AMD CEO sees chips from TSMC's US plant costing 5%-20% more

> US has been a reliable partner post WWII for 95%+ of the time.

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.

Yeah, that ship sailed the second time Americans voted for him.

Not in the most recent years though. People aren't saying that the US has always been unreliable, but that it is becoming more so.

Averaging over a large window while ignoring the trend is not reasonable.

You know the joke. You can build churches your entire life, but screw a goat once and that's how they are going to call you.

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.

Don't ever look into the US's involvement in Latin America if you want to keep believing this

Even under Trump, it's been a lot more words than action

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".

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.

> without west being united

If that is true, perhaps the US should stop destroying the western alliance.

> 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.

>collective west

Rossiya-1 viewer/bot sighted

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.

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.

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.

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.

>> 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.

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.

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

Why?

there is no way the US would go to war with China over Taiwan anyway.

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.

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?

I think the risk here is Taiwan being invaded by China, in which case having some US-based production helps a lot.

> It took explosives for the EU to curtail its Russian natural gas use.

Assuming you refer to NS2 blowup, it was unused when it got sabotaged.

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.

What is interesting is if the world is not that reliant on Taiwan chips anymore would China really care that much about Taiwan?

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.

when? 1945 was a long time ago

> Ah yes, Taiwán

If you’re going to use accents, technically it’s Táiwān (ㄊㄞˊㄨㄢ)

From America's perspective the East is Europe and West is Asia. If we're going to talk about cardinal directions.

China is west of the USA.

OP is. Otherwise there's always a west to any west.

20% decrease would be only 80% price rise for the customer

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.

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.

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.

Don't make excuses for weakness at the top.

> They've been doing the exact right thing for the shareholders

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

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.

That’s a bullshit meme. One glance at the stock history shows that they haven’t been doing anything for shareholders for over a decade.

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.

I'm sorry, but to blame Intel's inadequacies on political climate is comedic.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Didn't they commit to that quite some time ago?

They just farmed out the compute section of Nova Lake to TSMC which is a sad statement

Apple farms out its displays to Samsung, a competitor. It's just how business is done.

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.

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.

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.

Price/performance, not node is what matters.

How long ago did nm numbers stop being descriptions of size of chip and start being purely marketing names? About a decade?

Yeah. That is what happen when I post it just before I felt asleep. Too late now can't edit it.

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.

Athlon 64 competed with first-gen Core, but Core 2 thru Sandy Bridge is what left AMD in the dust for 10 years.

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.

AMD had been gradually working their way up for a long time - the K6-III was an excellent CPU for the time.

They made the amd64 architecture. Let’s not forget that.

That’s a big if.

“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.

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.

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.

The problem for Intel is all the growth since mid 2000s is non PC.

What I don't get is: When AMD fabless is profitable and GlobalFoundries is profitable, why where AMD with the fab not?

> 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.

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.

> IDK if they are working on new fabs at this point

Yes, they are.

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/in...

Definitely struggling, but still in the game.

How does this scale? TSMC can't literally be the only fab in the world...

>> 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.

>There are dozens if not hundreds of fabless semiconductor companies.

How many of them develop high performance x64-64 cores?

>Owning fabs is the only thing that makes Intel special IMO.

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.

yeah that might happen

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

Being dependable isn't black and white.

US has become less dependable but a lot of countries still depend on US maybe less but not as allergic as depending on China.

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.

Apparently so! https://www.ajinomoto.com/innovation/our_innovation/buildupf...

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.

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

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.

We’re at least 4 years away from that, as it would require a round of STEM college students to go EE instead of computer science.

Ask Smoot and Hawley how well that went.

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.

You’re assuming rationality.

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.

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.

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.