The rise of TSMC, or more generally the merchant fab model, is really the big semiconductor story of the past few decades.
Traditional wisdom used to be that if you wanted cutting edge performance, you really needed your own cutting edge in-house fab. The vertical integration advantages of tuning your ASIC design to your process were unassailable. If you couldn't afford your own foundry, tough luck, you suffered a severe penalty in performance and/or cost.
But the merchant foundries, first and foremost TSMC, have really turned that traditional wisdom around. Both in terms of matching, and then surpassing Intel on deploying the latest process nodes, but also in terms of making it possible for 3rd party ASIC developers to use that process as efficiently as an in-house design team would be able to.
Traditional wisdom used to be that if you wanted cutting edge performance, you really needed your own cutting edge in-house fab. The vertical integration advantages of tuning your ASIC design to your process were unassailable. If you couldn't afford your own foundry, tough luck, you suffered a severe penalty in performance and/or cost.
But the merchant foundries, first and foremost TSMC, have really turned that traditional wisdom around. Both in terms of matching, and then surpassing Intel on deploying the latest process nodes, but also in terms of making it possible for 3rd party ASIC developers to use that process as efficiently as an in-house design team would be able to.