TSMC to start building four new plants with 1.4nm technology

For NATO maybe not, but for Europe and a fair chunk of the rest of the world Ukrainian grain exports are strategic.

> If china succeeds in leapfrogging ASML

they wont. full stop. they've even admitted as much in industry. they'll be extremely happy if they're (only!) a few years behind tsmc

at this point, what will be a real earthshaker is if china manages to get past 7nm. smic has gotten a long way but even that company's 7nm process has serious limitations (much higher cost and worse yields)

and anyways, aside from a handful of use cases (ai being one tbh), 7nm chips are more than viable for any general purpose task. a "leapfrog" is quickly diminishing from a "need" to a "want", and the resulting governmental support is fading as well. of course, it'll still be a high priority for the chinese, but it's not like top of the list.

Isn’t the point that other countries would have to think twice before letting China get their hands on Taiwan? The advantage to China would be immense if they secured Taiwan.

I wouldn't say comfortably - they're brute forcing it by using UV sources suitable for much older nodes.

End result requires more energy, has lower yield and is overall more expensive.

For military purposes and whatnot that's enough, but they can't put this in consumer devices without subsidies.

"We already have a pretty serious unemployment problem among college graduates "

Among stem graduates?

Unemployment is actually a symptom of inelasticity(?) of wages. Some people become unemployed instead of getting a minimum wage job. Until Americans can subsist on a 1k monthly salary, the cost advantage in Taiwan is real.

Pretty sure Intel failed because of the opposite, they were too ambitious in attempting to do both fab and design that they out outmanuvered by more nimble companies like AMD and TSMC.

> I think America doesn't manufacture semiconductors because it is a very unclean process, full of nasty chemicals. It's expensive to make semiconductors and deal with the clean-up. There are less environmental restrictions and cheaper labor in other parts of the world.

> Nobody in the U.S. really wants that in their back yard.

Disagree. I worked in Intel's flagship semiconductor r&d division in Oregon in the 2010s.

Everybody wanted Intel in their backyard. It was a huge source of high paying and stable jobs, both for engineers with PhDs, like me, and for thousands of technicians and support staff.

There were protected wetlands on Intel's campuses, and parks and fields around them. Certainly Intel wasn't perfect from an environmental point of view, but it was not a high source of pollution.

I've worked at/with many other semiconductor fabs around the US and around the world, and they're mostly similar in this regard. Far "cleaner" than factories in many other industries.

> American corporations are what created "Silicon Valley" in the first place.

According to https://steveblank.com/2009/04/27/the-secret-history-of-sili... and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo the creation of Silicon Valley had more to do with academic expertise in radio research and Department of Defense funding circa World War II. Corporations were the "second wave".

TSMC's competitive advantage comes from Taiwan's unique willingness to look away from wanton dumping of used acid wash like it's the 80s in Silicon Valley? Or moderately more expensive labor on one of those highly automated factories with FOUPs zooming every which way?

Press (X) to doubt.

GlobalFoundries has 3, Micron has 2, Intel has 4, Texas Instruments has 7, TSMC has 3, and Samsung has 1 in the U.S., etc.

A simple Google search for 'how many semiconductor fabs are in the U.S.' shows there are 70 commercial fabs.

Quite a bit of "Silicon Valley" was founded on outright theft from competitors. Now that the American industry is entrenched and "protect intellectual property" dominates over "improvement", falling behind other nations is inevitable.

The military industrial complex, endowment funds from large colleges and academic research created Silicon Valley.

American corporations are fading into irrelevance through "financial management". Manufacturing powerhouses like Boeing and Intel are a shadow of their former selve and are really just coasting on inertia.

Pretty much everywhere you see "innovation", you will see government money. Look at the pharma industry. I doubt there's a drug out there that wasn't created by researchers using federal grants.

I'm often reminded of the story of Tetris. A handful of Soviets created the game. What was capitalism's contribution? Licensing agreements, sub-licensing agreements and so on. Put another way: building enclosures. That and rent-seeking is really all American corporations do anymore.

Are you arguing that engineers inadequate salaries are to blame for intel losing its edge?

You're missing the key point, which is that the size referenced as the semiconductor manufacturing node is no longer an accurate description of the true transistor size, it's more of a marketing term.

Even if it's possible to build transistors that are 1.4nm in size (or smaller), that is not what "1.4nm" means in the context of this announcement. I get that this can be confusing, it's just a case of smoke and mirrors because Moore's Law is already dead and semiconductor manufacturers don't want to spook investors. The performance gains are still real, but the reasons for getting them are no longer as simple as shrinking transistor size.

As for the true physical limits of transistor sizes, there are problems like quantum tunnelling that we aren't likely to overcome, so even if you can build a gate with 7 atoms, that doesn't mean it'll work effectively. Also note that "gate" does not necessarily mean "transistor".

Yes. But also what you read is correct too. There are quantum effects that need be accounted for at these levels (have been for quite some time). Both things can be true.

The whole system that supports TSMC will break down in the event of a war.

You can see this with SMIC and their inability to get modern lithography systems from the only leading edge vendor ASML. Sure, you can create your own vendors to replace such companies, but they are unlikely to ever catch up to the leading edge or even be only a generation or two behind the leading edge despite massive investments.

With non-leading edge equipment & processes you have to make compromises like making much larger chips so you can get the same compute in a low power profile. This drives up the initial cost of every device you make and you run into throughput issues like what Huawei has experienced where they cannot produce enough ships to ship their flagship ship phones at a reasonable price and simultaneously keep them in stock.

Instead you get boutique products that sell out practically immediately because there were so few units that were able to be manufactured.

"Bloodless takeover" is assuming a lot. Pro unification is a very fringe position: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Unification_Promotio...

It seems very unlikely to me that between KMT loyalist troops and angry mobs that China would simply be allowed to take Taiwan without violence, and that nobody would decide to use TSMC as a hostage.

See the Swiss strategy, where every bridge and tunnel has its explosives pre-placed when it was built.

All they need to do, is open a fire exit, and run a leafblower.

Fabs run at BSL3. Get that dirty, and you have a whole lot of expensive scrap metal.

The implication I got from the GP comment is that the U.S. would be reluctant to have CCP manufacturing the processors due to the (proven) risk that they’ll modify and backdoor stuff.

If TSMC over invests in US factories then they could be taken over under imminent domain if Taiwan was no longer independent. So they have to keep a large portion of manufacturing domestic to Taiwan for lessened geopolitical risk.

There are rumors their fabs are rigged to self destruct rather than fall to china

https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2024/05/21/asml_kill_switch/

In that case almost any country would let their borders wide open for refugee visas to get the semiconductor talent over. even the us under trump.

Do you mean ‘bloodless’ like the way the CCP controls dissidents now?

Isn't this water nearly 100% recyclable? It's not that it would get used up, like water used for watering of almond trees in California.

There was a story about this a year ago: https://fortune.com/2024/04/08/tsmc-water-usage-phoenix-chip...

Yeah, who wouldn't invest locally first when there is an economic advantage to doing so? Their suppliers, talent base, and management are all there already.

I don’t think you can separate geopolitics from business in this case.

Of course. And were that the actual case, it would be worth having in the summary.

Can this be right?

For instance, GK104 on 28nm was 3.5 billion transistors. AD104 today is 35 billion. Is Nvidia really paying 10x as much for an AD104 die as a GK104 die?

My laptop definitely dies significantly faster when I'm making it work instead of just mindlessly scrolling on it... since the display is on in both cases I don't see what that could be but chip powre consumption making a singificant difference.

My phone dies much faster when I am using it, but admittedly screen usage means I can't prove that's chip power consumption.

VR headsets get noticeably hot in use, and I'm all but certain that that is largely chip power usage.

Macbook airs are the same speed as macbook pros until they thermally throttle, because the chips use too much power.

This claim just doesn't pass the smell test.

It might be niche, but I just got a new computer for this very reason.

Why wouldn’t you want lower power usage?

I find it amusing how we’ve come from treating AI as a novelty to developing a sense of how it writes in the space of a few months. That parent comment doesn’t even have the famed em dashes, for instance. Still, we are able to recognize it as AI-generated just by looking at its syntax.

Looks like it's also his first post in a year. Feels full AI generated.

It will increase, but amortization tends to make that fall off over time. Also the newer processes tend to result in smaller die sizes.

Production of anything on a new line is expensive, doesn't matter if it is chips or cheeze-its

But you also get more transistors per wafer