And the original report was released on 01/12 before Intel appoints Pat Gelsinger as new CEO. So even if the report speculated correctly, which is unlikely, the circumstance already changed.
The only problem with this, is that its fairly well-known by industry insiders that Apple has TSMC's entire 5nm production locked up for a significant portion of this year, maybe even the entire year. M1 is just the beginning. New Axx chips are going 5nm too.
I would trust Charlie over at SemiAccurate before I trust TrendForce.
I'm not saying this isn't true or accurate, I'm saying that Apple's manufacturing demands are enormous just for iPhone / iPad chips, and now M1 has invigorated demand for desktop / laptop Mac products, at least amongst nerdier types like us, but wherever we go, the mainstream inevitably follows. Once "normal" people start using MacBook Pros and realize they now have 2-4 day battery life (or even longer for light users), then its only a matter of time until demand rises. I think Apple has anticipated this to some degree.
Not to mention, 2021 is supposed to be the Year of the Mx iMac / Mac Pro.
Ultimately, this is just a terrible time to be Intel. They're at least 2-3 years away from any worthwhile new product on their own nodes. 10nm is still a shitshow and 7nm isn't faring much better.
I was a super MBP user until a few years ago when I got into 3D printing. I started doing lots of CAD stuff and found Windows users... Lots of them. Then I got into CNC at a hobby level and I find most of that tribe is heavily invested into Windows. Looking at the non-hobby level of CAD users, that is, professional engineers who use CAD... I see lots of Windows users.
That is not to say Intel isn't in trouble, but I have exactly zero interest in running MacOS anytime soon. I don't care if the M1 MBP has 15 day battery life. I need a discrete GPU and loads of RAM and I want it in a Laptop, understanding that I need to plug it in after 1 hour. There are dozens of us!
Your issue there isn't so much the hardware, but the software. Any MBP with discrete graphics gives reasonable performance running Windows given the form factor.
Everyone I know wants an M1 laptop, has bought one, or is waiting for a larger laptop with it in it. None of these people are nerdy types, but the buzz surrounding the M1 is loud.
> Everyone I know wants an M1 laptop, has bought one, or is waiting for a larger laptop with it in it. None of these people are nerdy types, but the buzz surrounding the M1 is loud.
Now go to the most fashionable nightclubs that are the hardest places to get in, in America's largest 50 cities.
Ask them what they think about Apple's new M1 CPU / chip and if they are planning to get a MBP/MBA/Mac Mini.
Now go ask the top physicians in those 50 cities. The top psychiatrists. The top fashion designers. The top <anyone who isn't intrinsically involved in technology>.
I bet you less than 10% of them even know that Apple released a new MacBook and MacMini.
Performance isn't the draw for these people, its battery life.
If you want to sell 2 billion smartphones, give the people a phone with 75% of the performance of an iPhone 11 or Galaxy S21, but a two week battery life.
Most people that I know use some combination of Windows, Linux and older Macs. None of us have upgraded to M1, nor are we in any hurry to do so.
This comment is typed on an older Mac that will be replaced with either Linux or Windows when it dies. Because my experience with Apple has been going downhill, and I'm tired of dealing with the bugs.
So I work in tech in SV and at least a third of the engineers I know have ordered an M1. The ones that I know that have been using them sing their praises (with some teething around Homebrew and docker). I ordered a Mini a week ago and should receive it tomorrow. I am hoping to be as blown away as everyone I know was.
I work in tech in Orange County and nobody here particularly cares about the M1.
It may not help that I work for a company centered around manufacturing, and factories are deeply Windows centric. (For the Linux fans, it turns out that when the Linux box fails at 3 AM, and nobody in the factory knows what to do about it, it gets replaced by Windows ASAP. Doesn't matter why it failed, they want someone around who at least knows where to start on diagnosing it.)
I would guess that my experience is closer to average for a software developer outside of the SV bubble than yours. And developers of all kinds are going to be faster to upgrade computers than the general public.
So by SV I mean companies based in SV, however the dev team is all over the world. Anyway, I received my M1. Pretty blown away. I have 2 rsync checksum task running on 100K files each (one local between drives, the 2nd from a drive to NFS mount), Minecraft running (AFK), Music importing 90K files, a browser with 20 tabs open, a large compile job of a re-install of 100+ Homebrew apps going, the 1st Backblaze backup of the system, the 1st Time Machine backup of the system and , an Xcode job of a personal build, and a few other random task for setting up a new system running and there is ZERO slowdown in an responsiveness anywhere. The activity monitor shows the system is bored and the fan is not running. It is freaking impressive.
>The only problem with this, is that its fairly well-known by industry insiders that Apple has TSMC's entire 5nm production locked up for a significant portion of this year, maybe even the entire year. M1 is just the beginning. New Axx chips are going 5nm too.
Maybe I'm not following you, but if this is true, doesn't that just confirm parent's comment that Intel is likely not outsourcing to TSMC's 5nm process? Because TSMC has no 5nm process availability to outsource to?
They’re not even close to the bottom. Their current product line up isn’t the best and the future is bleak, but the market needs their fab capacity. The bottom will occur as competitor production capacity relative to demand improves. Part of this is pandemic related, too, as COVID has reduced production and caused a spike in demand.
Meanwhile, there's a shortage of foundry capacity. Automakers are pausing assembly lines because they can't get chips. So yeah, Intel isn't making the best chips, but they're still making ok chips, there's a chip shortage, and things could look different in 5 years.
Not saying I'd bet on them. I'd probably not bet either way. I just think the "future is bleak" narrative is overplayed.
They will recover, but we're not at the bottom yet.
I think the stock will hit rock bottom in early-to-mid 2022. It'll start to climb around Q2 2023 when new products on working Intel nodes are announced. Once those products are reviewed and performance is at parity or better than AMD / Apple products, it'll rebound.
And they will have to recover, one way or another. Intel is now a strategic asset. TSMC is too close to mainland China to risk losing access to, the Arizona fab won't be online for at least 3-5 years, and its capacity is tiny compared to the main fab in Taiwan. Samsung can't afford to share capacity because whatever portion of their fabs aren't used for Samsung products, the rest is locked up by NVIDIA, which literally every researcher needs because GPU-based compute is now dominant.
Intel has to succeed, and if they can't do that on their own, the United States government has to step in, in some way. They did it for a bunch of shitty bankers in 2008, they can definitely do it for an industry that produces an actual, tangible product.
Getting the government involved does not change the makeup of engineers or organizational antics; if anything, government involvement makes the entire thing worse. Intel has soft resource problems (managerial, talent), not hard resource problems (money, access).
If Intel is not shook from the top down, this story will not end well.
The thing that US government needs is to ensure that at least a reasonable part of modern chip manufacturing happens on US soil and not across the Pacific. The way they can step in for that is with subsidies for US-based fabs. However, do they need to be Intel fabs? TSMC might as well fulfil that need if they can be motivated to build fabs in USA.
If it has come so far that the government has to steps in than they are probably done. Once government starts to bankroll them, they'll have no incentive to be competitive and all the smart creative people will leave for better pastures.
Further back, modern computing / internetworking wouldn't exist without military and DARPA cash from the government. Read any book on the history of these.
There's a difference between the government paying for or subsidizing a needed service and the government bailing out a specific company after that company has failed to compete in the market. Successful industrial policy, like the sort South Korea practiced, requires backing the winners not rescuing the losers.
I don't know whether Intel will ever need government bailout. If however it does need it, it will probably be game over for them to ever become a leader again. There will simply be no incentive for them to innovate.
Lockheed and Boeing would both easily get government bailouts if it came to it, for the same reason I believe Intel would.
America can no longer cede ground in high-tech manufacturing to anywhere else in the world.
Hong Kong should have been the wake-up call for this. If China can subjugate Hong Kong, they can subjugate Taiwan. I'm not convinced the average American would support a war against China to free Taiwan, even if it did mean no more iPhones for them.
So the only other option is America has to return to being a bastion a high-tech manufacturing. The Wall Street types don't like this because it doesn't make them enormous margins. They're under the belief that offshoring everything will be fine, because to their mind, commerce and trade are the most important things in the world. They lack the mentality to understand that Communist China simply does not share this mindset.
That should be obvious with China "re-educating" their version of Elon Musk or Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg or whoever you want to compare him to - Jack Ma. No one is above "the Party". This isn't something that Wall Street types understand, because this is extremely bad for business, and they don't "get" why someone would sabotage profits for ideology. I would call it a Western failing, but frankly it was America and our Allies that failed in World War II. We should have listened to Patton and finished off Stalin, and then went to work on Mao, but we lacked the courage to do it.
If you really wanna go nuts, the stock split king for tech is Microsoft, with 9, yet its also at its highest point per share than ever.
Stock splits aren't a good reason for a low stock price, in fact, usually if a stock is hot enough in demand to split, after the split, the prices almost always eclipses the pre-split price.
> that its fairly well-known by industry insiders that Apple has TSMC's entire 5nm production locked up for a significant portion of this year, maybe even the entire year.
This is clearly incorrect. Qualcomm's Snapdragon 888 chip is made on 5nm, and they'll be in every Android flagship phone.
Why is it so hard to horizontally scale a working chip fab (i.e. copy-and-paste the entire plant to get more throughput)?
Is it a bottleneck on staffing people with the required expertise (i.e. are the only people who can run a given process node, the same people who designed/operationalized that process node)?
I read somewhere that scaling semiconductor fabs is incredibly difficult affair, as every minute detail have to be faithfully replicated - down to using the same color of lighting. All that is required to get consistent output quality.
Seems like the best idea would just be to try to plop the new plant next-door to the existing plant, then (and to keep doing that.) Would make the logistics of sourcing the same "everything" a lot simpler.
Intuitively, I'd expect that fabs would plan for this in advance, ensuring that 1. everything they buy, they have ways to get N of the exact same of that thing down the line — the same way that NASA missions contract to ensure they can get precisely-specced replacement parts decades down the line; and 2. that they build their first plant for a given process node in a huge empty expanse of land (much larger than what Plant No. 1 needs) where they either buy all that land ahead of time, or at least have a contract with the municipality to retain right-of-first-refusal on purchases of that land.
There's also a long lead up time to opening up a new fab. If you have just proved out your process, it might be tempting to duplicate that but when you're chasing the cutting edge as these markets are, there's a real opportunity cost to consider in scaling out your now "mature" process vs chasing the next big leap.
Maybe now that there are only two players left and new process costs continue to escalate we might see more of that
Despite the people, water, and electricity are another issues.
Taiwan is a small country with limited water resource due to the lack of land to have long river to keep the water on the ground.
For the electricity, nowadays, many BIG TECHs demand "green" electricity to manufacture their products, but once again Taiwan is not a big country. There is no enough area to hold the solar plates and the weather there is not suitable for wind power because of the typhoon.
These are the nature limitations. There are also other issues such as lack of engineers, the risk if expansion is not worth it in the future, etc.
IIRC a solar farm is being built in Australia which isn't going to touch Australia's own power grid, but rather is going to connect to Singapore's power grid using a pair of undersea HVDC cable runs.
Taiwan could probably get in on that action. If you're already running a 3500km cable, you could run a 4500km cable just as well.
(Kind of annoying that Taiwan can't just buy green energy from China — very easy logistically — but that's extremely politically untenable.)
Apple booked 80% of TSMC 5nm for 2021. AMD hasn't even started making 5nm CPUs this year while Apple has been shipping them to consumers since September of last year.
I don't know about volume, but Apple sure has more margin.
Outsourcing fabrication doesn't guarantee that you can choose the best fab, it just guarantees that you get to compete with Apple (and NVidia and, now, Intel) in a contest of "who can pay the most per chip."
The more credible speculation I've seen (although arguably once you're arguing with speculation is more credible, you've already lost) is that Intel is doing a multiyear deal to have TSMC crank out its discrete Xe graphics/compute cards. Which frankly makes a lot more sense, they need a leading process to compete with NVidia who currently has access to Samsung's 7nm and AMD who has TSMC's 7nm and will probably move on to TSMC 5nm sometime next year as Apple moves on to TSMC 3nm.
So supposedly Intel is guaranteeing enough Xe business to get TSMC to convert part of its Baoshan complex over to making Xe. Intel will keep trying to fix its own fabs for its CPUs and probably intends to bring Xe cards back in house at a later date, but they also want to go challenge AMD and nVidia for datacenter GPUs now and that means getting access to a better process.
Outsourcing the commodity i3 whose main goal in life is run MS Office on a Dell Optiplex is definitely a strange rumor. Out of all the things Intel has, that's the area that has the least need of a process upgrade.
And the original report was released on 01/12 before Intel appoints Pat Gelsinger as new CEO. So even if the report speculated correctly, which is unlikely, the circumstance already changed.