melgross

I have no plans to make retro parts. But the price is pretty good. It’s actually lower than some of the PLA filaments I use. I’m thinking of picking up a roll, for no good reason. But the way it works is that I won’t buy a roll and then something will come up where I need it, but sales will likely be pretty low and so they’ll discontinue it and I won’t be able to get it.

of course, after buying it I will never find a need for the color and it will sit until I decide to use it just to get rid of it, and THEN I will need it for the purpose it was intended. As Larry Niven has said, in one of his characters; “The universe tends towards perversity.”

ok, I just ordered it. Shipping 6/30/25. Hopefully it gets here, though I’ll likely forget I ordered it.

hmlongco said:

Amazing how steadily TSMC advances these processes. It seemed to take Intel generations to go from one process to another.

No. Intel progressed to a new process every two years for a very long time. The politics of the chip business derailed them for a while. There was a big fight between Intel and the others about what to call a process. For decades, a process size actually meant the size of the features used to make the transistors. Then, as sizes began to get smaller, around the 22 to 14nm sizes, companies found it was too difficult to continuing that, so they made variable feature sizes on a chip, with the narrowest width line defining the process size.

 Intel insisted, at 10nm, that all features should be at the 10nm scale. But they couldn’t do it, not unexpectedly. They wasted almost three years trying to do that before giving up. Then they tried, with their process sizes still being better (an Intel 10nm was about equal to other’s 7nm, for example) to use transistors per square mm, but of course, nobody else would agree to that as it put them at a marketing disadvantage.

intel’s problems were caused by other thinks. One of which was Apple’s A series and then their M series, which took interest away from the x86 lines. By the way, while and made a major comeback, they’re in the same boat as Intel.

SuntanIronMan said:

melgross said:

blastdoor said:

Apple's silicon design team appears to be among the strongest teams in the company, and among the best silicon design teams in the world (if not the best). 

I wonder if Apple will buy or build their own fab so that they are both designing and manufacturing their chips. I know what the knee jerk reaction to that suggestion will be, but TSMC margins are steadily going up, which means that's profit Apple is missing out on. Time and time again, we have seen Apple identify suppliers with fat profit margins and then take over that business themselves. 

Maybe a way to start could be a joint venture with TSMC or Intel to build an Apple fab in the US. Apple could finance and own the fab and pay their partner some patent licensing and management/operation fees. Eventually Apple could then take over the management and operation. 

A modern fab costs up to $25 billion, and rising. It also takes years of experience to get the fab up to optimal performance. I doubt Apple will be willing to spend that money and take years to get it running properly. Then there are the risks of having a problem as fab companies gave. So now, 2nm is a year late from tank and others. But these companies have a number of favs. The build a new one and one by one, upgrade their older ones. How could Apple do that? They would have to have a fully functioning 3nm fab and build a 2nm fab.

no. Apple decided to not do that, and they’re right.

I know of a company that has shiny new leading-edge fab in Arizona, is struggling financially, has been selling/spinning-off various parts of its company and now has a new CEO.

I’m not saying Apple would buy Intel fabrication business. Not only am I not saying that, but I’m darn-near positive that Apple would never, lol.

BUT (just to speculate wildly): If Apple did want to get into fabrication (which it doesn’t), there is a quick way to skip all the time consuming parts that you mentioned. It would just require a large sum of money (which Apple has), Intel’s willingness to sell (which it might) and some government approval (since Intel took CHIPS Act money that requires Intel to not sell their fabrication business for some time).

Again, I’m not at all saying this is something that would happen. And it wouldn’t never be as simple as that. Just having fun speculating about something that definitely won’t happen, lol.

Intel got itself in trouble years ago at the end of the 10nm period. Before then other fabs had used nm loosely.10nm wasn’t really 10nm in that much of what was on the chips were 12 and 14nm. Intel had the idealistic idea that 10nm should actually be 10nm. They couldn’t do it. So a good two years after “10nm” came out elsewhere, they finally decided to follow the industry so they could catch up. By that time “7nm” had come out and they were forever behind. They proposed a new nomenclature which was number of transistors per square mm, or something similar, because they still had the better numbers, but unsurprisingly, no other company wanted to go along.

at any rate, refusing to cooperate with Apple in making the A series of SoCs because they didn’t believe Apple’s numbers, which they later said were correct, was a reason TSMC has risen, and they have fallen. 

Trump was the one who wanted Tick Tock banned in the first place. Now, he wants it because he thinks the viewers will want to see HIM on it. What a hypocrite.

netrox said:

elijahg said:

So Apple is finally friendly with Nvidia again?

What makes you think Apple wasn't friendly with Nvidia? 

Good one! Apple has had a feud with Nvidia for a long time. It started with CUDA. Apple came up with their own software for that which was better. ATI embraced it, but Nvidia didn’t allow it in their GPUs. That was the first problem. The second was as linked to above, when Nvidia changed their production to different solder balls. It didn’t tell the manufacturer of the sub boards the chips were then soldered to. When the incompatible solder connections began to fail for all manufacturers, and we had two iMacs that failed because of this, Nvidia refused to take responsibility. Eventually they had to put $500,000,000 into an escrow account for manufacturers to dip into, but it wasn’t adequate.

Apple hasn’t used Nvidia since. So this is interesting and somewhat surprising.