^ ^ ^ ^ ^
Other than that, the wccf article states "Nikkei's sources also believe that the overall chip volume TSMC has dedicated to Intel is higher than that dedicated to Apple, resulting in the smartphone maker delaying adopting the 3nm process for its next year's smartphone upgrade." - which sounds really counter-intuitive for me.
Yeah this seems ridiculous if all TSMC got was a slightly higher price per wafer.
Not only would it benefit Intel by allowing them to produce better chips than they can by themselves but they would also deny bleeding-edge wafers to main competitors. a win-win for Intel.
Actually a win-win-win when you consider that this would help Intel
a ton with Intel's own open foundry efforts:
They'd get to see how TSMC works with customers first hand. And not just a customer,
the biggest leading-edge customer on their best jewel node! They could copy all they like: All the design rules, methodology, how they communicate/troubleshoot with them, etc .... Not to mention extra insight into how TSMCs best nodes work.
And when this enables them to create the best products on the market, selling them at atrocious prices, they'd also end up in the green with this endeavour Which in turn would fuel their own future foundry efforts dumping TSMC ASAP.
When considering the opposite (not allowing Intel to be the main customer on their best node ASAP):
- TSMC would still sell every single 3nm wafer anyway (and with pretty good prices guaranteed)
- Every single Intel x86 chip loss would have an ultra high chance of ending up produced at TSMC be it:
- Other x86 chips produced for AMD
- M1 chips for Apple
- Graviton chips for Amazon
- Ampere Altra or other for ARM server vendors (e.g. oracle) - all use TSMC
- Google's youtube silicon (replacing millions of Skylake Xeons)
- Hell even Xilinx FPGAs
- not to mention Future Nvidia/Qualcomm laptop chips (some might also be Samsung but still a loss to Intel)
ALL of the above would end up produced at TSMC anyway, as long as they keep their foundry advantage.
So there's got to be more TSMC gets out of it if it's true, or their strategist are full-on-braindead