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0 pointsyk2y ago0 comments

The technology is roughly 10 years behind, but in the scenario that the replacement capability becomes important is something like Trump fumbles the great power competition and US and China have a nice nuclear moment. And frankly making do with Haswell era CPUs is lamentable but as far as nuclear exchanges go not that bad.

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llm_nerd2y ago

Older generation fabs are critical. They power most of the machines around us, and often pump out low priced but capable chips. I certainly am not contesting that.

I responded to someone who seems to believe this is the great AI equalizer. This fab has no relevance to AI. And FWIW, Europe already has a number of much more advanced fabs! Intel is currently upgrading Ireland to "Intel 4" spec (which in TSMC land would be 7nm), and is building other fabs, for instance.

Ultimately this story is "German automakers want more control over supply chain of vanilla automation chips", and not much more.

As an aside, it's always interesting that we talk about Taiwan's revered chip prowess (South Korea is up there as well)...when the Dutch company ASML is really the technology key. TSMC executes extraordinarily well, but they wouldn't be doing it without ASML.

ironborn1232y ago

Lets just say semiconductor manufacturing is the best example of regional competencies and global trade.

Globalization has failed on many fronts and resulted in race to the bottom outcomes, but here it works well due to specialization.

Having understood that, one can also see a core TSMC strength is that Taiwanese workers are disciplined and work long hours for moderate pay, a culture that European and American labor will never accept. So all these new factories in US/EU should be treated as high cost alternatives, justifiable only for non cost-sensitive customers like defence/aerospace/high end cars.

FredPret2y ago

And/or Taiwanese workers should negotiate higher pay and shorter hours

samat2y ago

I am no expert, but my understanding is that to get nice chips, you need both ASML and TSMC. They have very different areas of expertise and posses very different know hows.

camillomiller2y ago

Well, ASML wouldn’t be doing it without the micro optics they buy from Zeiss in Germany either, it doesn’t stop there

PeterisP2y ago

The way I see it, things like that are critical for long term capability maintenance; having or not having fabs for mass production of simpler chips is what determines whether your country will have a workforce which would make it possible to build and run a cutting edge fab later; if you keep offshoring the cheap and simple stuff, eventually the state of art stuff goes there as well.

demondemidi2y ago

Yes, that is intentional. There's more to the CPU market than the next gaming platform.

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