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why are so many motherboard companies based out of taiwan?

W

wfbberzerker

Lifer
it seems like almost every motherboard maker is based in taiwan (abit, ecs, asus, msi, i think epox, etc.), but you look at other major hardware makers, i.e. intel, amd, nvidia, ati, they're all based in north america. anyone know why this is?
 
I'm no economist, so take this with a grain of salt; but my guess is that it comes down to economic differences between the products.

Intel, AMD, ATI, NVDIA all design and produce high end integrated semiconductors. Designing and fabbing chips requires a fairly small number of skilled workers and some massively expensive hardware(Chip fabs are in the billions of dollars these days). Places like north america (Intel) and Germany (AMD) are good for Fabs; because those cost a fortune no matter where you build them, so it makes sense to put them near concentrations of highly skilled workers, universities, etc. Chip packaging and similar ancillary tasks are usually outsourced to other countries(malysia packages a huge number of chips).

Manufacturing motherboards, 3d cards, cases, barebones, etc. requires a small number of skilled EEs, and Tiawan definitely has their share; but also requires lots and lots of labor and manufacturing capacity. This makes nearby China a big asset.

Thus, we have the current situation, where high end semiconductors are designed in the US, Europe, and Japan, by residents of those countries and by talented expats from India, Taiwan, China, etc. Often fabbed on location for things like microprocessors, or fabbed in Taiwan or China for some things and packaged in malaysia.

The Taiwanese OEMs then design the boards that will carry the chips(or work from reference designs, depending on what segment of the market we are dealing with) and do the fabrication in China.
 
A whole lot of capacitors are made in Taiwan. Other electronic components too I'd imagine. Why are they made there? I don't know. Why does the US make so much corn? It's just something we happen to be good at.


FYI, one motherboard manufacturer that's US-based: Supermicro. They make some nice server-level boards, as well as ones that could work in home PC's. But they don't have anything in the way of overclocking, at least the one I had didn't. That was a P6SLA, a Pentium II motherboard with the 440LX chipset. Very nice BIOS though, complete with a graphical interface with mouse support. It did it without storing anything on the hard drive either, like some older Compaq (and others perhaps) PCs did.
 

It could be that there are trade restrictions to prevent elite fabs to be located in places such as Taiwan (cheap labor). Taiwan is a developed place for manufacturing with skilled workers, therefore it would be difficult to setup fabs in countries that is perceivably to have cheaper labors.

If we don't have trade restrictions Mexico would be the place that manufacture all cars for North America.

 
Originally posted by: SZLiao214
Cheaper to produce there maybe?
Click to expand...
Common misconception. Most of them are based in Taiwan, but do their manufacturing in China.

I imagine Taiwain's got some laws that are good for their books.
 
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