese and US militaries.
If you’re going to use accents, technically it’s Táiwān (ㄊㄞˊㄨㄢ)
A physical taurus embedded in our 3D universe, i.e. a donut, cannot be flat. Which may be the confusion.
But video game spaces are neither logically embedded or restricted by our 3D space. All its physics, including its spacial topology and geometry, flat or otherwise, were completely up to the game designers.
And the Asteroid game designers chose a flat space.
• Two parallel line segments stay parallel, no matter how long you extend them. Or how many times they wrap around the Asteroid space. (They also never intersect, but can overlap, just as in any flat 2D space.)
• Any number and distance of moves in any two perpendicular directions, are commutative. I.e. you can change the order of the moves, and you will still end up at the same spot.
• The three angles of any triangle in Asteroid space adds up to 180 degrees.
None of which applies to the surface of a donut.
Consider the reverse direction: if a company can decrease costs, they will usually pocket the extra profit, not reduce the price they charge. Price cuts usually only happen for one of two reasons: 1) to avoid losing customers to another company that is charging less (or to entice customers of another company that's charging the same), or 2) to capture more profit if they'll earn more customers at a lower price than they'll lose due to the lower per-unit profit. (Yes, there are other reasons, but these seem to be the main ones.
For goods that are not essential to life, prices are set based on what people are willing to pay vs. how many units can be sold at that price, with the cost as a floor (absent a policy of using a product as a loss leader).
I am no expert in BoM and margins, but that seems like a wild claim to me. Could you explain your math?
In Europe nobody is going to pay extra for a gadget that comes with an American chip inside it, they will just buy Chinese.
The result will be like automotive with the Chicken Tax, with Americans having pickup trucks and the rest of the world having crossover SUVs.
Purchasing products made under autocratic regimes strengthens those regimes and gives them more power on the world stage.
I think "moral obligation" (a phrase the GP did not use, for the record) is a bit over the top, though.
[1]: Why are these countries “autocracies”? To better resist foreign intervention.
Numbeo shows the cost of living (including rent) is 45% higher in Phoenix than in Hsinchu (where TSMC's 2N is)
Rent is 176% higher.
Ffs, take a look at how many superfund sites Silicon Valley has, from back when we manufactured semiconductors.
We need to have know-how, talent and all that stuff to create some value. We're bleeding all these things by the minute, and I don't want to be around when the critical point is reached.
The part you don't want to be around for is following the realisation that there is no path back.
Where would they be if their exports were significantly slashed? They didn’t develop all that manufacturing capacity to sell domestically.
The author of the post you are responding to has a valid point. Consumption alone isn't sustainable.
And when we're talking about international relations, if your exports don't cover your imports, eventually you'll go bankrupt.
People of like minds and compatible values can and should work together and form agreements to allow each other to specialize in some ways and play to each others' strengths.
But in the West, our values are not compatible with the Chinese government's.
But it could be. I don't have to consume the canned food in my basement for it to provide food security in the event of a natural disaster.
I'm finding exact numbers difficult to come by but rice requires noticeably more water to grow. Dried corn kernels are approximately equivalent to dried rice when it comes to storage and transport.
There really isn't any sensible argument for switching from corn to rice in the US midwest.
Are you certain there's no strategic reserve? If not there probably ought to be. Seems like a rather cheap form of insurance in the bigger picture.
Disagreed otherwise though. Soil degradation is due to people cutting corners to save money. Rice requires significantly more water. Wheat and oats don't have the same shelf life. Legumes are likely comparable but how do they stack up against corn for things like animal feed and chemical feedstock?
The reality is that corn is an extremely practical crop regardless of its lack of political popularity of late.
There's nothing that represents American values more than respecting the market, and supporting a non-competitive player is the kind of manipulation that could have had all kinds of negative implications, both now and in the past.
The State choosing winners... smh.
/s (but only partially)
If you're making a product one of the considerations you make is how robust your supply chain is. If you fail to make that consideration you will get eaten by the organizations that do, on a long enough timescale.
The main issue here is political.
First, high-end chips have essentially a single global market. Compared to the value of the product, transport cost is negligible. If a TSMC Taiwan factory has an oopsie, all its customers are going to be buying from your local US plant - so you are still ending up having to deal with the effects of a significantly higher demand. AMD unable to ship? Expect Intel to go out of stock rather quickly as well.
Second, the chip manufacturing supply chain. Having a local chip factory is nice and all, but where is that factory getting its supplies and equipment from? Most of it does not come from the US, so during another COVID your local chip factory might still be forced to shut down. This also applies downstream: what use is a fancy high-end CPU if you can't find anyone locally to produce all the trivial parts you need to support it? Who is going to manufacture those trivial-yet-essential $0.05 connectors and $0.001 capacitors or resistors? That has all been outsourced to Asia decades ago.
A single US plant isn't going to do anything for your supply chain robustness. You're going to have to rethink the entire chain and each step is going to be 20% more expensive, so better prepare for a doubling or tripling of the final product price.
Local factories are nice for the defense industry, where the confidentiality needs due to national security might warrant the premium. But regular consumer chips? You'll be paying a huge premium just so a politician can get a couple of favorable headlines, often without there actually being a significant impact to the local economy.
> You'll be paying a huge premium just so a politician can get a couple of favorable headlines
You're paying a premium to reduce the cross section of risk that your local economy is exposed to. The cost savings of globalization do not come without their own downsides.
I already own a perfectly adequate computer for my needs. In every possible way this won't affect me, and infact so long as the cheaper product is available for purchase it still won't affect me. If I'm a business I'll be 20% better off then other local businesses by continuing to not buy local anyway. If I'm consumer...well I'll just have more stuff I want.
And so on in this way you might want to go read up on The Tragedy of the Commons in economic theory and then reflect on what one of the primary roles of government actually is.
They used to be a crown-jewel of US tech. But it seems like every time I read the news, they are announcing a delay or shutting down some product.
Defense is starting to get a blank check with fairly bipartisan support for the first time in at least 30-40 years and it's centered on semiconductor supply chains. There has never been a better time to secure the fucking funding, have ASML send twice as many people as they already have, and power through it. The market is whatever you want and the margins are whatever you want: in a functioning system? You fucking do it.
And while I will believe that Intel has suffered serious attrition in key posts, there's no way that the meta-knowledge of how to debug "we don't have the fabs running right, who do we hire, what so we need to give them to get it done" has evaporated in 5-10 years from the singular source of this institutional muscle memory in the history of the world.
The failing here is more like a failing in courage, or stamina, grit, something. It's a failure of the will to do the right thing for both the shareholders and the country.
They've been doing the exact right thing for the shareholders: squeezing the living shit out of an asset (x86/64) for decades while cutting anything interesting or competitive to the bone to give shareholders more money. Money spent on something that could really have been competitive is money not sent to the retirement fund that keeps John and Jane Q. Public swinging in more ways than one at their golf course retirement community in Florida.
The problem is, you can only do that for so long. There is a minimum spend to remain a competitive company with regard to being able to market products to consumers. Executives don't have a fiduciary duty to create the best possible product for consumers to look at and potentially buy in the marketplace, but they do have a fiduciary duty to shareholders to meet an earnings projection. If these two activities can coexist peacefully, great. If not, the first activity stops while the company gets gutted.
The most expensive, highest-margin, technically advanced and risky business in the world is for investors who want that in their portfolio. If they wanted to milk a dying industry on the way down they would go buy Disney stock.
It is very clearly in the interests of long-term investors in Intel to maintain a commanding position in fabrication: it's been the secret sauce of the company since the very beginning, it's never been more in demand.
This idea that companies are obligated to do what will deliver some little bump in the stock price in 90-180 days is everything from not how the rules work to just a lazy meme for people who don't want to earn their princely salaries.
Don't make excuses for weakness at the top.
Different market participants will be trading on different signals, sentiments, or theses, and this will influence everything from the order types they use to the hold time of the instruments in question.
But one of many things they all have in common is that they know that what other people think about the future affects the price right now: an intuitive proof of this is that if some major announcement is made about e.g. trade policy, and the market deems it credible, you will see instruments transact up or down in price immediately.
In any effort to go deeper, one must be wary that this goes from market microstructure to Ito calculus to voodoo real fast, a closed form solution would be an infinite money machine! But a reasonable jumping off point might be the notion of a Keynsian Beauty contest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest
The TLDR is that hold times across like 13 orders of magnitude (rumor has it a cutting edge FPGA fielded by someone like Optiver or HRT or Virtu can pull a whole ladder in 20-50ns glass-to-glass, so whatever Buffet does divided by that) the market still in some sense reflects expectations about the future: it's "priced in" in trading parlance.
"Too late" has some ways you can use it meaningfully in finance, but it's not in the sense I take you to mean above.
Inflation-adjusted INTC [1] is the same as it was in 1997, including dividends! Shareholders have no real return from INTC for almost 3 decades.
[1] https://totalrealreturns.com/s/INTC
I would quibble with the exact right thing phrases but otherwise agree. Intel indeed followed a formula which is intended to and often does produce massive return for some time frame. The formula is indeed "gutting the company" - squeeze every part of an enterprise and return the results as profits. Whether destroying the companies long term prospects is worth these short term profits is a complex calculation.
A managers' duty is to promote long term value and stability, actually, but return enough short term profits and you trump that long investment income.
And in the days when fraud or "fraud-adjacent" behavior carried serious costs? When violating the social contract around pensions and severance and stuff had real reputational costs that followed the principles around? People used them when necessary. You sold off the assets sometimes.
But beginning with the LBO "innovation" in the 80s and running a line through Milken and shit all the way to the Vanguard/State Street/Blackrock "quasi-sovereign" level of PE asset capture?
People started arbing it, not by seeing value where others had missed it! By betting that Gordon Gecko had enough fans to make the arb work. "Gutting" a company slowely and painfully is in a bucket I'll call "fraud adjacent": usually not outright illegal (lotta "gray" work, gray edge), clearly not what society wants or intended, and you know it's a scam when you look in the mirror every night. i used to get wasted with these guys at Catch when I lived in NYC: they'll tell you everytging I am and more on five gin and tonics
There's no place for the word "duty" in any version of that argument unless you also use the word "derelict".
Don't excuse weakness at the top.
By betting that Gordon Gecko had enough fans to make the arb work. "Gutting" a company slowely and painfully is in a bucket I'll call "fraud adjacent": usually not outright illegal (lotta "gray" work, gray edge), clearly not what society wants or intended
Sure, but if society doesn't intend this, society has to f---ing do something. Clearly it's not.
IE: if the only legal obligation of management is promoting maximum legally possible valuation over time, "squeezing" still makes sense if there's enough money to be had. The only way to change this is forcing the issue in some fashion or other.
At a certain point, you hollow yourself out, and you can't recover. Top-level talent doesn't want to work at a place that doesn't have a real shot. So things just... peter out.
Usually opposing parties have had the common sense not to immediately hit the undo button once they take office. E.g., Biden leaving most of Trump's previous nutty tariffs in place. But "common sense" isn't on the agenda these days. We are, to all intents and purposes, under attack from within.
In 1998 Meriwether and the rest of LTCM nearly crashed the economy, needed the Fed to get involved, and they were personally ruined, guy never opened a ten thousand dollar bottle of wine again and probably never had anything again. Shortly thereafter, Jeff Skilling took out offices in 9 cities and pension plans all over the country with shady accounting. 24 years in prison (reduced later to 14). Ebbers/Worldcom 2002: died in prison.
By 2008? Zero prosecutions. Bonuses the next year.
Around the same time Clinton got caught lying about chasing (consenting and of age) skirt in the Office: nearly ended his presidency, definitely ended his policy agenda, real consequences and he caught a shooting star to avoid far worse. The public was not going to accept it, Congress was not going to let it slide on either side of the aisle. Today? Something like that barely makes the press. You have to be accused of sex trafficking to even get an investigation started and everyone will probably walk.
The idea that this became uniquely bad in January, or even 2016 is demonstrably untrue. At some time in the last 30 years we started accepting leadership who are dishonest, nakedly self-interested, lie without consequences, enrich themselves via extraction rather than value creation, collude with no oversight, and sell out the public.
This is a completely bipartisan consensus on these norms. Speaking for myself, I think Trump represents a new low, but not by much, he's just the next increment in what history will probably call the Altman Era if his ascent to arbitrary power on zero substance continues on it's current trajectory.
Reasons for that are easy to come up, imo chief among them being web2.0 (social media) and the ever increasing degree with which people exaggerate everything just to get a reaction.
Under that context, what's a little skirt chasing compared to what people usually say about the politicians? And how are you gonna remember he did something a few months ago, when so many more extreme things have happened since?
Really, I feel like social media will be considered the most destructive force to society in 20-50 yrs
The thing about those sources is that for the most part, it wasn't really economically viable to alienate half the population by leaning hard right or left. Any reduction in audience would likely translate to a commensurate reduction in advertising revenue.
Today, there are many, many sources of 'news' available in various forms around the internet, and of course people are free to choose what to pay attention to. This means it's entirely feasible for each source to cater to a particular viewpoint, even at the expense of definitely alienating half or more of the theoretical potential audience.
I theorize that the reason for this is that people have voted with their feet, balanced sources aren't as profitable and that's why there are fewer of them. It makes sense, a more balanced take on events is by definition not nearly as sensational, and almost always requires more mental effort on the part of the listener.
That by itself would probably be enough to explain the current situation, but on top of that, we also have the fact that many people receive the above mentioned information via algorithms designed to feed them more of what they already like (i.e. agree with) and nothing else, which of course only amplifies the effect further.
I have no idea how we get out of this situation (or if in fact we will), but in my mind it's not surprising at all.
I think the internet just supercharged a change that was already well underway.
I usually can think of at least a few plausible/possible solutions to most problems. But I am not at all sure what the Democrat's right response should have been.
However, a severe lack of legal tolerance for businesses that use technology to super-scale poisonous conflicts of interest, like surveillance backed ads and media feeds algorithmically manipulated for addiction/attention behavior would have been part of it.
Zuck should have been put away for life a few accidental genocides ago. (IMHO)
Sometimes I find myself thinking about that experiment with the perfect rat paradise. The overpopulation got so bad, the normal social functions of the rats started to break down and the rats started acting like sociopaths. Sometimes, I think that's what we're doing to ourselves by exposing the average human to millions of voices through the internet.
Of course, ironically, I'm ignoring my own advice and still engage with the Internet. Though I mostly keep to HN and some IRC.
It was just as wrong as predictions about human overpopulation like Malthusianism
Like there are any number of extremely specific issues which are not "screaming and posturing" unless you're dead set on not talking about them.
In other words, I completely agree.
The child sex ring that was uncovered in 2008 resulted in ludicrously light consequences and then after a repeat offense in 2019 was systematically ignored until now.
I don't think Al Franken would agree with this
The same President Clinton, with the same Congress, repealed the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999 and thereby effectively legalized much of the next 26 years of corporate malfeasance, starting with much of what enabled the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. And when they did this, it was popular and politically nonthreatening.
We got what we voted for.
They heavily pushed the idea that the opposition could not have legitimacy. Gingrich did it through the exercise of power and Limbaugh did it on the airwaves. It wasn’t just that the opposition was wrong or bad for the country, standard democracy stuff, but that the opposition had no right to hold power at all. Once you start thinking that legitimacy is based on which side you’re on rather than who you are or what you do, you won’t care about bad leadership as long as it’s yours.
Trump's entire rhetoric relies on this tactic. Anyone who disagrees with him or tries to shut him down should be impeached, jailed, whatever, because they shouldn't be allowed to exercise their power against him, no matter how legally they wield it.
It just makes me so angry to hear Vance say things like "judges aren't allowed to control the executive's legitimate power". Yes, they are! That's literally one of their jobs, specifically enumerated in the constitution! But that's the tactic: train people to believe that the judicial branch is not legitimate when it comes to executive branch decisions.
Just coal then?
Trump speaks nonstop nonsense. His policies don't even make sense to what is left of the Republican Party that isn't "all with him".
The left does get shrill about equal rights, but then, the people they aim to protect have been persecuted. I mean people actually brutalized for just being themselves - and I am talking about friends and family and ambulances, and surgeries after surgery. And now, Trump's idea of finding balance is to continue/resume denigrating many classes of people. So that's not an issue the Republican party comes out ahead on right now.
I personally don't understand why anyone would label themselves right or left. Group identification is disastrous for balanced thinking. Like noticing the left is shrill, but not noticing the right's idea of balance is to ignore or celebrate second class treatment for millions of people.
Group identification is also ruinous for any kind of actual innovative thinking, as apposed to ideology. Reality and reason have nothing to do with political power alignments. The runaway centralization of power within the two parties has become the biggest impediment to US competence.
Really? Because:
> During Donald Trump's 2025 speech to a joint session of Congress, the president asked House Speaker Mike Johnson to “get rid” of the subject act.[190]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIPS_and_Science_Act#Subseque...
What has much more commonly produced good outcomes in such situations is robust public-private partnerships like the ones that produced the semiconductor industry in the first place. Run the list of innovations in strategically key technology and what will you find at one remove in every instance? The DoD, NASA, the Labs and ATT more broadly, the university system.
It's always a public/private partnership during periods of explosive value creation when the stakes are high, and it's always a private sector capture orgy during periods of extractive stagnation like the present.
That era of American history has passed. Innovation gives way to consolidation and cronyism. Think Mussolini’s Italy.
A lot of cash is going to be redeployed towards tilting at the windmill of domestic ballistic missile defense… while we’re watching a war in Ukraine where cheap drones are demonstrating that most major weapons platforms are functionally obsolete.
Forums like HN full of senior technologists and future founders are disproportionately high impact. If the tone around here shifted a little to stop excusing what YC has become and start embracing how it all started?
Shit like that adds up. geohotz had that post a few weeks ago about this late capitalism internet shit, he was pretty deep in with the Effective Altruists and he got it together. I said at the time and I'll say again, you get a few more people like that to sober up? pmarca and lex and people? Maybe even pg?
Real change happens that way.
The current board is a pack of cargo-culting epitaph writers.
I forget the name of the speaker guy who has this turn of phrase, but whatever the merits of his overall platform this hits perfectly: "People doing well today are using every means at their disposal to decrease their accountability while increasing their compensation. If you don't compensate people based on the responsibility they are willing to undertake, you will get a world run by people like this and it will look like the world you live in right now".
It's also noteworthy that GAAFET being a complete redesign of major parts of the manufacturing process levels the playing field significantly. A big example of this is Japan's Rapidus which was founded in 2022 and has managed to invent (and license) enough stuff to be prototyping GAA processes.
Intel's 18a process seems to be quite good. It's behind TSMC in absolute transistor density (SRAM density seems to be the same as N3E), but ahead on hard features like BSPD and maybe on GAA too. I suspect that they didn't push transistor density as hard as they could because BSPD and GAA tech were already big, risky changes.
We'll have a much better idea of Intel's fab future with 14a and 10a as they should show a trend of whether Intel's fabs can catch up and pass TSMC or if they run out of steam after the initial GAA bump.
TSMC by collaborating with many different customers with different needs had a lot of insensitive to not just create powerful tooling for one kind of CPU design approach but also being very flexible to allow other approaches for other needs. And AMD has repeatedly interrelated on their whole tool chain and dev. processes for many years while Intel was somewhat complacent with what they had.
And a bunch of the recent issues with CPUs internally dying sound a lot like miss-design issues which tooling should have coughed (instead of looking like fundamental tech/production issues).
They were wasting a ton of time and effort eagerly trying to convince Apple to put IA into phones despite obvious failures to deliver power-effective chips (Atom being the result of these efforts from what I understand). They were spending a lot of time and money trying to start up like a junk ware app-store thing for PCs that they could use OEM relationships to peddle, as if the PC ecosystem belonged to them the way that Android did to Google or Apple's ecosystem to Apple, not realizing that if anyone has that power it's Microsoft (but they also don't).
It was pretty shocking coming from a hacker/cyberpunk culture where everybody had been dunking on Intel designs for over a decade. (I personally had been waiting for an ARM laptop since around 2000.) A lot of leadership I got to interact with were business/people-people types that truly seemed to believe that the best product boiled down entirely to social perception of status and has zero basis in reality. Basically the company seemed to be high on the Intel Architecture's accidental monopoly over personal computing thanks to PC-WinTel becoming so dominant (and Apple's later capitulation) and seemed to believe that it was all because of their "genius" Intel Inside marketing campaigns (which were pure social status signaling, but with an effect of avoiding price competition with lower-cost IA rivals AMD,Citrix,VIA and holding power over OEMs rather than being responsible for the market situation around IA in the first place).
Maybe something in the Hillsboro/Beaverton area's water? Both they and Nike seem to entirely consist of a diet of their own farts.
Of course, one could have done an ARM Linux device at any point in that timeline, but using efficient software is apparently cheating.
agreed, but that was often not necessary a hardware issue but a ecosystem issue and Intel executives maybe not seeing/realizing that is pretty incompetent
On one side you had the whole windows was absolute garbage on ARM until very recently, and needed Apple to show them how to have a low friction support extension/transition. And if you instead shipped it with Android or Chrome OS it supposedly didn't count anymore (except a lot of non tech afine consumers have replaced home desktop/laptop with a tablet anyway (cheaper and does everything they need)).
On the other side there was a best technical fit/best customer fit mismatch. Best customers where tech enthusiasts which want to try out new things and can live with a bit of friction (if it's small enough) and are also often willing to pay _slightly_ more. But the best price/product fit is the low (initially, then to mid) end devices except they aren't really that interesting for enthusiasts and due to low (initial) production quantity also not necessary that cheap either and for the people which normally buy this devices buying a similar priced android tablet is most times just better and with a bit of effort you can get an even better x86 PC, through with many 2nd hand/hand me down parts.
and outside of 1) means to pressure MS for better deals, 2) Steam Deck/OS, there just weren't any meaningful large/well known hardware producers shipping with Linux (yes Lenovo and Dell do care (do they still? idk.) for Linux compatibility in _some(few)_ of there expensive business focused lines. But outside of exceptions in 1) don't ship with it so no "normal" consumer pics it up, and Linux shipping ORMs are on the larger consumer market picture just too small to make a big difference. So ARM Linux stayed relegated to niche, too.
The fact that they can't use their own fab for 30% of their products [1], all of which are those that require power efficiency and compute performance [2], suggests it is not overstated.
[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/intel-will-keep-u...
[2] https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/intel-is-using-tsmc-4nm-f...
There is talk about the next version of Arc using 18a. If it does, I'd expect Intel to move that generation's compute tiles to 18a as well.
Apple farms out its displays to Samsung, a competitor. It's just how business is done.
Apple just recently moved back into the hardware space after farming everything out since the iMac gen2 days. Hell, I remember the Mac clones. I miss Power Computing.
Samsung's competition is Huawei, Xiaomi, Oppo, etc.
18A is canceled for foundry customers, it's not going to save them. If they can't get it together for 14A, they are toast.
It seems difficult to figure out if they are getting back on track, though. They always seem to just be a couple years from finally catching up to TSMC.
But so far nothing of the sort has happened for a long time. If feels like ever since Ryzen landed, they have been desperate to catch up but keep tripping on themselves. Losing Apple, while inevitable, has made them look even more irrelevant. They still do decent stuff for the most part but there isnt anything really exciting.
I do like what they are doing with Arc GPUs but it is clear those are loss leaders and it isnt really gaining that much traction.
Alas, this is a story where we will have a better understanding in five years from now.
I would be very surprised if 14a and 10a comes out soon enough to be competitive with TSMC.
It's not about how soon 14a and 10a come out, but rather about how good they are when they arrive. 14a will be competing against TSMC A16 in late 2026 and 10a will be competing with TSMC A14 in late 2027. The measure of Intel's success will be whether they are gaining or losing vs TSMC.
On the customer front, I think customers are probably necessary to offset the ever-increasing R&D costs and an extra year or two to work on making their libraries more standardized may be best for everyone.
I dont know if I count, but at least I wrote about TSMC before most if anyone knew much about TSMC. Which is when Apple brought them to spotlight.
It depends on how you define or count as being able to compete with TSMC?
If Intel technically leapfrog TSMC and their 18nm is better than TSMC 20nm this year but;
It is 30 - 40% more expensive.
It has lower Gross margin, or even negative margin.
It has much lower volume and capacity.
It is slower in ramping up capacity for future capacity planning.
It has limited IP range for its foundry.
It has less packaging options.
It does not have other high speed, low power or analog node options.
At what point does it count as competing? Because right now there isn't a single metric that Intel Foundry is winning. And they are feeling exactly the same as Global Foundry or AMD when Intel Foundry advancement is getting all the oxygens.
And even if they did, with a magic wand got them to compete with TSMC on every single one of the item above, in medium to long term there isn't a single chance Intel could compete with their current board and management.
TSMC leadership and management team is Nvidia's level great. I cant think of any other tech company that could rival them. Their only risk is China.
The first year of TSMCs latest process goes to Apple. And the second few years are booked completely full. There is room for Intel if they can just get in the ballpark of TSMC.
Think you mean 1.8nm, aka 18A. We're way past 18nm and 20nm.
"For a long time, gate length (the length of the transistor gate) and half-pitch (half the distance between two identical features on a chip) matched the process node name, but the last time this was true was 1997"
Or not. Sometimes it if looks like terminal decline, it simply is terminal decline.
These days iGPUs run pretty much any game I care to play so it doesn't matter.
Now we are in a different situation. There are several big competitors using ARM instead of x86. The software world is actually transitioning away from x86 in masses. Apple does their own CPUs better than Intel. AMD outsourced production already. Everybody is pumping money into TSMC who are are already ahead of Intel and they are moving faster.
Either Intel gets a really really lucky run with their new technology or they need to split off the foundry business. The government may put it on life support until TSMC themselves may run into serious problems.
The better way into the future may be to split up TSMC in multiple redundant and competing companies.
Indeed that's how they were marketed where I worked (Office Max) and were priced and spec'd comparably to the Celeron based offerings from IBM, HP, and Packard Bell.
Another issue with the K6 line was they were always a generation behind at a time when Intel was rapidly rolling out technologies like MMX and SSE. Intel coordinated with software manufacturers and had launch day examples that presented significant performance gaps between the CPU lines.
The K6 also had a shorter execution pipeline than Pentium so it struggled to hit 400mhz when Intel was approaching 500mhz. That's why the Athlon was such a shock because it arrived at 700mhz and stomped everything.
Looking back at the K6 line now, they likely perform far better then they did at the time because software eventually got around to supporting the hardware.
The 650MHz came two months after than, and 700MHz another two months later. 6 months later 1GHz! It is easy to forget just how rapid performance increased in the late 90s.
I remember it was a K7 700 because it was the first from scratch PC that I ever built. Everything before and probably since has been a Ship of Theseus.
"AMD Athlon 500-600MHz (bulk) price display. The product is scheduled to arrive in mid-July, and reservations are being accepted. However, there is no specific arrival schedule for compatible motherboards yet."
"the K7 revised "Athlon" has been given a price and reservations have also started. The estimated price is 44,800 yen for 500MHz, 69,800 yen for 550MHz, and 89,800 yen for 600MHz."
Those were Pentium 3 450-550MHz prices.
A week before official AMD shipping date retail Athlons arrive in Japan https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/990813.html
"AMD's latest CPU "Athlon" will be sold in Akihabara without waiting for the official release date on the 17th is started. All products on the market are imported products, and 3 models of 500MHz/550MHz/600MHz are on sale. The sale of compatible motherboards has also started, and it is possible to obtain it alone, including Athlon"
https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/990813/p_cpu.ht...
~$380-800 depending on speed.
https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/990813/newitem....
Picture of one of the Akihabara stalls full of CPUs being sold retail before official AMD launch date :) https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/990813/image/at...
For reference in US 4 days later on August 17 Alienware was merely teasing pictures of Athlon system https://www.shacknews.com/article/1019/wheres-my-athlon According to Anand "OEMs will start advertising Athlon based systems starting August 16, 1999" https://www.anandtech.com/show/355/24
By January 2000 prices corrected to saner bus still delusional levels https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/20000108/p_cpu....
K6-III/450 14,550 $140
K6-III/400 8,980 $85
Celeron 300A $57
First time Duron shows up in Akihabara is June 17 2000 https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/20000617/p_cpu....
Celeron 533A 10,570 $100
Duron 600MHz 9,990 $95
K6-III/450 24,800 $236 haha whats up with that price? Either AMD stopped shipping already and its leftovers or its a sucker tax for ss7 owners wanting to max out.
K6-III/400 14,800 $140
K6-2/550 7,949 $76
K6-2/533 5,970 $57
K6-2/500 5,350 $50
Week later https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/20000624/p_cpu....
Celeron 533A 9,980 $95
Duron 600MHz 9,480 $90
K6-III/450 24,800 $230 AHAHAHAHAHA
K6-III/400 15,800 $150
K6-2/550 7,940 $76
K6-2/533 6,700 $63
K6-2/500 5,300 $50
Looks like by the time Durons showed up nobody was bothering to stock K6-3, only 3 vendors in Akihabara had them. Those crazy prices werent limited to Japan, Poland September 1999:
Pentium III 450MHz 1260 $308
Pentium II 400MHz 943 $231
Celeron 366MHz 348 $85 (300A missing from the list, but was still available and selling cheaper)
K6-III/450 1108 $271 HAHA
K6-III/400 877 $215
K6-2/400 397 $97 haha
K6-2/350 230 $56
For a brief moment in 1999 AMD pretended K6-3 was equal to Pentium 2/3 and tried to price it accordingly but market corrected them swiftly. There was a 1/3 performance gap between K6-3 and overclocked Celeron.
https://web.archive.org/web/20080418185205/http://arstechnic...
https://web.archive.org/web/20070918073530/http://arstechnic...
https://web.archive.org/web/20070918135927/http://arstechnic...
Yes, building top-of-the-line CPUs is hard and it's impressive that we saw the dominance flip in the course of just a few years.
But I think frontier chip fabrication is a bigger juggernaut than "mere" CPU design.
(Your conclusion could still be correct, but I don't know if I buy the high-level reasoning).
“If Intel can just get this next node they’ll be sitting pretty” is what people have been saying for over a decade isn’t it?
Just getting the nodes working and producing enough chips has been a huge issue for them, let alone having good chip designs on top of that.
“No one got fired for choosing Intel” has stopped applying. They’re even losing server marketshare, which was their rock.
Intel as a brand may survive in some shape or form but it's not looking good for the foundry.
My most recent computer is AMD Ryzen based, but we just bought an Intel-based Dell for my partner because the price/performance was better than comparable AMD machines at the time, possibly due to a sale. But the Intel chip is a lot faster than my laptop, so now I'm a little bit jealous of the Intel machine.
Maybe it is just bad luck on my end, but I have not had those issues with Intel in the past or currently.
I have 2 intel/dell laptops and thinkpad/amd 14s laptop. Both Dells (a workstation-class 22 core cpu and a more power-efficient one) suck massively when compared to amd ai-something-something-ryzen.
What's worse, intel drivers are a mess on linux right now. Dell xps 13 plus is the worst laptop I had in a decade, and that's after owning every Linux-preinstalled Dell XPS 13 ever released.
Not really sure what you mean by that.
Both our Intel and AMD computers are doing great. Nothing "weird" about it.
No problems at all. YMMV.
FWIW, Apple M4 Max 16 Core scores 43,818 on passmark and runs at 90 Watts TDP, so Intel certainly is competing on speed, as well as TDP.
it's almost apples to oranges in most cases.
He later noped out of Intel shortly after joining. Whatever he saw, either in leadership or product, had to be pretty bad in my opinion. AFAIK there's been speculation, but nothing really concrete.
Nowadays, there will be another process node from TSMC. If AMD doesn’t pay for the R&D, TSMC’s other customers (like Apple and… actually, Intel) will instead.
I think the big fear here is that if Intel does the same, there won't be much competition left in the fab space.
Is Samsung still competitive with TSMC?
Part of it, sure, but they were still fabless and in the ditch before Zen. Unless you're referring to going with TSMC instead of GloFo as going fabless.
What helped them is putting the right people in charge of Zen design and intel fumbling 10nm due to their own hubris.
AMD was fine with having GloFo as a fab until 20nm process. They were already behind, but not terribly.
AMD even used TSMC for their CPUs and GPUs before Zen. Ontario was fabbed at TSMC in 2011.
Point is AMD as free to shop around. Only in 2016 the agreement was amended that GloFo would be preferred for 14nm and 7nm, but since they decided not to work on 7nm, it freed up AMD.
Zen 2 is also where Ryzen went from "exciting and competitive, but not top of the line" to actually giving Intel a run for their money in more than just highly multithreaded workloads.
Improved architecture put AMD within striking distance of Intel and the move to TSMC allowed them to pull ahead.
They don't want to be competitive they want to bleed the company dry.
Intel outsourcing their core product line is also a massive liability. It's just a different kind of liability.
I personally think the world's reliance on TSMC indicates that fabs are critically important infrastructure. And operating a world class one provides a company with a ton of leverage with governments and other businesses.
Intel's fab would be doing much better if it spun it out a while ago and was making Intel, Nvidia, and Apple chips right now.
What Intel process from the last decade would have been enticing to Nvidia or Apple?
Intel is doing the same. IDK if they are working on new fabs at this point, but the last few generations of chips from intel have used TSMC.
My expectation is that Intel might still run fabs, but they'll be mostly contracting them out to people who want cheap ASICs and 10 year old fab tech.
Yes, they are.
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/in...
Definitely struggling, but still in the game.
Samsung comes in a close second in terms of tech. GloFo is also still floating around though lagging pretty bad AFAIK. Micron has it's own fabs that they are actively developing (in fact, they are building new facilities right now).
What TSMC is is cutting edge. That's why everyone that needs top performance uses them.
In this case...TSMC is holding all the cards, not Nvidia
Intel fabs have never had to be as cost effective as others. They were selling top end chips for top dollar for decades. I bet there are 10 other companies that can make 45nm chips cheaper than Intel can on their old equipment. I could be wrong.
That's the precious leader. The new CEO is not from a semiconductor manufacturing background. His main claim to success is leading a company that built EDA tools.
The problem with Intel is that they are so short sighted and they change direction and focus very quickly. Intel will adopt these seemingly great ideas that require 10-20 year strategies, invest heavily in them, and then abandon them 5 years later. They always measure initiatives against their core CPU line and if they don't show similar profitability in the short term then they defund and eventually cut the programs entirely.
If everyone chases higher margin and ditches their fabs what kind of industry are we left with? One giant fab company like TSMC? That sounds healthy!
How many of them develop high performance x64-64 cores?
But if Intel joins the fabless club, all of the sudden the playing field gets much more level.
AMD would disagree?
Maybe if you ignore they're the only player with remotely competitive discrete GPU IP for graphics and AI, after the Nvidia and AMD duopoly.
global* foundry
So we're just going to hand control of the US supply of semiconductors completely over to TSMC, Samsung, and the Chinese fabs in the works? That seems incredibly short sighted and reckless.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14588429
The top of the market will go GPU and the bottom will go ARM, and the middle will be an ever shrinking x86 market share. The few places that will need heavy CPU resources will be the same people who can apply pressure to Intel's margins.
The process of chip making will look very similar in the future, but the brand of the CPU will matter less every year. Intel's not "dead in five years", but Intel will definitely cross the point of no return in that timeframe. Shifting a big company's focus is more difficult than growing another company who already has the right focus.
I think they have a lot of potential in the dedicated GPU space, but that is a consumer market so profit margins are smaller and they have potential in the low-to-mid-end market so even less margin. It's really sad as the competition there would help consumers.
the sad thing is, it was predictable. Wintel and other monopoly-like deals/situations had removed the need to compete/stay on edge from Intel. They then noticed it too late and made mistakes when trying to course correct/having to much innovation dept to effectively course correct screwed them up big
At the same time AMD again and again re-invented and optimized their development flow and experimented with alternative approaches and did not shy away from cooperating with TSMC and implicitly through that Nivdea and other (sometimes also Intel). Intel on the other hand AFIK got stuck on a approach where they had a edge over AMD but which was seem to have turned out to be somewhat of a dead end.
what is interesting is how TSMC has so far avoided the same kind of trap
- by having competing customers and having deep research co-operations with all the customers they brought competition and innovation back into a monopoly in a round about way like position
- having limited capacity of the newest tech which their competing customers bit for bring in monetary insensitive to innovate
- and them being somewhat of a life line for their country put a lot of pressure onto them to not break their own innovation machine for greed (e.g. by intentionally not expanding the availability of the latest node even when they technically could)
I think dedicated GPUs will be dead soon. AMD will beat nVidia with APUs that compete with midrange DGPU in performance with lower system cost. With AI using GPUs we want the shared memory of the APU rather than splitting RAM into two mutually exclusive areas - witness boards starting to use soldered ram in 64 and 128GB configurations. nVidia can't compete without x86 cores and Intel just cant compete for now.
I mean for gaming there is already the Ryzan Max+395 which already is beyond the level of low end graphics (at least if placed in a desktop where it's not heat/power throttled). But it's a bit of a unicorn (especially if you look for a system where it can run full throttle).
but I'm not sure about the beat nVidea part, nVidea has some experience with putting ARM CPUs on their graphic cards and as far as I remember on for their server center solutions there is one which pairs up graphic cards (and their RAM) over PCIe and mostly cuts out the CPU
IMHO the whole user-visible p-core/e-core thing on desktop CPUs is one of the worst decisions in the history of microprocessors. My gaming machines need to do double-duty as as build boxes, so they're just utterly unusable for me.
But maybe it was more of an early foreshadowing. I had a housemate that worked on their internal CAD tools and it also sounded like a bit of a mess with NIH syndrome. (20+ years ago)
Smart people know to choose AMD. OEMs heavily favor Intel for the brand recognition. It's the same on the workstation side, though AMD's market share has been rising quite fast (it's apparently at a 36.5% share) so I'm unsure if system integrators will keep pushing their Intel SKUs so heavily.
So they're not cooked, but they're certainly not doing well and barring a massive jump in performance or efficiency, they're not going to be making a recovery any time soon.
I was disappointed with their offerings and went with AMD for my latested build. I don't know too many people who have built PCs recently, but the few I do know who have or are planning to, everyone is planning to use AMD. Similar to the GE example, it seems many people would recommend LG or Samsung appliances over GE.
A friend used to send me articles regularly from Semiaccurate in the mid 2010s. I thought it was "alternative truth" but it turns out to have been more, uh, accurate than I thought.
Quite simply imagine being dropped in as CEO of Intel in 2015. Could you have prevented the malaise of today?
They're also very unpopular online so it's tough to find solid unbiased info about them. Like is the stink about 18A true or do people just want to hate on Intel?
https://www.nytimes.com/1997/05/14/business/suit-by-digital-...
There were much more discussion of Intel stealing things in the 90s than today.
"Over the past 10 years, Intel engaged in financial engineering, primarily through significant stock buybacks ($53 billion in 2011–2015) and stock-based executive compensation, which diverted resources from innovation and contributed to its lag in semiconductor fabrication. This financialization, as critiqued in the 2021 report, is a long-term factor in Intel’s weakened competitive position"
https://semianalysis.com/2024/12/09/intel-on-the-brink-of-de...
https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/how-intel-fi...
https://www.intc.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1726/...
I live in the area and know a LOT of intel fab workers.
The issue is not the workers: Intel has been captured by corporate raiders and toxic management.
They aren't interested in making chips or an innovative company. They just want to squeeze the juice out of the company until it is dry.
That is why it is so bad.
Could you explain to those of us who don't understand how corporate raiders have influenced Intel's strategy?
Listed companies are too vulnerable to short-term thinking, thanks to the meaningless “fiduciary duty”.
Instead of investing in the future and paying top dollar for top employees, the Board paid the shareholders (even 20 years ago). They never even tried to compete for the best employees, and instead let them all go to Alphabet/Apple/Amazon/Meta/Microsoft/Nvidia/Netflix.
This includes the employees in management.
nVidia market cap is 4T or about 40x Intels. Im not sure who those smart people are.
Intel fired the one CEO that spoke both engineer and business, and Gelsinger could have been their Lisa Su. They fired the only talented CEO they've had for years.
This will be fatal.
Gelsinger was the scapegoat for 20+ years of inability to compete with foreign companies, no matter how much money was poured into them. They used American exceptionalism as a cover to defraud shareholders and any government that invested in them. They used the relationship of AIPAC and Congress to build a fab and R&D lab in Israel (inserting yourself into global politics to make a buck is always spicy) at low cost to them.
Taiwan became the capitol of electrical engineering in the world, and is a shining example of how to survive and thrive in a post-war era, and it absolutely shows. They caught up to Intel and zoomed right past.
Gelsinger's crime was try to do what AMD did: they didn't have a fab that could make their chip BUT they had a fab that made chips that people wanted AND the foundry could take that work and survive if they legally split. GloFo is now the third largest semi foundry in the world today, and when it was part of AMD, it very much wasn't; I can't quite remember, but 5th or 6th? Something like that. GloFo is #3, TSMC is #1, Samsung is #2, and Intel could very well be that #4, and push out UMC (#4) and SMIC (#5) in the secondary chip foundry market.
Gelsinger could have split Intel into Intel and IFoundry or something, and Intel could have profited on IFoundry taking off and taking external work. Right now, IFoundry can't compete on top nodes, but _could_ steal work from all other fabs for secondary larger nodes. Having a working 12 nm competitor as well as a working 7nm competitor is big business, which Intel currently has _ZERO_ of (since they don't take external contracts). Gelsinger was big on this potential revenue stream.
Gelsinger's other crime was being part of the negotiation between TSMC and the Biden administration for the CHIPs act money: part of what built the TSMC fab right next door to Intel's in Arizona was Biden and Intel money. Intel was investing in it's future by playing the American exceptionalism card again, but now in everybody's favor. We _all_ benefit from this. Gelsinger wanted to have _somebody_ fab the chips, and if its good enough for AMD, Apple, and Nvidia, its good enough for Intel.
There is zero indication that GAA 20A is ready, and Intel has a history of having leadership that says such-and-such is ready for it to either come out several gens later, or just vanish off the roadmap. Gelsinger's other OTHER crime is admitting to this and changing the direction of the Titanic before it hits the iceberg, for the CEO that replaced him just to steer right back into the iceberg.
I have _zero_ faith in Intel's leadership if they can't bring Gelsinger back. Tan, Gelsinger's replacement, is a former board member. I have no reason to think he is not just going to further poison the company. Tan has not spoken about any plan that indicates he understands Intel is not competitive, Intel cannot competitively make 100% of the tiles, that Intel's Foveros tech stack is extremely valuable because the only truly comparative alternative is TSMC's CoWoS tech family and superior to it and people are willing to throw money at that problem but they can't license it as long as IFoundry is part of Intel.
Intel is cooked imnsho.
At the time, EPROM tech was Intels most profitble product until the 8088 and 8087, which were designed in Israel at the dev center (along with many of their chip designs).
Edit: Look, to whoever is out there on a downvote spree, I don't care if I get downvoted, man, but wild you'd just downvote people talking about a guy whose won multiple IEEE awards, has patents to his name, and has left his mark on EE, and isn't even the focus of the discussion at hand.
His over-optimism gave the whole "5 nodes in 4 years" supposed path to leadership a weird flavor, like it must be somehow a bit of a con even if it gets technically achieved.
Also, I looked into the claim when he had said it, apparently he was being intentionally misleading about it, and the press tried to ask what he meant: he was speaking tensor performance on future enterprise Arc card products at datacenter scale, ie, AI bait.
In early 2021, Nvidia's compute flagship was the A100, 19.5 FP32 MAD TFLOPs, but the misleading number they quote in marketing is the tensor performance of 312 TFLOPs of FP16 accumulates. That would be about 3.2 million of these at tensor perf.
Skipping H series, in late Nov of last year, their new flagship is the B200. 124 FP32 MAD TFLOPs, 2250 tensor FP16 accumulate TFLOPs. That is now 445k cards to reach zettascale if using tensor cores. You won't be fitting ~1400 GPU-laden machines in a single datacenter, but the number is becoming more manageable.
They improved, in 3.5 years, 7.2x.
Lets say Nvidia does this again. 3.5 years, again, would put you in early 2028, and they manage another 7.2x win: that could be 62k cards across 7.7k. That absolutely is doable in a single datacenter.
The problem is, and this is where the prediction actually falls apart, not that its impossible: We don't know what future Arc cards look like, nor enterprise ones. Battlemage is an improvement over Alchemist, so the tech *is moving forwards at, but either Celestial or Druid was supposed to introduce the enterprise compute card variants, but that seems to be dead, and no indication either of those lines will even see the light of day now. The new CEO seems to be hard set on making Xe for iGPU only.
I can't find any hard numbers on Intel's tensor units, but apparently they're actually competitive. I can find the normal FP32 MAD numbers, and it ends up that Intel is 13.5w per TFLOP and Nvidia is 8 and both companies have equal efficiency in transistor usage. Assuming Intel made a B200 competitor, and assuming the higher power usage is due to voltage (Intel B series voltage is similar to Series 40's voltages, which is a lot higher than equivalent enterprise/pro series cards), Intel could be making a card that's somewhere in the ballpark as 2/3 as good for the same power usage.
So, in the end, yes, I don't agree with his claims of future Zettascale at Intel by 2027. I don't think he was wrong for the industry as a whole, however. If he would have said, say, 2030, I don't think we would be discussing this, that certainly would have been doable if he was at the helm and they kept doubling down on Arc every gen and everything went according to plan.
Regardless, it seems like the company leadership should be gutted (the same could be said of Boeing) and the company given over to a new technically-grounded leadership team.
Betting some on Intel is very wise when the alternatives are, as I see it: 1) investing in TSMC building fabs and creating more of an employee knowledge base and skill base on shore, 2) hoping a US-based startup gets enough traction to grow.
Agreed on leadership. But selecting leadership teams, especially technically-grounded leadership teams is extremely difficult. Which is why companies revert to non-technical leadership so often.
Since Intel has been mismanaged for so long I don’t know how many good lower level employees they managed to retain, I doubt much would be left if they properly cleaned house.
TSMC is making fabs in the US, but they are not SOTA fabs. Those are kept in Taiwan.
Building a fab is no mean feat and loss of infra is a major blow, but it's certainly not impossible to build these fabs in the West, just not economical. You are not starting from scratch.
That being said the government will likely not allow them to fail completely out of the foundry business for geopolitical reasons
There wasn't any bailout on them, what do you mean?
google://Intel chips act billions
Intel was looking bad but not the dire state they’re in now.
>The CHIPS Act primarily benefits semiconductor manufacturers and related industries by providing substantial funding for domestic chip production and research. Companies like Intel, TSMC, Samsung, and Micron have received significant grants and loans to expand or establish new manufacturing facilities in the United States.
>The act authorizes roughly $280 billion in new funding to boost domestic research and manufacturing of semiconductors in the United States, for which it appropriates $52.7 billion
>The act includes $39 billion in subsidies for chip manufacturing on U.S. soil along with 25% investment tax credits for costs of manufacturing equipment, and $13 billion for semiconductor research and workforce training, with the dual aim of strengthening American supply chain resilience and countering China
That is the political calculation, not "throw good money after bad" kind of economics 101.
But I guess "too much socialism"
The problem is that they are far too incompetent and have zero clue about tech, and only understand real estate, that simplest of business that can be executed with mere lizard-brain intelligence.
Tech is also about small startups disrupting large giants, which is completely antithetical to current Republican leadership ideals, where the wealthiest get all gains, regardless of who does the work.
It will take many years of full-on Democratic leadership to reconfigure the Republican Party back to a somewhat innovation-friendly business party. Meanwhile the Democrats, under Biden, were by far some of the most business-friendly politicians we have seen in perhaps a century, spurring massive investment in factories and industry, mostly across red states. But because it's a politically incorrect fact, it never gets reported.
This neat little dichotomy between "free market capitalism" and "centrally planned socialism" is a cute story but also complete fiction. In "capitalist" countries the government basically always runs R&D during any period of time when the stakes are high, and in "communist" countries there are always markets, and they are always sanctioned to some degree.
All of the foundational progress for American leadership in high technology was centrally planned and administered, all of it one way or another: through ATT, through NASA, through the DoD, through the universities. Value creation occurs under the watchful eye of the DoD.
Once in a while we go on an orgy of extractive wealth transfer like now, instead of creative innovation like usually, and the top industry guys always fuck it up. And on cue, yeah this is going great.
I feel like x86 itself is kinda legacy tech. So while AMD has made advancements, they're somewhat in the same boat as Intel.
It seems like NVIDIA and Micron are the real "crown jewels" of US tech
Intel could make exciting RISC-V relatively quickly if they wanted to; what stops them and other companies like this is the strategic asset they perceive their existing ecosystem as.
https://www.computerenhance.com/p/an-interview-with-zen-chie...
It's like saying that programming language syntax/keywords are better than the other.
Everything is about compiler, lib, runtime, etc.
https://chipsandcheese.com/p/arm-or-x86-isa-doesnt-matter
Also some people say that RISC-V is the way to go
When people say "ISA doesn't matter", they mean that the "legacy cruft" in x86 doesn't matter (that much) and that x86 remains competitive with other similar ISAs. It doesn't mean that the difference between VLIW and traditional ISAs doesn't matter. ISA paradigm still matters, just not the "syntax".
But let's be clear: Of course ISA matters. It's just as trivial to make a bad ISA as it is a bad syntax. But does the ISA of modern superscalar processors matter? Probably a bit, but certainly not a whole lot.
In this particular case: ia64 leaned hard into wide VLIW in an era where growing transistor budgets made it possible to decode and issue traditional instructions in parallel[1]. The Itaniums really were fine CPUs, they just weren't particularly advantageous relative to the P6 cores against which they were competing, so no one bought them.
[1] In some sense, VLIW won as a matter of pipeline architecture, it only lost as a design point in ISA specs. Your Macbook is issuing 10 arm64 instructions every cycle, and it doesn't need to futz with the instruction format to do it.
Either have a stupid ISA and do all the work ahead-of-time with way more compute time to optimize or don't optimize and have a higher level ISA, that also hs concepts like pointer provenance.
The current state seams like a local minima with both having ahead-of-time optimization, but the ISA does it's thing anyways and also the compiler throwing much of the information away with OoO analysis being time-critical.
Meanwhile the CPU probably can't do a loop invariant hoist in a reasonable way or understand high level semantics.
Isn't having fixed-size naturally-aligned instructions (like on 64-bit ARM) enough to get that advantage?
Really VLIW is a fine idea. It's just not that great an idea, and in practice it wasn't enough to save ia64. But it's not what killed it, either.
And by the way that's why open source makes such migrations much cheaper.
The impact of ISA is overrated, it's much more important that the ISA continues to grow and adapt as CPUs get larger.
No, it's not. In modern high-speed CPUs, many instructions are decoded directly, without going through the microcode engine. In fact, on several modern Intel CPUs, only one of the instruction decoders can run microcode ("complex") instructions, while all the other decoders can only run non-microcode ("simple") instructions.
It would be more precise to say that it's at the "front-end" part of the core (where the decoders are) that the ISA lives, but even that's not quite true; many ISAs have peculiarities which affect beyond that, like flags on x86.
Asia has a massive pool of highly skilled manufacturing talent, and that kind of deep expertise is something the U.S. is quickly forgetting.
So my question is: with TSMC building a fab in the U.S., are Americans actually getting retrained in real manufacturing skills? Or are they just being taught to push the buttons TSMC tells them to push?
The US has plenty of manufacturing operations much more complicated than building CPUs, so of course we can do it. Manufacturing expertise in Asia (as I understand it) comes down more to macro-level processes, where different components might be built or raw ingredients sourced near each other, so further assembly can be done easier than any place in the United States.
It's my understanding that this is not the case. That CPU (and similar) manufacturing is considered one of the most complex processes humanity has ever developed. What are these plenty of manufacturing operations that are more complicated?
Compare this to, say, building a car. Much less automation, much simpler end product.
I was born in 1978 and was really into Heathkits and breadboard projects and stuff when I was a child and early teen. My dad was (and still is) an analog electronic engineer and gave me lots of surplus oscilloscopes and frequency counters and other coolness too. I distinctly remember often seeing "Made in Korea," "Made in Japan," "Made in Taiwan," etc. on circuit boards and chassis assemblies. The single word "Korea" was very common on components. This would have mostly been stuff from the late 1970s and 1980s.
At the very least it seems like electronics from at least the early-mid solid state era onward into the IC era has always been a globalized industry with a globalized supply chain. I feel like you've got to go back to vacuum tubes to find self-contained nationalized electronics industries.
Back then as now a lot of stuff was designed in the USA and Europe but manufactured elsewhere. Just like Asia has a ton of top tier manufacturing and logistics talent, the US and Europe have a ton of top tier design engineering and coding talent.
I still do agree that there is strategic value in making sure the US at least has some domestic capacity to manufacture leading-edge chips and electronics, not just to maintain some talent here but in case a major global conflict breaks out that deeply fractures all these supply chains. Same for Europe and any other country. China meanwhile would do well to develop its own domestic software and design talent pool.
Everything started to globalize starting in the late 1970s to early 1980s which really kicked off with the end of the gold standard and the Volker Shock.
The Japanese and Germans, which had IC industry already, picked up steam and started to export as the economics changed.
China, Korea, Vietnam, etc. are recent entries (2000s)
That 5%-20% is worth it now because no one else can fabricate competing chips. In a competitive market, 5%-20% can be the difference between having the price edge or not. I understand why the USA wants TSMC to manufacture outside of Taiwan, but perhaps it makes sense to move it not the USA but, say, Mexico?
Chinese car companies seem to be slowly but surely rolling American car companies in international markets with great value at low prices. The move in this market evidently isn't to move manufacturing away from Mexico at a 5%-20% increase in price.
In the chip market there's less immediate competition, but I can only imagine it'll come. Hopefully economies of scale would have removed this extra 5%-20% by the time China catches up?
Well that is an insurance only for the US. As a european, I feel safer, or at best neutral, knowing my ships are made in the Taiwan rather than the US, so having them more 5-20% more expensive is not competitive.
With all their antagonizing of allies, and predatory privacy laws, and repeated espionage on allies, the US has disintegrated any trust other parties have to buy things made there.
Because Taiwan is a small, earthquake prone island perpetually on the brink of invasion of a superpower 180 kilometers away. And antagonizing, predatory privacy laws and espionage is also an issue with CCP, however we still import a lot of electronics and semiconductors from there.
Credit where credit is due: Australia, UK, New Zealand and Canada are all doing their major parts in espionage on each other and everyone else as a service as part of Five Eyes.
As a European myself, I am pretty miffed that my fellow Europeans keep acting like we're not leading the charge when it comes to spying on each other.
If rumors are to be believed, TSMC will scuttle their fabs before they fall into Chinese hands. Even if they don't, or fail to execute, Taiwan-based chip production will be disrupted for years.
Bet you'll be happy that TSMC has fabs in the US, despite your understandable misgivings.
Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and other countries even Philippines and Vietnam don't want to depend too much on China. A lot of island disputes and so on and so forth.
My guess right now is that China will never catch up because Europe, US, Australia, and many other developing countries will avoid depending on China critically. This doesn't mean 0% would buy from China but it'll never become a critical dependency.
The problem China is big enough to catch up just by it depending on itself + some cheap mass consumer market outlets to even further scale production.
Like they have 1408 Million people ~3times the US and their education system tries (at least of paper) to give everyone a chance to reach silence excellence iff (and only iff) they are noticeable above average (but also due to the form of their education system for people which certain kinds of approaches to thinking which is a major handicap they gave themself accidentally). Like either way with that population size, priority on catching up on chip production, willingness to steal science (through it's not like the US doesn't have a habit for that, too) it's just a matter of time until they have some truly genius people put into the right kind of position with the right kind of resources which will close the gap step by step.
US has become less dependable but a lot of countries still depend on US maybe less but not as allergic as depending on China.
This almost sounds verbatim what U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent told Bloomberg yesterday, so take the headline phrase “worth it” in that context.
There's all kinds of stuff like this in supply chains. Low profit, high barrier to entry critical items.
- https://www.ajinomoto.com/innovation/our_innovation/buildupf...
- https://www.ajinomoto.com/brands/aji-no-moto
Hyundai makes cars and military weapons and probably thousands of other things that aren’t even related to each other, don’t know if they still make computers.
I haven't been to Asia in a while, but at one time, Hyundai made both computer chips and bulldozers.
Mitsubishi once made computer chips, and had a bank, and an art museum.
There are companies that own both department stores and subway systems.
America used to have a fair amount of this, but it was more common during the Industrial Revolution. Companies that owned both railroads and summer resorts. Oil wells and banks.
Even as recently as the 1990's there were companies that owned both pipelines and fiber optic networks. Toasters and television networks.
What this administration is doing is not a recipe for success: trade wars with everyone, immigration crackdowns, and unpredictable tariff policy.
EDIT: Oh and hinting at invasion (Greenland, Canada) doesn't help either
But Taiwan or the rest of Asia is still a problem given the tensions in the area. If China did something it could seriously effect supply even if it wasn’t an attack on whichever country was supplying us.
We need friends making things in Canada or the rest of the Americas or Europe or Africa or some other place that isn’t China or directly under their thumb.
Even without action by man. The wrong tsunami or whatever could effectively wipe enough out everyone would be screwed.
We need geographical diversity too. The existing alliances we’re burning to the ground don’t solve that.
Even if it was just motherboards in particular and not others, that seems like a necessary step in securing the supply chain and if we only do that for national defense the benefits of competition likely won't extend to consumers that are still exposed to trade taxation.
'Most all of which falls square into your "low tech and low profit", from a right-thinking* American company's PoV.
Not to say that a saintly American company could do much better, if it tried to swim uphill against America's vastly-higher cost of living (vs. the countries where most of that stuff's manufactured). And other problems beyond its control.
*profit-obsessed, generally
Another interesting point:
> AMD and larger rival Nvidia Corp. recently gained a reprieve on restrictions imposed on shipments of some types of artificial intelligence accelerators to China. It’s still not clear how many licenses will be granted — or how long the companies will be allowed to ship the chips to the country, the biggest market for semiconductors.
It sounds like they’re trying to give China some chips but not as many as American allied countries. I wonder if they’re trying to get China “addicted” to western AI chips to hurt Chinese chip manufacturing development?
It’s wild the same administrations would argue for restricting access to the US market for tariffs to strengthen domestic production, would not believe that severely restricting exports to the Chinese market would strengthen their domestic production
This has nothing to do with that. It was part of the deal made with China recently in Geneva. The U.S. needs what China has (rare metals), and China needs what the U.S. has (SOTA chips).
There - that's a little more accurate.
This is all assuming you can get past the NIMBYs to build the plants in the first place.
I'm fine with chips made in Taiwan.
The world needs a healthy diversified CPU/GPU chip market. At least there is ARM on the CPU side, but it's not nearly enough.
CPU space is definitely easier to disrupt but the GPU space requires a HUGE investment and you're fighting uphill against proprietary technology like CUDA that has become industry standards. Intel, Qualcomm, Samsung and Google have made inroads with budget to mid range which is the highest selling segment. But to compete with Nvidia or AMD on the high end you either need a whole datacenter or many years of R&D with very little return for a long time. Apple would be on this list but they have siloed off themselves entirely.
Branching out supply chains and industry is a big problem to solve effectively because it touches so many different pieces.
That's just silly.
1. https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
2. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/d...
So sure, right now we might not want to pay that 20% markup for US-made chips, but 20% will be cheap if the only operational TSMC fabs are in the US.
I'd rather see America hooked on the same supply as everyone else to make sure they stop China from invading Taiwan. Our shared weaknesses force governments to cooperate, which is a win in my book.
I couldn't help but laugh. And they say software engineers are replaceable by AI.
It seems to me that long term having fabs in the IS is net positive for the economy: more jobs, more localized supply chains, more local expertise, etc etc
I have no idea what is the manufacturing cost of a 800 mm^2 die is, but I am sure it is lower than the development cost.
> Particularly for GPUs, the high bandwidth memory and manufacturing costs are a significant portion of the product price.
HBM is not manufactured by the GPU vendor, it is an off-the-shelf component that AMD buys like any other company can. Thus, the cost of HBM is tallied in the BOM and integration costs (interposer, packaging, etc).
[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/spitballing-...
i'd prefer taiwan over the US...
It is potentially worth pointing out that container ships going back to Asia are basically empty, so that return shipping trip is basically free.
The extra transport cost might not matter for these precious chips. A tray full of Epyc or Blackwell dies is an insane number of potential revenue per kg.
What’s positive is that we have state of the art domestic manufacturing with potential to onshore more and more of the required supply chains, building/educating local expertise, etc etc.
It’s silly to focus on shipping.
TSMC alone accounts for 12% of Taiwan's electricity demand, and growing fast:
https://spectrum.ieee.org/taiwan-semiconductor ("TSMC’s Energy Demand Drives Taiwan’s Geopolitical Future" (2024))
However, talking about chips that are hundreds of watts each the pollution produced by them is a lot higher than any transport.
https://www.stg-online.org/onTEAM/shipefficiency/programm/06...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_ultraviolet_lithogra...
https://youtu.be/9WkGNe27r_Q?si=w5BE2tZKdFcI6aC1&t=812
There are certainly benefits to being able to make something down the block and quickly iterate. But that's a different thing from industrial scale production. And if we really wanted that benefit wouldn't we just... do it?
You can hop in a car and visit them. In the US they are across the Pacific and in a very different/inconvenient timezone. It's a 15 hour gap. 9 am in Arizona would be midnight in Taiwan. And there's the anti meridian running through that so it's a day later over there as well. And the business days barely overlap.
I bet all that adds some friction in day to day operations. Lost time, shipping delays, miscommunication, etc. There are solutions to this, of course. But I'm sure that adds complexity to an already complex business. So, limiting that overhead to just 5-20% sounds pretty good to me.
Semiconductor companies need gross margins of around 65% to grow and be able to invest in development of the next node. So this large additional variable cost really can’t be shrugged off as you suggest. If so, Ms. Su wouldn’t have mentioned it at all.
>TSMC’s new Arizona plant is already comparable with those in Taiwan when it comes to the measure of yield — the amount of good chips a production run produces per batch — Su told the audience at the forum.
More cynically, perhaps the DoD is getting a sweetheart deal and TSMC is passing the cost onto customers.
It's the limited and expensive talent pool, construction costs etc. resulting in a difference. Americans do earn at least 2-3x more than someone in Taiwan for a given role.
20% more expensive and 99.9% of people buy the $500 one instead of the $600 one.
Never make the mistake of falling for people's virtue signalling and pay attention instead to how they actually apply those virtues (spoiler: saving money is the #1 acted upon virtue, being far stronger than any other).
Seems other agree with me on that:
> And while many companies fear that moving their manufacturing to the U.S. would cost significantly more, some experts estimate that wafer production at the Arizona site is only about 10% more expensive compared to Taiwan. Despite that, the company says that its customers are willing to pay a higher price, with production already sold out until late 2027.
Also interesting that many of the new tariffs settle down to around 10%. That seems like a good balance for the US, and also similar to what European tariffs have been for many industries.
IMHO, the idea of entirely free trade is as dumb as excessive trade barriers. It's like trying to model people as purely rational agents. We're not. It's a decent starting point but we need perturbative models based on empirical information of human biases.
The ideal solution for tariffs is likely a distribution function with a peak around 5-15% with a steep drop off toward 0% and a longer tail for higher tariffs. Because 0% just leaves you open to any market manipulations of malicious foreign actors and corporations looking to offshore for a few cents of profits while higher tariffs lead to increasing protectionism and local companies becoming lax and inefficient.
That would just so happen to align well with these extra cost to manufacture in the USA in this instance.
_Never_ make the mistake of assuming a market is perfectly efficient and any corporate savings along the way will be passed along to the consumer.
When Apple or Google comes along and buys out next year's total TMSC output, that 80% of people will just have to buy whatever is on the shelf at the time.
Whether or not AMD is motivated to eat that cost is another question, of course.
Taiwan is in a precarious position, which is a huge liability for "western" powers. And a liability for us is effectively also a liability for Taiwan, considering we are their protectorate. North America and western Europe are comparatively safe.
Cost increase in a single part doesn’t necessarily mean the cost of the device needs to go up. If a CPU costs 120$ instead of 100$ like that of a competing device 300$ device you can always sell yours for 310$ and make less margins. Things have to get subsidized in the short term if we are going to get domestic production up.
A 20% premium for one of the pillars of a modern economy to both repatriate engineering knowledge as well as be significantly less threatenable by your primary geopolitical enemy would be money very well spent.
Like, as more of the supply chain is reshored will that continually increase cost because reshoring is intrinsically less efficient or will it decrease costs because the increased cost of just reshoring the fab part of the supply chain costs more due to less proximity and integration with the existing supply chain?
Businesses that rely on the chips will see an increase in cost; and that means passing the cost down to their customers (or having less to invest on their own R&D).
5-20% more expensive prices for just one type of thing
there I fixed it.
In the long term, it would provide the US with an independent source of chips, and eventually allow them to let go of any plants to protect Taiwan from China.
In Europe or Japan I can already build much cheaper, workforce is cheaper, now even hardware is cheaper.
How does data centers in US stay competitive? Why would Google or others build their new AI infrastructure in Ohio rather than elsewhere?
1. The estimates are never accurate; after subsidies dry up expect 50-200%.
2. I will buy used before I buy new to cut costs.
3. American manufacturing is trash; I will never buy GM/Ford/Chrysler/Tesla; no matter how much you try to force me to. Intel falls into this category. I'm supposed to just accept on faith that building a tsmc fab in the US is going to "just werk"? Nah.
4. I don't care if it's "Made in America"; what I care about is price to quality and performance ratio. Which as we all know the Americans have gave up on (ahem Ford and only manufacturing trucks, etc). Intel has been getting it's asshole rocked the past couple years and it has home field advantage.
5. I care what Linux runs; and if China and RISC-V take off and are lower price point I'll buy that before I spend anything on US "American made chips".
6. I don't care about "ccp bad"; fuck off with your propaganda. You realize Taiwan is an island state of China right? Seems like good idea to let them setup shop in US? Good job you played yourself.
7. The "rare earths" to make these chips come mostly from China. China will counter like they already have screwing over Micron and Intel (and soon tsmc).
8. Apple will mark up whole price; not just chip price. The consumer will pay for the entire shift of the supply chain not just the cost to manufacture. Even in best case of 5% your 2,000 laptop is now minimum 2,100; yea, the average American can afford that... People can't even afford to eat fast food anymore and some idiots in here think they can pay more for something they don't give a shit about? Lol
9. You first; just like with the idiots that bought Teslas (which are the lowest and worst in quality of all cars manufactured). Meanwhile I'm still driving my second car (Japanese btw) after having bought in 2019 (and the one before lasted 20 years).
10. This reeks of the anti Honda shit I would see during 2008 PvP of US auto industry because they failed to innovate. And guess what no propaganda saved them and they still can't compete in the market.
11. Intel is on life support, and tsmc is supposed to what...?
Like I said it's nothing but delusion.
5%-20% is surprisingly cheap imo.
And yes, no matter what you think of America First (I'm not even American), that sounds very much worth it.
You see it with Columbia university and that network television network that got sued
Corporations outsourced not because they couldn't compete, but because why leave 10% on the table when we can reward the executives with that cash instead of the labor?
For the sake of argument, if all goods increase in price by 20%, Americans are going to have the experience of being worse off than they were before.
This is the largest tax hike on Americans in modern times (possibly ever?). While it may take a while for people to understand the impact of policy, people generally do not like large tax hikes. I don't think it's a stretch to think people will not like this tax increase, either.
This is a confluence of the previous administration having the forethought to do this, before the current administration tried to kill the CHIPS act.
If they hadn’t done that, you likely wouldn’t have seen domestic production able to satisfy the needs.
Tariffs alone are a misguided cudgel.
Also your comment about a “major impact to the consumer” ignores that this is an increase in cost just for the silicon. There’s a lot of tariffs on different parts of the actual product.
You need to have reasonable certainty that your factory is going to be profitable on a 20+ year horizon to commit into building a production line.
I don't understand how MAGAs don't get that.
If you want to bring back manufacturing you need to consider the entire supply chain, and make sure that inputs for whatever factory you are bringing in are secure and will be equal or cheaper in 20 years. These things need to be predictable.
Also, let's not pretend the MAGA movement listens to anything other than the propaganda.
When you offshore a production facility, it's not about being profitable, it's that it can be more profitable elsewhere.
If you have no guarantee that the tariffs will still be there to artificially maintain your profitability so high, then you don't build.
I think we can agree on the facts there
Despite the marketing, the tariffs are fairly bi-partisan among the congress.
On the other hand... most of the tariffs you hear about aren't real and never had/will-have an impact, and are clearly being weaponized as a way to get trading partners in-line. Few actual tariffs have been realized as-of yet... but if you read the news you'd be led to believe everything you buy is tariffed all to hell.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. The Biden Admin left in-place a lot of Trump foreign policy, and Democrats (the likely next admin-party) have been wishing for tariffs for years. Currently they're playing their part as the "opposition" but I'd bet money most of the tariffs stay during the next admin.
Your point about changing every 2 weeks is sound, however.
These greedy fucks in the 1970s sold out current generations so they could min/max profit for themselves and billionaire buddies. All of this at the expense of decimating: local manufacturing industries, environment, public safety nets, and sustainable living.
I'm not attempting to assign blame to one political party or another. Reasonable tariffs to protect domestic labor should be a bi-partisan issue.
Especially silly when the chance of China invading Taiwan is very nonzero.