“ TSMC will build 5nm chips for the iPhone 12, iPad Air, 5G iPad Pro, and any future MacBook or iMac systems Apple launches with its own custom ARM silicon. In 2019, Apple is thought to have accounted for about 20 percent of TSMC’s monthly revenue, making it one of TSMC’s largest customers.”
TSMC had about $35b in annual revenue in 2019. Is there another customer who might be ordering more than $7b of chips from them annually? I believe Samsung fabs their own processors, so I’d assume it’d need to be a Chinese OEM?
Could be a couple reasons, but one I see is that they too expensive for Apple to do so.
Apple also isn't the type to manufacture chips for other companies which is a lot of TSMC's revenue (this article is only for one size). So they would be taking a huge loss in value just to have control.
Much more likely for Apple is to try and create their own manufacturing lines.
I'd bet on "Taiwan would block it". If Apple bought TSMC, they'd probably want to diversify production locations away from a geopolitically interesting island. But having TSMC there makes it a lot more likely for people to come to the defence of the island in the case of war...
It's also not in Taiwan's interest to align too close to the US. The bulk of Taiwan's exports are to China, and they stand to lose the most in the trade war if the US attempts to ban business with more Chinese companies. We can't realistically defend them in a hot war either.
The Taiwanese notably are framing the Huawei issue as a ban on a specific company rather than trade with China in general [1]. Whether that continues to be true might hinge on November...
It's less about making people physically send ships and troops to defend them than it is making sure that any attempt by the PRC to invade or blockade them would have crushing effects on the mainland money-train that is the lifeblood of the party.
Risk/reward? What if TSMC invests billions into the next process and never gets good yields? It's happened to other fab owners. (Remember when Intel had competitive products?) Then Apple is out billions of dollars for nothing. But if they are just TSMC's customer, then they don't take on that risk. Their risk is that TSMC raises prices, or other people can make CPUs as good as theirs. But that is not a huge risk for Apple; if they can't buy capacity, neither can their competitors.
I also have to imagine that if people are making a big antitrust stink to the government about how Apple takes 30% of Fortnite loot boxes, there will be an equally big problem when AMD, Nvidia, Broadcom, Qualcomm, Marvell, etc. can't have chips produced anymore.
On the other hand, Samsung owns a fab and makes phones, so it's not unheard of. Samsung has other big semiconductor businesses, though, and it's not clear that Apple really wants to enter into those. You don't need to manufacture your own flash memory to make good laptops; Samsung's SSD business does well on its own.
I really like vertical integration in general, but sometimes things work great even when they're completely decoupled. Two small projects is a lot easier to run than one big project, so you have to show some benefit for integrating things. In Apple's case, it was clear that Intel's CPUs weren't getting them where they wanted to go with thin laptops, so they made their own. They had to in order to sell competitive laptops. This whole thing is in its early days, though, and we don't even know if they're going to beat Intel or AMD. So the summary is, being TSMC's customer is working out great for Apple; they specify a CPU and they get a good one at a cost that the market seems OK with. They want to make a big bet and dramatically change the computing landscape, but that might not work out. What if Intel totally leapfrogs Apple Silicon? It is so uncertain that it is hard to say "they should just buy TSMC". Rather, they should sit and wait and see how they do, and then decide if more integration will let them make better phones, tablets, and laptops.
I can imagine that Apple is fairly happy at the moment as a customer of TSMC; they do the heavy lifting on the lithography front and Apple just provide the designs.
Purchasing TSMC would lead to it having to deal with maintaining relationships to people it actively competes on several levels with. This would almost certainly lead to accusations of anti-competitive behaviour.
Hah, all the other TSMC customers would no doubt band together to stop, if not through regulatory means, putting up a counteroff for some jointly owned controlled. It's too vital.
I thought ASMC really cornered the market on the EUV lithography process that is required for making 5nm chips. Wouldn't Apple be better off buying them?
ASML? They're a big player in EUV, but not the only one.
Buying ASML also wouldn't really gain Apple anything. There's tons of technology and know-how that goes into a fab beyond buying a lithography machines.
Yes I think that. If Chinese actors buy all the lockheed stock eventually they'll have control. Lockheed would probably be banned from the US like Huawei is at that point but China would control it.
If you hold more than 5% of a public traded company you have to announce it. That will be the latest when the US will invoke national security laws and either buy or just take it all back.
They have a few internationally, including a 160nm fab in the US already. All their cutting-edge stuff is in Taiwan, though. The one being built for in the US, expected to be for a DoD contract, is the first cutting-edge one outside of Taiwan, but its capacity is miniscule compared with what they have in Taiwan today.
> The simple answer is that TSMC is a national strategic asset of Taiwan, and as such, is not for sale to anyone at any price.
Ahem. ARM.
Seriously, though. Take a look even at TikTok. I was pleasantly surprised that it's not for sale, either. Why does every tech company has to be HQ'ed in the US?!
Some people think TSMC is part of Taiwan's strategy to stop China invading.
After all, TSMC helps make Taiwan one of America's valued trading partners, even if America doesn't officially acknowledge Taiwanese sovereignty.
So long as a Chinese invasion will mean American companies lose access to TSMC and Chinese companies gain it, they hope this provides them the same protection Kuwait and Saudi Arabia enjoy. Or at least, if not certain protection then a high enough chance of protection to discourage an invasion.
As the UK does not have an expansionist neighbour disputing their sovereignty, ARM is not a strategic asset in the same way.
2. TSMC is much larger than Apple's manufacturing requirements. To keep it running, they would have to commit to doing a lot of contract work for other companies, which really isn't Apple's style. Moreover, many of TSMC's current clients (like AMD, Intel, Nvidia, and Qualcomm) might be uncomfortable with Apple controlling the company, as that would introduce conflicts of interest.
3. Owning TSMC would put Apple in charge of the company's technology development, and would expose them to significant financial risk if TSMC suffered a failure, much like Intel has been harmed by their failures to develop a 7nm process. Contracting out their semiconductor manufacturing allows Apple to switch foundries if needed.
Well the point of a hostile takeover is that the current controller doesn't want to sell. They lose control because enough stockholders who previously supported them are willing to sell. It looks like the founder only controls 7%, so I don't think it would be impossible to find enough stock that is willing to be sold.
FWIW, Horace on Critical Path says that large M&A is just something Apple doesn't do. It's a recurring topic and he goes over the rationale in this episode.
I barely understand what Horace is talking about (square hole, round peg) and would only butcher his thesis. Sorry.
These podcasts are in the "think out loud" format, vs finally crafted presentations. So I listen at high speed and rewind to replay the key points.
Edit: Gonna risk it.
Large M&As are notoriously bad moves. Beats was Apple's largest acquisition, which Horace thinks was ok because it probably broke even. (I have a different take: it was an acqui-hire and they got some head phones as bonus.)
Reinvesting cash surplus is also bad, because it's shareholder's cash for them to invest themselves. Also, to do so would make Apple a hedge fund, which is a huge distraction.
Horace doesn't touch on Apple style partnerships, the deep investments into their suppliers. Not quite keiretsu. Not quite monopsony. Definitely not WalMart style partnerships, which is very abusive. Maybe more like defense or auto manufacturer partnerships, where it's more mutually beneficial. Like Toyota does. I would love to read case studies about Apple's partnerships.
1. TSMC has very low margins. Buying the company means lowering Apple margins, that are the highest on the world.
2. Lots of companies depend on TSMC, if Apple did that they will be sued for monopolistic behavior.
3. Apple benefits enormously from the cheap devices that TSMC makes for other companies, that is volume, improvement of technology that Apple can use(ARM). It is over 5x the volume in sales of Apple products.
4. It is a strategic interest company of Taiwan,Europe, China and US.Buying it is not economics,it is geopolitics.
I’m not sure why you are suggesting this, and I am very certain that behind the rhetoric China has no interest in invading Taiwan right now unless they want to guarantee that Trump gets re-elected and raise the possibility of a hot conventional war with the United States and maybe regional allies. Not to mention the potential for millions of people to die... because of TSMC.
> China has no interest in invading Taiwan right now
CCP has a policy of reuniting Taiwan with the mainland. If they could do it today, they would.
> Not to mention the potential for millions of people to die
Chinese premiers have stated they would sacrifice half their citizens if necessary. In fact, they are sacrificing whole towns during the current floods to save various dams, reservoirs and cities, flooding them at nite to make investigations more difficult to avoid welfare payments.
Not sure which imaginary China you're talking about.
Not the original poster but remember hearing something very similar over a decade ago, and I haven't forgotten the statement:
"If the Americans are determined to interfere [in a confrontation over Taiwan] we will be determined to respond,” said Gen Zhu, who is also a professor at China's National Defence University.
"We will prepare ourselves for the destruction of all of the cities east of Xian."
Here's a quote from a page full of similar quotes:
"We are prepared to sacrifice 300 million Chinese for the victory of the world revolution."
- Mao Zedong
(Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, Mao: The Unknown Story [Jonathan Cape, 2005], pp. 457-8)
The population of China was 600 million at the time.
And if China is willing to sacrifice half of their own population, they're willing to sacrifice 100% of the rest of the world. This explains China's behavior over the corona virus.
(The great genocides of Stalin and Mao were methods to distribute the wealth of farmers to the state for industrialization and militarization projects. So reasons.)
Note that China's population of 1.4 billion people is a liability when you're responsible for feeding all of them, and Xi cannot feed them in 2020 due to the flooding, locust and mold disasters, so you can see the possibilities.
He can feed CCP members, which are about 15% of the population.
> CCP has a policy of reuniting Taiwan with the mainland. If they could do it today, they would.
Then we can conclude that so far they haven’t been in a position to enact that policy, and that unless circumstances suddenly fail to no longer obtain, they will continue to be impeded.
Nonsense. Sorry to be so harsh. China could, today, take over Taiwan. No doubt about that. The US could certainly make that difficult or impossible depending on the situation, though I think US involvement is the big unknown here.
> Chinese premiers have stated...
US senators and congresspeople have stated all sorts of crazy things too, but it doesn’t mean much. If China were to sacrifice over 500 million people to take over Taiwan, there isn’t anything stopping them from doing so today besides that statement being untrue.
China has a lot of Communist Rhetoric in the general speech patterns of the government, but if you stop and think for a second the Chinese, like everybody else, are just people. They drift cars and buy iPhones and go to the grocery store. The willingness to kill 500 million to invade Taiwan is probably not there.
You'll never find a source for this, but there have been rumors for years that TSMC facilities have cabinets filled with explosives and (in?)formal procedures to render themselves inoperable should the worst come to pass.
If you wanted to cause worldwide mayhem, I guess this would do it, but I wouldn't assume that TSMC could just be invaded and taken over like that.
Cabinets filled with illegal explosives at cutting-edge precision multi-billion factory with priceless equipment awaiting for an accident?
Only if it very safe explosives planted in strategic places by Taiwan military with consent from all parties involved with solders posted 24/7 to protect from sabotage.
Who said anything about illegal? The Taiwanese government knows the importance of TSMC. If the rumors are true, the explosives would be there because the government wanted it.
It isn't exactly unprecedented. Switzerland kept all its bridges and tunnels actively primed with explosives at all times since at least WW2 to the early 2000s.
>with priceless equipment awaiting for an accident?
I'm not an expert on explosives, but aren't modern explosives relatively safe? As in, they require very specific conditions to explode, so they're not going to be set off by a random fires or impacts. The blasting caps (needed to initiate the explosion) can be placed in a safe in the plant manager's office.
I've heard that American soldiers in Vietnam sometimes cooked their food by lighting pieces of C4 on fire. I'm not sure if that's historically accurate but it should be possible at least; as you say you need something like a blasting cap to detonate it.
That wouldn't surprise me, they have deliberately done things like lay gas or oil lines at the likely beaches for landing zones so they can essentially set them on fire at a moment's notice, and have extensive fortifications all various parts of the island.
There is almost certainly at least a plan to render any critical equipment like that unusable, even if there aren't wired up explosives at the fab at all times.
I'm not a big fan of this article. It doesn't 'work out well for everyone' that AMD are a node behind Apple. In fact with Apple moving into more general compute I would say it's less 'work out well for everyone' and more 'existential threat'.
Also, the shift from desktop CPUs to mobile CPUs as leading the shift to smaller nodes sounds less like a massive revelation, and more like the innevitable result of mobile CPUs out-stripping traditional CPUs in volume & margin.
Most companies wait until a node matures / a second gen version is offered. Defect rate for example can be high which makes it too expensive to use for larger processors.
As mentioned in other comments, Apple works out deals with some of their suppliers where they will purchase or help purchase the equipment and book its future production. If it’s the same type of deal here, then this is Apple putting their money where their mouth is.
If it makes sense for other companies to adopt these kinds of financial arrangements, they will eventually, and while it works out best for Apple here, at this particular point in time, this is just one point in time. It does benefit others in the long run as TSMC is able to refine their process fabbing chips for Apple and will be able to open new production lines in the future with the profits from manufacturing for Apple and offer those to their other customers.
AMD is still doing really well in the market, and their customers are different and their more direct competition is Intel and NVIDIA. Could they make better products on a 5nm process size? We assume they can and will, maybe that will happen a little later than they would like, or maybe they’re working behind the scenes and making their own deals with other manufacturers that we don’t know about yet. This isn’t the bad old days where Intel was completely dominant, competition actually is good here. Apple is ahead right now, but that’s a temporary situation much like anything else.
The rumors were that 5mn was going to take a lot of work and so AMD delayed until their following CPU architecture iteration Zen4. Now it seems more likely that they were outbid by Apple which is why Zen3 is stuck on the older process. The risk for AMD is if they can get 5mn or equivalent from another fab for Zen4
And that sucks for them at this point in time, but it’s just business, and business has risks. Apple does a lot to mitigate risks to their business, and if AMD really was outbid, then that just means AMD probably also tried to mitigate as much risk to their business as they could, but they clearly didn’t mitigate it enough.
At this point in time, this is the situation, but no one here should expect this to remain the situation in perpetuity. From what I heard, prior to this, Apple and AMD were jointly buying up all of or almost all of TSMC’s 7nm fab capacity. AMD has risen from the the dirt, and then later again from the ashes and is presently making the best x86_64 chips you can buy today. I’m actually disappointed Apple didn’t try to shop around for the 2019 Mac Pro CPU because they could have gotten much better all-around parts buying the equivalents from AMD for less and with lower power consumption. Ah well, can’t win them all.
I think Apple's playing a longer game - if they weren't planning to move to their own ARM cores, they could have designed custom SOCs with AMD ala the game consoles.
That’s fair enough, I figured by the time they were designing the Mac Pro they were already planning to move to ARM. Would have been nice to see EPYC in the 2019 model, but it is understandable why that didn’t happen.
AMD spun out their foundries taking on this risk. And frankly it’s not much of a risk: they are selling as much as they can produce; going to a (currently) exclusive node wouldn’t help them at all.
It's just a fud article that's simping to glorify Apple as an almighty company. AMD already has 5nm capacity booked with TSMC but for this year. The reality is AMD isn't ready to go 5nm just yet. They have yet to even launch the 7nm Zen 3 Ryzens and have at least a year until they would want to even start phasing in initial 5nm products.
Right. And I’m sure a lot of the money pouring into TSMC will be reinvested into increasing their 5nm capacity and yields. In a year or two I’m sure we’ll see AMD move to 5nm as well, and TSMC have capacity for everyone. And if they don’t, Samsung isn’t far behind.
This is the kind of situation market dynamics excel at. The next few years of CPUs in all our devices are going to be fantastic.
It's interesting the ways we qualify 'fairness' when talking about capitalism.
In practice, I suspect these sorts of situation arise far more frequently than we think. One party overpays for a supply of an ingredient and then controls demand by leveraging it. In the first act, they convince people that they need things made with this ingredient. In the second, they bank on the cachet, the exclusivity, driving demand even higher.
But at the end of the day, someone is playing a chess match where in theory the customer could have had more options and now they don't. Or they could have had no options at all. We don't have a time machine so who can say?
Apple went farther in a number of situations by investing in suppliers in order to guarantee that they could produce an ingredient in the first place, either at all, or in a timely fashion. We are going to enable you to make a product, and then we are going to ask for special treatment for having done so.
Which means, for instance, that Intel may be able to field an equivalent ultralight notebook using the same supplier, but Apple made higher profit margins on the same product (although the manufacturer makes higher profits on the Intel version).
I don't have any illusions that they will continue with this level of benevolence in the future, especially after Tim (or indeed even as Tim's memory of Steve fades). I don't even know if they are still working that way now. Probably not, or not for long.
At any rate, R&D frequently is paid for by luxury goods of one form or another.
Like it or not, Apple is nearly the only luxury computing maker out there, though Samsung, Sony and LG dabble. I've expressed my confusion on a number of occasions as to why things are this way, given that it's not the case with cars or a number of other goods. I like Apple products and am an investor, but I'd also like to have more opportunities to compare them to a competitor. Hyundai has figured out they need a separate luxury brand, as have a number of car makers before them. Maybe Sony, Samsung and LG need their own 'Genesis', 'Audi', "Acura".
My last example was not a case of 'poor Intel, can't sell because of a licensing agreement'. They were probably wiping their tears away with 100 dollar bills. TSMC is probably pretty happy with this arrangement too. The way they 'get out' of this exclusivity is to produce more chips than Apple cares to buy, since it's probably Right of First Refusal, not 'you can make no more than N million chips per month or else'.
Apple will never be an existential threat unless they make a drastic change to their strategy. They're a premium manufacturer that produces desktops and laptops that only run MacOS. Apple has chosen high profits and a locked down platform. They have one or two options to meet customer needs.. That lack of choice will always mean a substantial number of people will choose something else. If you get a PC, you get literally thousands of choices.
It's a very similar situation with the iPhone. Apple makes a great phone in many respects, but they're one company and they can't meet the wide variety customers demand. That's reflected in their market share.
It's also too early to say that Apple Silicon is a threat to anyone. Apple Silicon in the iPhone and iPad is a low power & low performance chip compared to AMD/Intel. They have a huge challenge scaling that up to compete on desktop. Their first chips are going into their lower performance products. I'm sure it'll be decent in that role, but Apple likely NEEDS 5nm just so that it makes a respectable showing compared to AMD/Intel.
> a premium manufacturer that produces desktops and laptops that only run MacOS
Not sure that's been true for some time now. Wouldn't they be better described as "a premium manufacturer of mobile phones that run iOS with an app ecosystem they make 30% commission on, who also make legacy propitiatory laptop and desktop devices"?
(I agree with the rest of your comment though. Apple _don't want_ 99% of Android or Windows customers, and are more than happy for Huawei and Oppo and AliExpress to sell phones and laptops to people Apple dont care about. They _might_ care a bit about encouraging top of the range Samsung or Pixel phone customers to iPhones, maybe. And they at least used to try to woo the dev/webdev crowd to macOS machines, but less obviously these days, it seems to me.)
You are of course aware that Apple is soon selling computers with their own processors, I hope. I don’t think Apple is struggling with performance in their chips at all.
> If you get a PC, you get literally thousands of choices.
> You are of course aware that Apple is soon selling computers with their own processors, I hope.
Which has 0 relevance. GGP was asserting that Apple Is an existential threat to AMD. Given AMD is not an Apple supplier (of CPU anyway) and Apple will not sell their chips to the outside world, that makes sense on no axis.
AMD would like to produce and sell mobile CPUs, which are a very important market for chip makers, and which rely very much on betting on the smallest possible node, to minimize power consumption.
As far as mobiles broadly, my laptop has a Ryzen CPU in it.
It's not out of the question for them to consider such a move, but I think that the bigger issue here for AMD is that it means they will wind up a mode behind the edge, giving their main competitor- Intel- more time to catch up.
That is absurd. Last year I built a PC with off the shelf components that I spent about 30 minutes picking out, and all I had to do was stick the windows installer into the USB port to get everything set up perfectly out of the box. I have never had any reliability issues and I only reboot about once per month for updates. I used Apple products exclusively for a decade, but a contract role last year required me to use a Windows dev environment. I was holding my nose going in, but using WSL has been a joy and my MacBook is now collecting dust in the closet. In my experience most Mac purists that turn their nose up at commodity PCs haven't used one since MacBooks became the standard hip startup dev machine. Things have changed a lot in the last ten years.
And let's not pretend that Mac hardware has been perfectly reliable lately. In fact, of my hand rolled desktop PC and my 2017 MacBook Pro, the PC has had far fewer hardware reliability issues. Apple's declining hardware quality and increasingly unjustifiable retail prices have pretty much chased me off the platform after 10+ years of fanatical loyalty.
Your statement is ridiculous. The last 10 years? When was the last time you used a windows laptop provisioned by a company with a big enterprise style IT department? You know, the ones bogged down with tons of endpoint security crap, Citrix daemons, compliance daemons etc. Its still a shitshow that you have to use Linux or MacOS to escape in many places.
It’s a bit much to throw all that at the PC/Windows side.
Sure companies fill them with shit, that’s not really a flaw in the underlying hardware/OS though. Those same people have less scope for that on OSX/Linux sure, but again that doesn’t mean the software/hardware is better.
Unfortunately that is no longer reserved for Windows. JamF policies lockdown, DigitalGuardian, CyberReason Activeprobe, and various forced Firefox/Chome extensions are now causing slowdowns and crashes on “enterprise IT managed” Mac too.
I use a MacBook Pro 16” for work and have to have Sophos and Jamf installed. I’m operating at 60-80% of the performance I had before those became policy. Don’t underestimate what corporate IT can do to any machine.
My experience is the opposite. In my team at work people have either recent Mac book pro or Thinkpad with Linux. And it seems like the ones on Macs have always all kind of issues (with zoom screen sharing, with openvpn/tunnelblick, with docker not working as expected, and lately, as it's hot in paris, cooling issues - I laughed as they were exchanging tips too cool their laptop with stuffs you can put in the freezer, because otherwise their computer would be so slow that some of our time sensitive tests would fail...)
I use both and it’s leaps and bounds better using MacBooks for most things. Like putting your computer to sleep, or connecting external displays reliably.
No PCs are reliable? That's just ignorance speaking there are tons of great PC models out that meet and exceed anything that apple does. You've got to be kidding, tongue in cheek, right?
> but they're one company and they can't meet the wide variety customers demand. That's reflected in their market share.
While true for the world for now, they already own half of the phones sold in US. In revenue/profit terms, it is even higher. They have already beaten everyone with a fabulous phone processor design. Imagine that coupled with fab advantage. While others can differentiate on other things but at some point, some differences will become hard to overlook.
They are at a dangerous position where they can suffocate others like this easily because no one else has comparable cash to outbid them for cutting edge stuff.
> They have already beaten everyone with a fabulous phone processor design. Imagine that coupled with fab advantage. While others can differentiate on other things but at some point, some differences will become hard to overlook.
Such an advantage is not the end, though. Look at where Intel is, with all the R&D spending, fab, and anti-competition moves from a couple of years ago. Engineers move around, and it is difficult to keep a top team for decades. You always end up making mistakes that can be used by your competition.
They won't keep the fab advantage. The money TSMC gets from Apple will contribute to improving production, which will also benefit other TSMC customers. Just like Apple buying most of the world's supply of NAND chips a couple of years back did not kill the market.
ARM Macs may be different in the future, but I don't think the performance advantage in phones is that important. People chose mostly on features and ecosystem. Even Android geeks do not care that much that last generation's iPhone outperforms their current flagship. Android still sells. Now, more performance does give more room for some features, but this is a second-order effect. For now, you can find almost any iPhone feature in some Android phones, often with bigger batteries or other things like a headphone jack or a SD port. OnePlus' phones are slower, but it's not the end of the world.
A vertically integrated Apple will suffocate the others if they become dominant enough to utterly dominate their market, which I don't see happening as long as they focus on the high end.
> A vertically integrated Apple will suffocate the others if they become dominant enough to utterly dominate their market, which I don't see happening as long as they focus on the high end.
But they aren't just focusing on the higher end. They have products at competitive prices now like iPhone SE or Watch SE/ older gen watch.
> They won't keep the fab advantage. The money TSMC gets from Apple will contribute to improving production, which will also benefit other TSMC customers. Just like Apple buying most of the world's supply of NAND chips a couple of years back did not kill the market.
And unquestionably TSMC now has much more 7nm capacity for sale than they would have if Apple were vertically integrated and owned their own fabs.
If it is not allowed to do a "fabulous phone processor", manufacture it in the best way possible and profit from it, there will be no investment / advancement at all
They should be definitely allowed as this looks like a good business deal, the dangers of monopolizing on competitive advantages nonetheless. My statement was just about the power they have.
This is the kind of thinking that leads to monopolies. If companies get too big a market share they can and will be reduced in stature by various governments around the world. Today's competitor becomes tomorrow's overbearing monoculture. I'm not really afraid of that happening to apple anytime soon but it certainly could if they start trying to use monopolist power to push out competitors.
Linux works, but the latest models usually have bad driver support for a while. I'm using a 2-year-old MacBook Pro with Arch Linux and it works fine after some tweaking.
It is unclear if it still be the case once they switch from Intel CPUs to ARM - not looking good if their locked down walled garden mobile hardware is any indication.
If by can run you mean half of the hardware doesn't work on linux and the drivers are shit on Windows then yes. And I doubt this will be the case on ARM.
Apple is quickly turning from pushing he at a premium to pushing HW and services in a walled garden package.
> It's also too early to say that Apple Silicon is a threat to anyone.
Anandtech's Tiger Lake deep dive compares performance gains when running SPEC at a 15 watt TDP and a 28 watt TDP.
>At first glance, the Tiger Lake system performs quite well versus its predecessor, but that’s mostly only in the 28W mode. At 15W, the generational boost, while it is there, isn’t that significant.
We're getting to the point where Intel is no longer able to deliver significant performance improvements inside a low TDP.
This bodes well for an architecture that has much better performance per watt.
>Here we present the 15W vs 28W configuration figures for the single-threaded workloads, which do see a jump in performance by going to the higher TDP configuration, meaning [Tiger Lake] is thermally constrained at 15W even in ST workloads.
Comparing it against Apple’s A13, things aren’t looking so rosy as the Intel CPU barely outmatches it even though it uses several times more power, which doesn’t bode well for Intel once Apple releases its “Apple Silicon” Macbooks.
The numbers from those performance tests aren't all good news for AMD.
>Against the x86 competition, Tiger Lake leaves AMD’s Zen2-based Renoir in the dust when it comes to single-threaded performance.
>[In multicore] AMD’s platform scales incredibly well in execution-bound workloads as it fully takes advantage of double the core count. In more memory-heavy workloads, the Zen2 cores here seem to be lacking sufficient resources and scale below the performance of Intel’s 4-core designs in some workloads.
We'll have to see what the testing figures look like after Zen3 and Apple Silicon ship.
Sure, but we are talking about ARM chips vs x86 chips, and so it would be more meaningful to compare ARM chips with AMD chips as AMD has made better strides than Intel in lowering TDP. Everyone would be more interested in how Apple ARM chips compare with AMD mobile and desktop Ryzen chips.
I suspect Apple's chips have a much smaller overall die size, so the economics of the early 5nm defect rate might just make more sense for apple than amd.
Everyone will have access to that node in the near future, once more infrastructure is built and that processes become more efficient. Apple is not in competition with any CPU maker; I think "existential threat" is a bit overblown. Unless there is a revolution at Apple leadership, ARM Macs will remain a slice of the PC market. There will still be lots of room for others.
The "node" or lambda is not all that important. It is a multiplication factor - you get sizes of parts in integer scales of node size.
It allows for some parts of chip parts to be smaller. Most transistors stay about the same, because you cannot make them much smaller, otherwise they will leak or will not be as fast as needed.
If you look for transition of the same company from lambda1 to smaller lambda2 you will see that gate or transistor density rises not as theoretical square of lambda1/lambda2, but as about lambda1/lambda2 or less.
It is also quite possible to screw things at smaller lambdas. For example, NVidia get their process right for same lambda only after several years, they were fighting steady state leaks, power issues and the like. And NVidia, just like AMD and Apple, was using TSMC.
So if you are pissed about AMD lagging behind a node, don't be. Being at forefront of node size does not mean instant success, lagging a node size step behind does not mean you will get much inferior product.
Apple does not want to run it's own manufacturing lines, however they have long been known for buying the manufacturing equipment needed for their manufacturing partners to make exactly the parts they want in the volume they need.
For instance, this deal from early in the Tim Cook era:
>Apple today announced that it has reached long-term supply agreements with Hynix, Intel, Micron, Samsung Electronics and Toshiba to secure the supply of NAND flash memory through 2010. As part of these agreements, Apple intends to prepay a total of $1.25 billion for flash memory components during the next three months.
If you go back to the time when Apple was looking at single sourcing their SOC production at TSMC you'll find some interesting comments in the press.
>The world's leading foundry chip maker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. is considering operating single-customer wafer fabs, according to chairman and CEO Morris Chang.
Chang, speaking to analysts on a conference call to discuss the company's second quarter financial results, said that the market is tending to produce fewer higher volume customers and some are so large they need their own dedicated fabs.
> Apple does not want to run it's own manufacturing lines, however they have long been known for buying the manufacturing equipment needed for their manufacturing partners to make exactly the parts they want in the volume they need.
I vaguely recall a story about them buying a controlling stake and the entire production output of the only company capable of making the machine tools to make the aluminium unibody Macbook cases (and maybe also the laser tooling that punches the holes in them for the status LED t shine through)...
I'm not sure it's the entire output, but AFAIK Apple is the buyer/owner of the largest fleet of high-precision CNC machines (Haas?), solely for the purpose of manufacturing unibody MacBook cases. One time I found the operator's website, a nondescript Taiwanese company that's responsible for all Apple cases. Again this is off the top of my head.
“Apple is the world's largest owner of CNC milling machines and swiss style lathes. Rumors are that the number is around 40,000 with about half dedicated to iPhone production. I've seen pictures of one shop with acres of Fanuc Robodrills making iPhones, and that was only one of about a dozen such facilities. Apple is such a huge buyer of a particular kind of mill (BT30 spindle drill-tap centers) that Fanuc, Brother and DMG Mori each have factories dedicated to building machines exclusively for Apple.”
If Apple makes other company to be their sole provider, isn't that effectively a way of tax avoidance?
For example in a smaller scale, if you hire a company that needs to do a project for you under your direction, you have to pay that company as if they were your own employees. In the UK this is called "IR35". Seems like for all intents and purposes TSMC is an Apple Fab?
And per the article only the first year of production or so. There's also the question of whether Apple actually got any actual exclusive deal for the first year, or whether they simply outbid other companies for the production slots.
People can also work for multiple companies. If the product is made to order to exact Apple specs, then that sounds like avoidance. Situation would be different if Apple were buying TSMC designs.
I can't remember the exact details but I remember a story at some point that they'd bought up basically all the world's manufacturing capacity of sapphires - I think for TouchID. Their manufacturing scale is just insane.
Actually Apple does that to prevent competitors from being able to sell similar competing products.
They also do that for classes of RAM, SSD, etc.
Less important, they do that to avoid the need for a supplier to build another facility. Often suppliers will raise prices after a step threshold requires more capacity (a new factory) because of the hassle, risk and setup cost.
One of the reasons that China took over the world's mfg. is that often they had pre-built factories already built. One engineer/entrepreneur in China financed and pre-built an entire chemical facility for a certain process. Talk about planning and faith.
An example of how wrong things are in the USA is that it took 20 years to extend BART 10 miles with above-ground track (Milpitas and Berryessa/North San Jose stations.)
There was a company that believed they had the tech to produce synthetic sapphire at the scale necessary for Apple to replace the Gorilla Glass on iPhones with synthetic sapphire.
In that deal, Apple loaned the manufacturer the money needed to buy the necessary production equipment, however the manufacturer was unable to get the process to work at scale.
>Apple announced a new factory in Arizona where its supplier, GT Advanced Technologies, would be loaned $578 million to produce huge synthetic sapphire crystals
Nvidia used TSMC 7nm for the first Ampere chip, the GA100 used in the HPC-focused A100. The density vs. the Samsung 8nm manufactured GA102 in the RTX 3090 & 3080 is drastic. 65.6M / mm² vs. 45.1M / mm².
Either Samsung gave Nvidia a hell of a deal or TSMC's 7nm was booked up.
Could also be a bit of both. But I wouldn't be surprised if it's mainly Samsung giving Nvidia a great deal. For years it's all over town that Samsung seems to have the best wafer prices in the industry.
Isn't the rumour that they went to TSMC and "balked" at the price - dangling how much cheaper Samsung would offer their fab capacity, demanded a discount and were told to go whistle since TSMC already has enough customers to run their foundries at 100%?
Listing all the marketing numbers without mentioning the actual feature size, or densities, of the processes in the comparison isn’t a good practice. For example, TSMC 5nm is far less than 4 times the density of Intel’s 10nm. Even though a credulous reader might assume so.
It is fascinating to consider that Apple has enough pull in Taiwan to get exclusivity on their most advanced technology.
Well I mean all it takes is a better offer, and all you need for that is more money. Wouldn't necessarily call it influence but yeah, it's still crazy either way.
TSMC isn’t a purely monetary profit driven company, though your right usually they do business as if they were. Because 100% of something is much different than 99% in B2B and at this scale. Though of course TSMC is a bit special because they are comfortably ahead on something that the only possible competitors are even more unlikely to do exclusivity.
Sensationalized article. The real story looks like all of TSMCs 5nm capacity for 2020 is booked by Apple, not all 5nm for all time. That said, TSMC is the world leader in process these days, and cimoetion between customers has been fierce to book it. But if there was any serious risk AMD could be shut out for all time from 5nm you would have heard about that at their last investor call, not from an enthusiast website.
Its not huge. Apple booked all of TSMCs 5nm production for the next 3 months. They are still ramping up the process too. Apple is going first. Interesting but not huge.
Remember Apple are about to ship 50M+ A14 in the next quarter of course it is going to be fully booked. And TSMC has been producing them since May / June.
These sort of headlines make people think Apple is taking over all the capacity and AMD / Nvidia cant gain much from it. And it will inevitably lead to either blaming TSMC or Apple. Which I know it would be something the Samsung PR / Marketing team likes to play with once their Foundry business is up to scratch.
Nitpick: I’m annoyed at sentences that capitalises every word just to make them look more important than they are. I was wondering what Apple Books (the app) was doing, and what the verb in the sentence was. Is there a name for this capitalisation trend?
Thanks, that’s it. I’m very annoyed by it because in the English language there is little distinction between the subject, object, and verb versions of a word. So the same sentence can be read in multiple ways. This title casing makes it even harder.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 189 ms ] threadWell, top 5 atleast.
Company with the highest profit margin can pay most, so Apple gets first choice.
Apple also isn't the type to manufacture chips for other companies which is a lot of TSMC's revenue (this article is only for one size). So they would be taking a huge loss in value just to have control.
Much more likely for Apple is to try and create their own manufacturing lines.
The Taiwanese notably are framing the Huawei issue as a ban on a specific company rather than trade with China in general [1]. Whether that continues to be true might hinge on November...
1. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-taiwan-economy/taiwan-min...
I also have to imagine that if people are making a big antitrust stink to the government about how Apple takes 30% of Fortnite loot boxes, there will be an equally big problem when AMD, Nvidia, Broadcom, Qualcomm, Marvell, etc. can't have chips produced anymore.
On the other hand, Samsung owns a fab and makes phones, so it's not unheard of. Samsung has other big semiconductor businesses, though, and it's not clear that Apple really wants to enter into those. You don't need to manufacture your own flash memory to make good laptops; Samsung's SSD business does well on its own.
I really like vertical integration in general, but sometimes things work great even when they're completely decoupled. Two small projects is a lot easier to run than one big project, so you have to show some benefit for integrating things. In Apple's case, it was clear that Intel's CPUs weren't getting them where they wanted to go with thin laptops, so they made their own. They had to in order to sell competitive laptops. This whole thing is in its early days, though, and we don't even know if they're going to beat Intel or AMD. So the summary is, being TSMC's customer is working out great for Apple; they specify a CPU and they get a good one at a cost that the market seems OK with. They want to make a big bet and dramatically change the computing landscape, but that might not work out. What if Intel totally leapfrogs Apple Silicon? It is so uncertain that it is hard to say "they should just buy TSMC". Rather, they should sit and wait and see how they do, and then decide if more integration will let them make better phones, tablets, and laptops.
Purchasing TSMC would lead to it having to deal with maintaining relationships to people it actively competes on several levels with. This would almost certainly lead to accusations of anti-competitive behaviour.
Buying ASML also wouldn't really gain Apple anything. There's tons of technology and know-how that goes into a fab beyond buying a lithography machines.
Taiwan would do the same in the case of TSMC.
Fun fact - they account for 5% of Taiwan’s energy usage alone. Wild.
It is widely-licensed but also vulnerable to being superceded or abandoned by licensees if it tries to squeeze them for more money.
It exists because it provides a useful service, but not a critical one
Ahem. ARM.
Seriously, though. Take a look even at TikTok. I was pleasantly surprised that it's not for sale, either. Why does every tech company has to be HQ'ed in the US?!
After all, TSMC helps make Taiwan one of America's valued trading partners, even if America doesn't officially acknowledge Taiwanese sovereignty.
So long as a Chinese invasion will mean American companies lose access to TSMC and Chinese companies gain it, they hope this provides them the same protection Kuwait and Saudi Arabia enjoy. Or at least, if not certain protection then a high enough chance of protection to discourage an invasion.
As the UK does not have an expansionist neighbour disputing their sovereignty, ARM is not a strategic asset in the same way.
2. TSMC is much larger than Apple's manufacturing requirements. To keep it running, they would have to commit to doing a lot of contract work for other companies, which really isn't Apple's style. Moreover, many of TSMC's current clients (like AMD, Intel, Nvidia, and Qualcomm) might be uncomfortable with Apple controlling the company, as that would introduce conflicts of interest.
3. Owning TSMC would put Apple in charge of the company's technology development, and would expose them to significant financial risk if TSMC suffered a failure, much like Intel has been harmed by their failures to develop a 7nm process. Contracting out their semiconductor manufacturing allows Apple to switch foundries if needed.
Also, tsmc has loads of clients. Apple doesn’t want to sell to them. So they shut them down?? It’s a mess.
#249: A Sane Amount of Cash http://5by5.tv/criticalpath/249
I barely understand what Horace is talking about (square hole, round peg) and would only butcher his thesis. Sorry.
These podcasts are in the "think out loud" format, vs finally crafted presentations. So I listen at high speed and rewind to replay the key points.
Edit: Gonna risk it.
Large M&As are notoriously bad moves. Beats was Apple's largest acquisition, which Horace thinks was ok because it probably broke even. (I have a different take: it was an acqui-hire and they got some head phones as bonus.)
Reinvesting cash surplus is also bad, because it's shareholder's cash for them to invest themselves. Also, to do so would make Apple a hedge fund, which is a huge distraction.
Horace doesn't touch on Apple style partnerships, the deep investments into their suppliers. Not quite keiretsu. Not quite monopsony. Definitely not WalMart style partnerships, which is very abusive. Maybe more like defense or auto manufacturer partnerships, where it's more mutually beneficial. Like Toyota does. I would love to read case studies about Apple's partnerships.
1. TSMC has very low margins. Buying the company means lowering Apple margins, that are the highest on the world.
2. Lots of companies depend on TSMC, if Apple did that they will be sued for monopolistic behavior.
3. Apple benefits enormously from the cheap devices that TSMC makes for other companies, that is volume, improvement of technology that Apple can use(ARM). It is over 5x the volume in sales of Apple products.
4. It is a strategic interest company of Taiwan,Europe, China and US.Buying it is not economics,it is geopolitics.
CCP has a policy of reuniting Taiwan with the mainland. If they could do it today, they would.
> Not to mention the potential for millions of people to die
Chinese premiers have stated they would sacrifice half their citizens if necessary. In fact, they are sacrificing whole towns during the current floods to save various dams, reservoirs and cities, flooding them at nite to make investigations more difficult to avoid welfare payments.
Not sure which imaginary China you're talking about.
I don’t mean this as a ‘citation needed’ dismissal. I’d like to learn more about when such a statement was made.
"If the Americans are determined to interfere [in a confrontation over Taiwan] we will be determined to respond,” said Gen Zhu, who is also a professor at China's National Defence University.
"We will prepare ourselves for the destruction of all of the cities east of Xian."
The source link is still online 15 years later: https://www.ft.com/content/28cfe55a-f4a7-11d9-9dd1-00000e251...
"We are prepared to sacrifice 300 million Chinese for the victory of the world revolution." - Mao Zedong (Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, Mao: The Unknown Story [Jonathan Cape, 2005], pp. 457-8)
http://www.worldfuturefund.org/wffmaster/Reading/Quotes/maot...
The population of China was 600 million at the time.
And if China is willing to sacrifice half of their own population, they're willing to sacrifice 100% of the rest of the world. This explains China's behavior over the corona virus.
(The great genocides of Stalin and Mao were methods to distribute the wealth of farmers to the state for industrialization and militarization projects. So reasons.)
Note that China's population of 1.4 billion people is a liability when you're responsible for feeding all of them, and Xi cannot feed them in 2020 due to the flooding, locust and mold disasters, so you can see the possibilities.
He can feed CCP members, which are about 15% of the population.
Then we can conclude that so far they haven’t been in a position to enact that policy, and that unless circumstances suddenly fail to no longer obtain, they will continue to be impeded.
There's no math proof here for you to falsify - stop being an HN pedant.
> Chinese premiers have stated...
US senators and congresspeople have stated all sorts of crazy things too, but it doesn’t mean much. If China were to sacrifice over 500 million people to take over Taiwan, there isn’t anything stopping them from doing so today besides that statement being untrue.
China has a lot of Communist Rhetoric in the general speech patterns of the government, but if you stop and think for a second the Chinese, like everybody else, are just people. They drift cars and buy iPhones and go to the grocery store. The willingness to kill 500 million to invade Taiwan is probably not there.
I provided a page of quotes from Mao confirming it in a related thread.
> if you stop and think for a second the Chinese, like everybody else, are just people.
The CCP is a totalitarian govenment, similar to Hitler or Stalin. They are currently committing genocide against multiple religions and ethnic groups.
What CCP Genocide Looks Like - Sterilization
https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/21/asia/xinjiang-china-response-...
Stop being a useful idiot:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot
If you wanted to cause worldwide mayhem, I guess this would do it, but I wouldn't assume that TSMC could just be invaded and taken over like that.
Only if it very safe explosives planted in strategic places by Taiwan military with consent from all parties involved with solders posted 24/7 to protect from sabotage.
Like bridges in military time.
I'm not an expert on explosives, but aren't modern explosives relatively safe? As in, they require very specific conditions to explode, so they're not going to be set off by a random fires or impacts. The blasting caps (needed to initiate the explosion) can be placed in a safe in the plant manager's office.
There is almost certainly at least a plan to render any critical equipment like that unusable, even if there aren't wired up explosives at the fab at all times.
Also, the shift from desktop CPUs to mobile CPUs as leading the shift to smaller nodes sounds less like a massive revelation, and more like the innevitable result of mobile CPUs out-stripping traditional CPUs in volume & margin.
If it makes sense for other companies to adopt these kinds of financial arrangements, they will eventually, and while it works out best for Apple here, at this particular point in time, this is just one point in time. It does benefit others in the long run as TSMC is able to refine their process fabbing chips for Apple and will be able to open new production lines in the future with the profits from manufacturing for Apple and offer those to their other customers.
AMD is still doing really well in the market, and their customers are different and their more direct competition is Intel and NVIDIA. Could they make better products on a 5nm process size? We assume they can and will, maybe that will happen a little later than they would like, or maybe they’re working behind the scenes and making their own deals with other manufacturers that we don’t know about yet. This isn’t the bad old days where Intel was completely dominant, competition actually is good here. Apple is ahead right now, but that’s a temporary situation much like anything else.
At this point in time, this is the situation, but no one here should expect this to remain the situation in perpetuity. From what I heard, prior to this, Apple and AMD were jointly buying up all of or almost all of TSMC’s 7nm fab capacity. AMD has risen from the the dirt, and then later again from the ashes and is presently making the best x86_64 chips you can buy today. I’m actually disappointed Apple didn’t try to shop around for the 2019 Mac Pro CPU because they could have gotten much better all-around parts buying the equivalents from AMD for less and with lower power consumption. Ah well, can’t win them all.
I‘m not sure that’s true. Afaik Intel parts still have a rather large advantage concerning idle power consumption.
It has nothing to do with 5nm, Apple, or not.
This is the kind of situation market dynamics excel at. The next few years of CPUs in all our devices are going to be fantastic.
In practice, I suspect these sorts of situation arise far more frequently than we think. One party overpays for a supply of an ingredient and then controls demand by leveraging it. In the first act, they convince people that they need things made with this ingredient. In the second, they bank on the cachet, the exclusivity, driving demand even higher.
But at the end of the day, someone is playing a chess match where in theory the customer could have had more options and now they don't. Or they could have had no options at all. We don't have a time machine so who can say?
Apple went farther in a number of situations by investing in suppliers in order to guarantee that they could produce an ingredient in the first place, either at all, or in a timely fashion. We are going to enable you to make a product, and then we are going to ask for special treatment for having done so.
Which means, for instance, that Intel may be able to field an equivalent ultralight notebook using the same supplier, but Apple made higher profit margins on the same product (although the manufacturer makes higher profits on the Intel version).
I don't have any illusions that they will continue with this level of benevolence in the future, especially after Tim (or indeed even as Tim's memory of Steve fades). I don't even know if they are still working that way now. Probably not, or not for long.
At any rate, R&D frequently is paid for by luxury goods of one form or another. Like it or not, Apple is nearly the only luxury computing maker out there, though Samsung, Sony and LG dabble. I've expressed my confusion on a number of occasions as to why things are this way, given that it's not the case with cars or a number of other goods. I like Apple products and am an investor, but I'd also like to have more opportunities to compare them to a competitor. Hyundai has figured out they need a separate luxury brand, as have a number of car makers before them. Maybe Sony, Samsung and LG need their own 'Genesis', 'Audi', "Acura".
My last example was not a case of 'poor Intel, can't sell because of a licensing agreement'. They were probably wiping their tears away with 100 dollar bills. TSMC is probably pretty happy with this arrangement too. The way they 'get out' of this exclusivity is to produce more chips than Apple cares to buy, since it's probably Right of First Refusal, not 'you can make no more than N million chips per month or else'.
It's a very similar situation with the iPhone. Apple makes a great phone in many respects, but they're one company and they can't meet the wide variety customers demand. That's reflected in their market share.
It's also too early to say that Apple Silicon is a threat to anyone. Apple Silicon in the iPhone and iPad is a low power & low performance chip compared to AMD/Intel. They have a huge challenge scaling that up to compete on desktop. Their first chips are going into their lower performance products. I'm sure it'll be decent in that role, but Apple likely NEEDS 5nm just so that it makes a respectable showing compared to AMD/Intel.
Not sure that's been true for some time now. Wouldn't they be better described as "a premium manufacturer of mobile phones that run iOS with an app ecosystem they make 30% commission on, who also make legacy propitiatory laptop and desktop devices"?
(I agree with the rest of your comment though. Apple _don't want_ 99% of Android or Windows customers, and are more than happy for Huawei and Oppo and AliExpress to sell phones and laptops to people Apple dont care about. They _might_ care a bit about encouraging top of the range Samsung or Pixel phone customers to iPhones, maybe. And they at least used to try to woo the dev/webdev crowd to macOS machines, but less obviously these days, it seems to me.)
> If you get a PC, you get literally thousands of choices.
And none of them work reliably.
Which has 0 relevance. GGP was asserting that Apple Is an existential threat to AMD. Given AMD is not an Apple supplier (of CPU anyway) and Apple will not sell their chips to the outside world, that makes sense on no axis.
Any sources for this? As far as I know, AMD has never designed CPU for mobiles.
It's not out of the question for them to consider such a move, but I think that the bigger issue here for AMD is that it means they will wind up a mode behind the edge, giving their main competitor- Intel- more time to catch up.
That is absurd. Last year I built a PC with off the shelf components that I spent about 30 minutes picking out, and all I had to do was stick the windows installer into the USB port to get everything set up perfectly out of the box. I have never had any reliability issues and I only reboot about once per month for updates. I used Apple products exclusively for a decade, but a contract role last year required me to use a Windows dev environment. I was holding my nose going in, but using WSL has been a joy and my MacBook is now collecting dust in the closet. In my experience most Mac purists that turn their nose up at commodity PCs haven't used one since MacBooks became the standard hip startup dev machine. Things have changed a lot in the last ten years.
And let's not pretend that Mac hardware has been perfectly reliable lately. In fact, of my hand rolled desktop PC and my 2017 MacBook Pro, the PC has had far fewer hardware reliability issues. Apple's declining hardware quality and increasingly unjustifiable retail prices have pretty much chased me off the platform after 10+ years of fanatical loyalty.
Sure companies fill them with shit, that’s not really a flaw in the underlying hardware/OS though. Those same people have less scope for that on OSX/Linux sure, but again that doesn’t mean the software/hardware is better.
My experience is the opposite. In my team at work people have either recent Mac book pro or Thinkpad with Linux. And it seems like the ones on Macs have always all kind of issues (with zoom screen sharing, with openvpn/tunnelblick, with docker not working as expected, and lately, as it's hot in paris, cooling issues - I laughed as they were exchanging tips too cool their laptop with stuffs you can put in the freezer, because otherwise their computer would be so slow that some of our time sensitive tests would fail...)
While true for the world for now, they already own half of the phones sold in US. In revenue/profit terms, it is even higher. They have already beaten everyone with a fabulous phone processor design. Imagine that coupled with fab advantage. While others can differentiate on other things but at some point, some differences will become hard to overlook.
They are at a dangerous position where they can suffocate others like this easily because no one else has comparable cash to outbid them for cutting edge stuff.
Such an advantage is not the end, though. Look at where Intel is, with all the R&D spending, fab, and anti-competition moves from a couple of years ago. Engineers move around, and it is difficult to keep a top team for decades. You always end up making mistakes that can be used by your competition.
They won't keep the fab advantage. The money TSMC gets from Apple will contribute to improving production, which will also benefit other TSMC customers. Just like Apple buying most of the world's supply of NAND chips a couple of years back did not kill the market.
ARM Macs may be different in the future, but I don't think the performance advantage in phones is that important. People chose mostly on features and ecosystem. Even Android geeks do not care that much that last generation's iPhone outperforms their current flagship. Android still sells. Now, more performance does give more room for some features, but this is a second-order effect. For now, you can find almost any iPhone feature in some Android phones, often with bigger batteries or other things like a headphone jack or a SD port. OnePlus' phones are slower, but it's not the end of the world.
A vertically integrated Apple will suffocate the others if they become dominant enough to utterly dominate their market, which I don't see happening as long as they focus on the high end.
But they aren't just focusing on the higher end. They have products at competitive prices now like iPhone SE or Watch SE/ older gen watch.
And unquestionably TSMC now has much more 7nm capacity for sale than they would have if Apple were vertically integrated and owned their own fabs.
I think you can run Linux, Windows, some of the BSDs, on them, can't you?
Linux works, but the latest models usually have bad driver support for a while. I'm using a 2-year-old MacBook Pro with Arch Linux and it works fine after some tweaking.
BSD is not well supported.
Apple is quickly turning from pushing he at a premium to pushing HW and services in a walled garden package.
Anandtech's Tiger Lake deep dive compares performance gains when running SPEC at a 15 watt TDP and a 28 watt TDP.
>At first glance, the Tiger Lake system performs quite well versus its predecessor, but that’s mostly only in the 28W mode. At 15W, the generational boost, while it is there, isn’t that significant.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16084/intel-tiger-lake-review...
We're getting to the point where Intel is no longer able to deliver significant performance improvements inside a low TDP.
This bodes well for an architecture that has much better performance per watt.
>Here we present the 15W vs 28W configuration figures for the single-threaded workloads, which do see a jump in performance by going to the higher TDP configuration, meaning [Tiger Lake] is thermally constrained at 15W even in ST workloads.
Comparing it against Apple’s A13, things aren’t looking so rosy as the Intel CPU barely outmatches it even though it uses several times more power, which doesn’t bode well for Intel once Apple releases its “Apple Silicon” Macbooks.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16084/intel-tiger-lake-review...
But why are we comparing with Intel chips, when it is AMD chips that have been more successful in delivering higher performance with lower TDPs?
>Against the x86 competition, Tiger Lake leaves AMD’s Zen2-based Renoir in the dust when it comes to single-threaded performance.
>[In multicore] AMD’s platform scales incredibly well in execution-bound workloads as it fully takes advantage of double the core count. In more memory-heavy workloads, the Zen2 cores here seem to be lacking sufficient resources and scale below the performance of Intel’s 4-core designs in some workloads.
We'll have to see what the testing figures look like after Zen3 and Apple Silicon ship.
An other commenter theorised that Apple had simply outbid AMD for the production capacity.
It allows for some parts of chip parts to be smaller. Most transistors stay about the same, because you cannot make them much smaller, otherwise they will leak or will not be as fast as needed.
If you look for transition of the same company from lambda1 to smaller lambda2 you will see that gate or transistor density rises not as theoretical square of lambda1/lambda2, but as about lambda1/lambda2 or less.
It is also quite possible to screw things at smaller lambdas. For example, NVidia get their process right for same lambda only after several years, they were fighting steady state leaks, power issues and the like. And NVidia, just like AMD and Apple, was using TSMC.
So if you are pissed about AMD lagging behind a node, don't be. Being at forefront of node size does not mean instant success, lagging a node size step behind does not mean you will get much inferior product.
For instance, this deal from early in the Tim Cook era:
>Apple today announced that it has reached long-term supply agreements with Hynix, Intel, Micron, Samsung Electronics and Toshiba to secure the supply of NAND flash memory through 2010. As part of these agreements, Apple intends to prepay a total of $1.25 billion for flash memory components during the next three months.
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2005/11/21Apple-Announces-Lon...
If you go back to the time when Apple was looking at single sourcing their SOC production at TSMC you'll find some interesting comments in the press.
>The world's leading foundry chip maker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. is considering operating single-customer wafer fabs, according to chairman and CEO Morris Chang.
Chang, speaking to analysts on a conference call to discuss the company's second quarter financial results, said that the market is tending to produce fewer higher volume customers and some are so large they need their own dedicated fabs.
https://web.archive.org/web/20120728040723/https://www.eetim...
I vaguely recall a story about them buying a controlling stake and the entire production output of the only company capable of making the machine tools to make the aluminium unibody Macbook cases (and maybe also the laser tooling that punches the holes in them for the status LED t shine through)...
“Apple is the world's largest owner of CNC milling machines and swiss style lathes. Rumors are that the number is around 40,000 with about half dedicated to iPhone production. I've seen pictures of one shop with acres of Fanuc Robodrills making iPhones, and that was only one of about a dozen such facilities. Apple is such a huge buyer of a particular kind of mill (BT30 spindle drill-tap centers) that Fanuc, Brother and DMG Mori each have factories dedicated to building machines exclusively for Apple.”
1) It's a company-to-company transaction. Individuals are not involved.
2) It's a company in one country to another country. Employment law doesn't cross national boundaries.
They also do that for classes of RAM, SSD, etc.
Less important, they do that to avoid the need for a supplier to build another facility. Often suppliers will raise prices after a step threshold requires more capacity (a new factory) because of the hassle, risk and setup cost.
One of the reasons that China took over the world's mfg. is that often they had pre-built factories already built. One engineer/entrepreneur in China financed and pre-built an entire chemical facility for a certain process. Talk about planning and faith.
An example of how wrong things are in the USA is that it took 20 years to extend BART 10 miles with above-ground track (Milpitas and Berryessa/North San Jose stations.)
https://abc7news.com/bart-south-bay-stations-silicon-valley-...
In that deal, Apple loaned the manufacturer the money needed to buy the necessary production equipment, however the manufacturer was unable to get the process to work at scale.
>Apple announced a new factory in Arizona where its supplier, GT Advanced Technologies, would be loaned $578 million to produce huge synthetic sapphire crystals
https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/3/18528920/sec-charges-apple...
Either Samsung gave Nvidia a hell of a deal or TSMC's 7nm was booked up.
It is fascinating to consider that Apple has enough pull in Taiwan to get exclusivity on their most advanced technology.
Here’s what seems to be the original source? https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20200917PD210.html
These sort of headlines make people think Apple is taking over all the capacity and AMD / Nvidia cant gain much from it. And it will inevitably lead to either blaming TSMC or Apple. Which I know it would be something the Samsung PR / Marketing team likes to play with once their Foundry business is up to scratch.
The age of Internet.
/S
Frankly, it's still much much better than most other social media platforms out there in terms of thought put into sentences.