Re:Apple Books TSMC’s Entire 5nm Production Capability
by teruakohatu on Saturday September 19, 2020 @07:13PM
(#24530910)
The rumors were that 5mn was going to take a lot of work and so AMD delayed until their following CPU architecture iteration Zen4. Now it seems more likely that they were outbid by Apple which is why Zen3 is stuck on the older process. The risk for AMD is if they can get 5mn or equivalent from another fab for Zen4
Re:Apple Books TSMC’s Entire 5nm Production Capability
by SllX on Saturday September 19, 2020 @07:24PM
(#24530939)
And that sucks for them at this point in time, but it’s just business, and business has risks. Apple does a lot to mitigate risks to their business, and if AMD really was outbid, then that just means AMD probably also tried to mitigate as much risk to their business as they could, but they clearly didn’t mitigate it enough.
At this point in time, this is the situation, but no one here should expect this to remain the situation in perpetuity. From what I heard, prior to this, Apple and AMD were jointly buying up all of or almost all of TSMC’s 7nm fab capacity. AMD has risen from the the dirt, and then later again from the ashes and is presently making the best x86_64 chips you can buy today. I’m actually disappointed Apple didn’t try to shop around for the 2019 Mac Pro CPU because they could have gotten much better all-around parts buying the equivalents from AMD for less and with lower power consumption. Ah well, can’t win them all.
Re:Apple Books TSMC’s Entire 5nm Production Capability
by happycube on Sunday September 20, 2020 @02:53AM
(#24532349)
I think Apple's playing a longer game - if they weren't planning to move to their own ARM cores, they could have designed custom SOCs with AMD ala the game consoles.
Re:Apple Books TSMC’s Entire 5nm Production Capability
by SllX on Sunday September 20, 2020 @02:46PM
(#24536272)
That’s fair enough, I figured by the time they were designing the Mac Pro they were already planning to move to ARM. Would have been nice to see EPYC in the 2019 model, but it is understandable why that didn’t happen.
Re:Apple Books TSMC’s Entire 5nm Production Capability
by MrBuddyCasino on Sunday September 20, 2020 @06:45AM
(#24533194)
> with lower power consumption
I‘m not sure that’s true. Afaik Intel parts still have a rather large advantage concerning idle power consumption.
Re:Apple Books TSMC’s Entire 5nm Production Capability
by SllX on Sunday September 20, 2020 @02:50PM
(#24536311)
You raise a good point and not one I considered.
Re:Apple Books TSMC’s Entire 5nm Production Capability
by gumby on Saturday September 19, 2020 @10:29PM
(#24531561)
AMD spun out their foundries taking on this risk. And frankly it’s not much of a risk: they are selling as much as they can produce; going to a (currently) exclusive node wouldn’t help them at all.
If it makes sense for other companies to adopt these kinds of financial arrangements, they will eventually, and while it works out best for Apple here, at this particular point in time, this is just one point in time. It does benefit others in the long run as TSMC is able to refine their process fabbing chips for Apple and will be able to open new production lines in the future with the profits from manufacturing for Apple and offer those to their other customers.
AMD is still doing really well in the market, and their customers are different and their more direct competition is Intel and NVIDIA. Could they make better products on a 5nm process size? We assume they can and will, maybe that will happen a little later than they would like, or maybe they’re working behind the scenes and making their own deals with other manufacturers that we don’t know about yet. This isn’t the bad old days where Intel was completely dominant, competition actually is good here. Apple is ahead right now, but that’s a temporary situation much like anything else.