Apple buys every 3 nm chip that TSMC can make for next-gen iPhones and Macs::TSMC is said to eat the cost of defective chips so it can keep Apple’s business.
Ah yes, inovation. And by innovation, I mean buying the entire manufacuring capability so your competitors can’t use it
I don’t mean to defend apple, but I wouldn’t criticize them for being ruthless when it comes to fighting for being the “best”
Look at me with a straight face and tell me that, if a customer comes into your store and says “I wanna buy everything you have and will make this year”, you’ll refuse because ‘it’s not fair to other people’.
Do they offer a contract to make up for the loss of access to other customers?
Because that’s a factor. If nobody else can buy your goods, they eventually consider your goods to be inaccessible at all, and you have no other customers.
Me? I’m going to be honest in a retail environment and tell the person they can’t have everything because it essentially shuts down my business entirely until I can restock, which means I have to rely on that sale covering the expenses in between as well as lost custom as a fallout of essentially being closed until new goods arrive.
It isn’t just unfair to other consumers, it’s problematic on a smaller scale.
That’s different than the scale apple works on though. The suppliers don’t have to worry about that, so they can get away with saying fuck the other customers because the other customers are on a similar scale.
This is the side effect of it. They order max capacity because apple knows its demand… they will sell all of it in record time 🥴
This has been happening every year for I don’t even know how many years. Apple buys all capacity of TSMC for some period of time, a bunch of articles get copy-pasted from last year, life goes on.
Probably why my 4nm AMD based laptop hasn’t shipped yet…still recovering from when Apple bought up the 4nm process.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
It’s been rumored for several months now that Apple will be using a new 3 nm manufacturing process from Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC) for its next-generation chips, including M3 series processors for Macs and the A17 Bionic for some next-gen iPhones.
But new reporting from The Information illuminates some of the favorable terms that Apple has secured to keep its costs down: Apple places huge chip orders worth billions of dollars, and in return, TSMC eats the cost of defective processor dies.
The Information says that roughly 70 percent of early 3 nm dies have been usable, though this number can change based on the chip being manufactured and does generally go up over time as processes are improved.
Reports have been circulating for months that Apple has bought up all of TSMC’s 3 nm manufacturing capacity in the short term, and The Information reports that TSMC’s 3 nm technology will be exclusive to Apple for “roughly a year” before there will be capacity to allow any other companies to use it.
TSMC currently makes most of the high-performance CPUs, GPUs, and SoCs for most of the world’s biggest chip companies; Apple, Nvidia, AMD, and Qualcomm all use TSMC for their most advanced products, and many have switched from competitors like Samsung and GlobalFoundries in the past few years.
Even Intel, which for most of its history has only made Intel-designed chips in its own factories, is relying on TSMC’s manufacturing for its Arc GPUs and some parts of its upcoming Meteor Lake processors, even as it tries to open its own factories to compete with TSMC for business from other chip designers.
I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Semiconductor manufacturing tech is the new power. It’s really great to see new foundries being built everywhere.
