
Apple Books TSMC’s Entire 5nm Production Capability - kristianpaul
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/315186-apple-books-tsmcs-entire-5nm-production-capability
======
GeekyBear
Apple does not want to run it's own manufacturing lines, however they have
long been known for buying the manufacturing equipment needed for their
manufacturing partners to make exactly the parts they want in the volume they
need.

For instance, this deal from early in the Tim Cook era:

>Apple today announced that it has reached long-term supply agreements with
Hynix, Intel, Micron, Samsung Electronics and Toshiba to secure the supply of
NAND flash memory through 2010. As part of these agreements, Apple intends to
prepay a total of $1.25 billion for flash memory components during the next
three months.

[https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2005/11/21Apple-Announces-
Lon...](https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2005/11/21Apple-Announces-Long-Term-
Supply-Agreements-for-Flash-Memory/)

If you go back to the time when Apple was looking at single sourcing their SOC
production at TSMC you'll find some interesting comments in the press.

>The world's leading foundry chip maker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.
Ltd. is considering operating single-customer wafer fabs, according to
chairman and CEO Morris Chang.

Chang, speaking to analysts on a conference call to discuss the company's
second quarter financial results, said that the market is tending to produce
fewer higher volume customers and some are so large they need their own
dedicated fabs.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20120728040723/https://www.eetim...](https://web.archive.org/web/20120728040723/https://www.eetimes.com/electronics-
news/4391104/TSMC-says-single-customer-fabs-make-sense)

~~~
intricatedetail
If Apple makes other company to be their sole provider, isn't that effectively
a way of tax avoidance? For example in a smaller scale, if you hire a company
that needs to do a project for you under your direction, you have to pay that
company as if they were your own employees. In the UK this is called "IR35".
Seems like for all intents and purposes TSMC is an Apple Fab?

~~~
thu2111
Only for this process node. TSMC make a lot of chips for other customers too.

~~~
gsnedders
And per the article only the first year of production or so. There's also the
question of whether Apple actually got any actual exclusive deal for the first
year, or whether they simply outbid other companies for the production slots.

------
Traster
I'm not a big fan of this article. It doesn't 'work out well for everyone'
that AMD are a node behind Apple. In fact with Apple moving into more general
compute I would say it's less 'work out well for everyone' and more
'existential threat'.

Also, the shift from desktop CPUs to mobile CPUs as leading the shift to
smaller nodes sounds less like a massive revelation, and more like the
innevitable result of mobile CPUs out-stripping traditional CPUs in volume &
margin.

~~~
rgbrenner
Apple will never be an existential threat unless they make a drastic change to
their strategy. They're a premium manufacturer that produces desktops and
laptops that only run MacOS. Apple has chosen high profits and a locked down
platform. They have one or two options to meet customer needs.. That lack of
choice will always mean a substantial number of people will choose something
else. If you get a PC, you get literally thousands of choices.

It's a very similar situation with the iPhone. Apple makes a great phone in
many respects, but they're one company and they can't meet the wide variety
customers demand. That's reflected in their market share.

It's also too early to say that Apple Silicon is a threat to anyone. Apple
Silicon in the iPhone and iPad is a low power & low performance chip compared
to AMD/Intel. They have a huge challenge scaling that up to compete on
desktop. Their first chips are going into their lower performance products.
I'm sure it'll be decent in that role, but Apple likely NEEDS 5nm just so that
it makes a respectable showing compared to AMD/Intel.

~~~
toxik
You are of course aware that Apple is soon selling computers with their own
processors, I hope. I don’t think Apple is struggling with performance in
their chips at all.

> If you get a PC, you get literally thousands of choices.

And none of them work reliably.

~~~
pault
> And none of them work reliably.

That is absurd. Last year I built a PC with off the shelf components that I
spent about 30 minutes picking out, and all I had to do was stick the windows
installer into the USB port to get everything set up perfectly out of the box.
I have never had any reliability issues and I only reboot about once per month
for updates. I used Apple products exclusively for a decade, but a contract
role last year required me to use a Windows dev environment. I was holding my
nose going in, but using WSL has been a joy and my MacBook is now collecting
dust in the closet. In my experience most Mac purists that turn their nose up
at commodity PCs haven't used one since MacBooks became the standard hip
startup dev machine. Things have changed a lot in the last ten years.

And let's not pretend that Mac hardware has been perfectly reliable lately. In
fact, of my hand rolled desktop PC and my 2017 MacBook Pro, the PC has had far
fewer hardware reliability issues. Apple's declining hardware quality and
increasingly unjustifiable retail prices have pretty much chased me off the
platform after 10+ years of fanatical loyalty.

~~~
pram
Your statement is ridiculous. The last 10 years? When was the last time you
used a windows laptop provisioned by a company with a big enterprise style IT
department? You know, the ones bogged down with tons of endpoint security
crap, Citrix daemons, compliance daemons etc. Its still a shitshow that you
have to use Linux or MacOS to escape in many places.

~~~
adpcm
Unfortunately that is no longer reserved for Windows. JamF policies lockdown,
DigitalGuardian, CyberReason Activeprobe, and various forced Firefox/Chome
extensions are now causing slowdowns and crashes on “enterprise IT managed”
Mac too.

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tpurves
Sensationalized article. The real story looks like all of TSMCs 5nm capacity
for 2020 is booked by Apple, not all 5nm for all time. That said, TSMC is the
world leader in process these days, and cimoetion between customers has been
fierce to book it. But if there was any serious risk AMD could be shut out for
all time from 5nm you would have heard about that at their last investor call,
not from an enthusiast website.

Here’s what seems to be the original source?
[https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20200917PD210.html](https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20200917PD210.html)

~~~
megablast
This is huge. Why pretend it isn’t??

~~~
phkahler
Its not huge. Apple booked all of TSMCs 5nm production for _the next 3
months_. They are still ramping up the process too. Apple is going first.
Interesting but not huge.

~~~
ashtonkem
I keep forgetting that we’re running out of 2020.

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ksec
Remember Apple are about to ship 50M+ A14 in the next quarter of course it is
going to be fully booked. And TSMC has been producing them since May / June.

These sort of headlines make people think Apple is taking over all the
capacity and AMD / Nvidia cant gain much from it. And it will inevitably lead
to either blaming TSMC or Apple. Which I know it would be something the
Samsung PR / Marketing team likes to play with once their Foundry business is
up to scratch.

The age of Internet.

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nabla9
It appears that Nvidia produces all Ampere GPUs in Samsung's 8nm process.

Company with the highest profit margin can pay most, so Apple gets first
choice.

~~~
en4bz
The A100 is on TSCM 7nm.

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bbx
Nitpick: I’m annoyed at sentences that capitalises every word just to make
them look more important than they are. I was wondering what Apple Books (the
app) was doing, and what the verb in the sentence was. Is there a name for
this capitalisation trend?

~~~
__alexs
It's called Title Case. It's been popular in the US for decades. In the UK we
often just use sentence case for titles.

~~~
thomasahle
It would be nice for HN to have a consistent style actually. I vote for
sentence case.

~~~
HeWhoLurksLate
ThAt WoUlD bE nIcE, wOuLdN't It? i VoTe FoR cAmEl CaSe BeCaUsE iT's A bUiLt-In
GaTeKeEpEr.

 _/ S_

Frankly, it's still much much better than most other social media platforms
out there in terms of thought put into sentences.

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brian_herman
This explains why Samsung was used in the 3080 released by NVidia.

~~~
boardwaalk
That's probably better explained by TSMC 7nm capacity rather 5nm capacity. I'm
sure Nvidia would have preferred even TSMC 7nm over Samsung 8nm.

~~~
kllrnohj
Nvidia used TSMC 7nm for the first Ampere chip, the GA100 used in the HPC-
focused A100. The density vs. the Samsung 8nm manufactured GA102 in the RTX
3090 & 3080 is drastic. 65.6M / mm² vs. 45.1M / mm².

Either Samsung gave Nvidia a hell of a deal or TSMC's 7nm was booked up.

~~~
tutanchamun
Could also be a bit of both. But I wouldn't be surprised if it's mainly
Samsung giving Nvidia a great deal. For years it's all over town that Samsung
seems to have the best wafer prices in the industry.

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mattl
Why can’t/doesn’t Apple buy TSMC entirely?

~~~
ohazi
The simple answer is that TSMC is a national strategic asset of Taiwan, and as
such, is not for sale to anyone at any price.

~~~
cnst
> The simple answer is that TSMC is a national strategic asset of Taiwan, and
> as such, is not for sale to anyone at any price.

Ahem. ARM.

Seriously, though. Take a look even at TikTok. I was pleasantly surprised that
it's not for sale, either. Why does every tech company has to be HQ'ed in the
US?!

~~~
rodgerd
The Taiwanese aren't as moronically short-sighted as the British.

~~~
masklinn
Also ARM is not a significant fraction of the UK’s gdp.

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amelius
Makes me wonder, why doesn't TSMC demand 30% of Apple's profits? :)

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kristianpaul
“ TSMC will build 5nm chips for the iPhone 12, iPad Air, 5G iPad Pro, and any
future MacBook or iMac systems Apple launches with its own custom ARM silicon.
In 2019, Apple is thought to have accounted for about 20 percent of TSMC’s
monthly revenue, making it one of TSMC’s largest customers.”

~~~
Traster
>Apple is thought to have accounted for about 20 percent of TSMC’s monthly
revenue, making it one of TSMC’s largest customers.

Well, top 5 atleast.

~~~
shuckles
TSMC had about $35b in annual revenue in 2019. Is there another customer who
might be ordering more than $7b of chips from them annually? I believe Samsung
fabs their own processors, so I’d assume it’d need to be a Chinese OEM?

~~~
anoncareer0212
Yes, yes, no

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MichaelZuo
Listing all the marketing numbers without mentioning the actual feature size,
or densities, of the processes in the comparison isn’t a good practice. For
example, TSMC 5nm is far less than 4 times the density of Intel’s 10nm. Even
though a credulous reader might assume so.

It is fascinating to consider that Apple has enough pull in Taiwan to get
exclusivity on their most advanced technology.

~~~
jassany
Well I mean all it takes is a better offer, and all you need for that is more
money. Wouldn't necessarily call it influence but yeah, it's still crazy
either way.

~~~
MichaelZuo
TSMC isn’t a purely monetary profit driven company, though your right usually
they do business as if they were. Because 100% of something is much different
than 99% in B2B and at this scale. Though of course TSMC is a bit special
because they are comfortably ahead on something that the only possible
competitors are even more unlikely to do exclusivity.

