bleab

robaba said:

Hope this doesn’t go through.  We need less consolidation within chip manufacturing, not more.

1. TSMC and Samsung have 74% of the chipmaking market. GlobalFoundries has 7%.
2. Chip manufacturing requires capital investments and expertise that few small companies are capable of. Only 3 foundries on the planet - TSMC, Samsung, Intel - are capable of even 14nm at high volumes. The fourth will be China's SMIC in early 2022. 
3. America has 3 real competitors in chipmaking: Taiwan, South Korea, China. The other 3 directly subsidize their chipmakers to a massive degree. Meanwhile America only voted to give its chipmakers their first subsidy in decades a few months ago ... and it was comparatively a very small one. So if you want "less consolidation in chipmaking" then you are asking for the federal government to get - for example - Texas Instruments from 130nm to 14nm and get GlobalFoundries' 14nm capacity from tiny to competitive, it would take more money than Intel's $78 billion in revenue last year.
4. The last one - Intels $78 billion in revenue  - is why no antitrust types are going to target them. Where Intel's $78 billion 2020 was a record year for them, Apple at times makes more than that in a single quarter.

Bottom line: you can either have a bunch of tiny chip manufacturers that can't compete with TSMC or maybe 4-6 that can. But you can't have both.

tht said:

Nikkei Asia has a good track record for reporting on movements within Apple's supply chain. It very rarely makes predictions on Apple's future plans, but when it does, it generally gets them right.

Weird rumors here.

The iPhone 14 using a 4nm chip imply the 3nm chips are really for 1H 2023 devices. Ie, 3nm mass market production is expected to start in the Fall of 2022 while iPhone 14 needs it to start in the Spring 2022. So, Apple has to use a 4nm process. Nothing too weird here.

But, since when did Intel jump the line to get 3nm chips from TSMC? That essentially means they wrote a $5b check to TSMC about 2 to 3 months ago to get to the front of the 3nm line. This is where you should be skeptical. I could see Intel using TSMC 5nm processes, but 3nm, ahead of everyone else? Skeptical.

Intel won't use TSMC's 5nm process in 2023 because their own 7nm process will be operational by then and their 7nm process is equivalent to TSMC's 5nm process (similar to how TSMC's 7nm process is similar to Samsung's 5nm).

It isn't just process size but also transistor density. So in rising order from least dense to most:
Samsung: least dense. Their 5nm is equivalent to TSMC's 7nm. Which - in addition to yield problems - is why no one uses it unless TSMC doesn't have capacity.
TSMC: middle density. Their 7nm is equivalent to Samsung's 5nm but Intel's 10nm. They are #1 because of a combination of better density/higher yields than Samsung and smaller process than Intel.
Intel: most dense. Much more dense than Samsung - their 10nm and Samsung's 5nm are basically equivalent - but also more dense than TSMC. Meaning that when Intel actually reaches 5nm (and smaller) with their transistor density, that will be formidable.

Also, it has less to do with "Intel paying people off" (why do Apple fans always insist that everyone is corrupt but Apple?) and more to do with the FACT that TSMC won't be able to manufacture very many 3nm chips in 2023. Right now their current capacity is dedicated to 6nm, 5nm and 4nm. Qualcomm, MediaTek, Nvidia, AMD etc. will be using those for years. TSMC will have to build new facilities in Taiwan and New Mexico to accommodate 3nm and 2nm at scale. So, TSMC will only have the ability to fab tens of millions of 3nm SOCs in 2023. That will accommodate the iPad Pro and iPad Air devices that sell a year (the $329 entry level iPad doesn't use the latest SOC and neither does the iPad Mini) and some Xeon/Core i9/Core i7 that Intel will need to hold the line against the progress that AMD is making against them with servers with their Epyc line as well as in workstations and gaming laptops. That "may" be 100 million SOCs between Apple and Intel and could be as low as 50 million. However, about 225-275 million iPhones sell in a typical year and that isn't nearly enough.

A better question may be why Apple isn't using the 3nm SOCs for Macs. I was certain that I read that 4nm M1X chips with at least 12 CPU cores were coming this year for the 14' and 16' MacBook Pro as well as some Mac Mini and iMac models. If that is the case, 3 years would be quite awhile to be on 4nm. But if Intel "jumped in the line" ahead of anyone that would be AMD. 

lkrupp said:

Microsoft/Android vs macOS/iOS. Who’d a thunk it. The new duopoly. Good luck Satya and Sundar. /s

Huh? ChromeOS has a bigger market share than macOS. So it is Windows vs ChromeOS/Android vs macOS/iOS. Apple makes the profits because Google and Microsoft sell negligible hardware. (Google is dumping Qualcomm for a partnership with Samsung - who will manufacture the SOCs that Google will design with Samsung's help - because they hope to sell more phones and Chromebooks.) But in PCs it is 80% market share (Windows) versus 12% (ChromeOS) and 8% (macOS). In mobile it is 84% share (Android, including ChromeOS tablets that run Android apps) versus 15% (iOS) versus 1% (Windows 10 tablets).  

Now while not having a mobile platform hurts, Windows is the dominant primary computing platform by a mile and this gives Microsoft much more influence than most Apple fans like to admit. (Including the objective fact that Intel isn't going anywhere so long as AMD is stuck being #3 behind Apple and Qualcomm for TSMC's business.) While mobile is extremely profitable - especially for Apple - it is nonetheless a secondary computing platform. Where ChromeOS can be a primary computing platform for two widely divergent demographics - highly skilled people i.e. tech workers who can utilize Linux/SaaS/cloud apps on one hand and people who only need a browser and an occasional mobile app on the other - for most people Chromebooks are for Windows users what iPads are to macOS users. 

omasou said:

The end of the headline should read... FOR Intel.

The CEO is probably so happy that he can blame further delays on the pandemic instead of Intel's inability to innovate and compete.

I've always thought this whole Apple Car thing wasn't so much about "the car" but instead about the hardware, i.e. silicon and the software. Apple doesn't want to sell cars they want car makers to use their hardware and software. What's the point of this side trip? The point is if Intel doesn't figure it out Apple will eat what's left of their processor business for mobile and embedded devices.

The Intel bashing is wishful thinking delusion. Thanks to the combination of Apple's small market share, terrible ARM chips by Qualcomm and MediaTek and the lack of capacity for AMD at TSMC who prioritizes mobile chips, Intel has 80% market share. Despite all of the "Intel is doomed" nonsense, this isn't going to change. Even if Apple Silicon double's the traditional macOS market share, it will still be barely over 10% and less than the ChromeOS market share for the past year. And while it seems that the Apple blogs have become AMD's biggest cheerleaders since Apple announced that they were leaving Intel, the truth is that the chip shortage has affected AMD even more. It is the reason for the latest XBox and PlayStation console shortages. Most OEMs and DIYers who want to use the latest AMD chips can't get their hands on enough to make more than a few models so they are resorting making new devices with the 10th and 11th gen Intel chips that they have on hand instead. Thanks to AMD making the decision to spin off their foundry, the main thing that keeps them from being truly able to rival Intel is TSMC's needing to make a combined 300 million iPhones and iPads a year, plus fill orders for the hundreds of millions of Qualcomm and MediaTek chips that go in Android and ChromeOS devices. Meanwhile Intel can dedicate their entire foundry output to their own chips.

Not only that but expect Intel to make inroads in the discrete GPU game in the next 2 years. AMD is going to continue to be stuck behind iPhone, iPad and Mac chips at TSMC. Nvidia is going to be held back by the combination of the bottleneck at TSMC and low yields at Samsung Foundries. So when the Intel discrete GPUs launch 3Q2021 they will sell by virtue of being pretty much the only option that people will be able to practically buy. So this whole idea that losing the 20 million CPUs that they sell Apple a year was going to set off this chain reaction that was going to bring Intel to their knees was always magical thinking, just as were the claims that iPads were going to kill off Microsoft and the endless "now THIS is what will finally kill off Android!" claims that have only recently stopped. While they certainly want it, Intel didn't need Apple's business before 2005 and they don't need it now. 

tht said:

red oak said:

Evidently, completely fucking up mobile including the failed Nokia merger and Windows mobile,  the failed MIcrosoft retail stores,  weak Microsoft Surface device sales, failed wearables efforts, failed content services including MS App Store and music, …

Evidently, it all does not matter  how badly you fuck up

MS has a monopoly on office automation software and PC operating software with services and software that serve those monopolies, with a vast and intricate relationship network with Enterprises and Corps. They then were able to ply those relationships for their network services business. As long as they don't mess up those monopoly positions ... Fund managers know this and hence their market capitalization.

Same with Alphabet and their moonshots running at something like $5b losses per year. As long as search and ads are ok, there is no amount of failures that could affect the company.

MS has a monopoly on Office and to a lesser extent Windows. They don't have anywhere near a monopoly on anything else, which is why they spent the Ballmer era attempting to either buy off or sue the rest of the software world out of existence. Those who lost out to Microsoft merely want to believe that Microsoft merely "leveraged a vast and intricate relationship network." The truth is that Microsoft created better products: well designed, easy to manage, comprehensive and tightly integrated stuff that the likes of Novell, Apple and IBM didn't compete with. People will claim until the end of time that OS/2 and Mac OS 8/9 were better than Windows. Fine, but what they didn't have were better ways to talk to each other - and to printers - over a LAN or be managed in a central, remote and uniform way. Windows 95 and 98 offered that and more which is why Microsoft won out. 

Also, Microsoft's market cap is due to a combination that no one else has: real market share/influence in PCs, enterprise, mobile and cloud. Microsoft has 1. Windows 10 and Office, 2. Windows Server/SQL Server/Sharepoint/Exchange, 3. Office 365 and 4. Azure. By comparison Apple has:

1. Macs (7% market share and hardware revenue only)
2. nothing (even requires third party software for macOS and iOS identity and device management as my "vast relationship network excuse is a canard" mentions above)
3. iOS, App Store, apps
4. nothing (hosting your own apps and services doesn't count ... and they even pay AWS and Google to help with that). 

Google has:

1. a bit but definitely way behind Microsoft (1/8th of the OS market share, Google Docs is "free with data") and Apple (forget Macs, Pixelbooks get crushed by Surface)
2. nothing (that they actually sell ... primarily FOSS stuff that most of its users don't even know that Google created it)
3. Android, Google Play, apps
4. The combination of Google Cloud Platform, Google Fiber and Google Fi is a distant #3 to AWS and Azure ... but it is enough to make them a factor here. 

Amazon has:

1. nothing
2. even less than Google
3. various Prime apps (a case can actually be made that they are #2 to Apple here if you consider how much Prime shopping is done on mobile)
4. AWS which is #1 and massive, the backend to nearly every major cloud app/service not owned by above

Past the big 4 ... take Oracle.
1. nothing
2. Oracle (plus Java - which nearly everyone uses for free - plus whatever else they got from the Sun Microsystems purchase boondoggle that they haven't killed yet)
3. nothing
4. (next to) nothing

IBM
1. despite inventing this space and dominating it for decades: nothing
2. a lot ... but nearly all legacy stuff
3. the CEO behind their huge "AI-driven enterprise apps for iPad" push was replaced so ... nothing
4. see Oracle

Facebook. Huge operation and not a legacy company. Now we're talking, right? Except ...
1. nothing
2. even less than Google
3. their entire operation really
4. nothing (they COULD be a player here but choose not to be)

As I mentioned in a previous post Microsoft ditched the one thing that wasn't working for them - mobile hardware/OS - to double down on the 4 that did. Worked like a charm. And then there is gaming. There are 6 real players here: Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Apple. Microsoft is the only one who gets real revenue in console (a lot), mobile (a little), PC (a lot) and cloud (a lot).

Apple: mobile (#1).
Google: mobile (a lot), cloud (a little)
Amazon: mobile (a little ... Kindle App Store), cloud (a lot by providing a ton of IaaS and PaaS to video game studios plus Luna)
Nintendo: console (a lot), mobile (a little)
Sony: console (a lot), cloud (a little)

Realize that xCloud - if handled correctly - could potentially have 100 million subscribers. Don't laugh: they had 18 million in January and may have 20 million by now. Granted, most of that 20 million isn't there primarily because of xCloud ... but also remember that xCloud is technically still in beta (720p on browser and mobile, XBox is the only way to play it on a TV). Either way xCloud likely has more paid subscribers than Apple TV+ has.