TSMC owning the silicon manufacturing game

[ShintaiDK]

I would think that Qualcomm are very interested, for new server SoCs and consumer SoCs, and Mediatek for consumer SoCs. The Chinese will emerge as large customers too.

Mediatek cant afford it. Qualcomm is on a downhill slope like Apple. And good luck with any server dreams.

 

[krumme]

My view is that in future the server/network market will demand a whole sea of SoCs, each fit-for-purpose in its own application domain; IntelD: can only cover so much; an example of a specialist application is Paypal's use of ARM based servers to monitor transactions in real-time.

" - Barcelona Supercomputing Center announcing that its "inexpensive" ARM-based High Performance Computers are now fully-operational and made available to scientific community across Europe
- PayPal releasing information demonstrating the benefits of using ARM based servers with a 50% reduction in capex, an 85% reduction in running costs and a 10-fold increase in server density compared to traditional data center equipment"

I agree. We will see a combination of a consolidation of many businesses and the use of cloud services. In this market general purpose gives lesser strenght than the more specific tailored soc as specialization favors the latter use.

Fixed function hardware will play a far bigger role here. As qcom have demonstrated using fixed function hardware is not only often 2-3 times faster but especially often 10 times more efficient. Nothing beats that.

Fixed function meets consolidation and the global trend towards bigger monopolies and the business of striving for monopoly edge in the market.

 

[Sheep221]

Not surprising, most of electronics corporations are fabless so it's just about handling the manufacturing.

However, TSMC does make all kinds of chips, so I guess making 90K wafers of single purpose ICs or SOCs is not same as making 90K wafers of x86 CPUs, so that's the only reason they make more wafers than Intel.

 

[ShintaiDK]

Intel got more leading edge capacity than TSMC as well. More than TSMC, Samsung and Glofo combined for that matter. Same reason they sit on ~2/3rds of all MPU revenue.