The used market for CPU's is already amazing every time AWS dumps a ton due to a hardware refresh cycle - in a few years it is gonna be amazing!
Getting in on THAT would likely be a very good deal!
Are you sure? TSMC definitely does packaging. And it seems like it would be crazy to ship a delicate unpackaged die to a different factory when you could just keep it in a clean room and do everything in one place. I think it would be mad for Intel not to do packaging there.
> needs to be mounted on a complete PCB
Intel sells lots of CPUs that aren't soldered to PCBs.
True, the very advanced packaging techniques, such as TSMC CoWoS or Intel EMIB, are done at the fabs by those companies. These packages are for very high performance multi-chip interconnects. In both cases, the "package" itself actually is partially constructed from silicon, so we are kind of blurring the lines between what is "chip" and what is "package". The vast majority of chips do not use packages anywhere near this advanced and are not done at fabs.
Also, it's not crazy to ship finished wafers (i.e. "unpackaged die"); it's standard practice. Once the final process steps are complete in the fab, the chip is not as sensitive to fine particles any more. The wafers get loaded into cassettes then vacuum-sealed in anti-static bags. They ship out to the backend assembly sites just fine. In fact, globally, there are probably ~100,000 wafers shipped like this every day.
> Intel sells lots of CPUs that aren't soldered to PCBs.
True. But if you are buying an LGA socketed Intel CPU, the silicon die had to first be mounted on a substrate and the heatspreader attached. That wasn't done at fab, it was done at backend assembly. Ever notice that Intel CPU's often say something about "assembled in Malaysia" on top? That's because it was assembled in Malaysia. Intel does not have any semiconductor fabs in Malaysia, meaning, they fabbed it in one place and assembled it in another.
If you are a company like Dell or HP and you are buying the laptop BGA CPUs, Intel still had to assemble those into the BGA package before shipping to Dell/HP. And the BGA package assembly also is not done at fab.
Consumers demand low cost. Many times they just buy the cheaper widget, because most people are not even capable of distinguishing the differences in performance or quality between two different widgets. But the difference in price is obvious to everyone and so most people just use that. The pressure of reducing every single penny out of the cost or semiconductors is enormous.
Top 10 OSAT (outsourced assembly and test) companies: https://evertiq.com/news/51003
i bet it would be fun to chat and talk shop with engineers at the bath and body works lab during a lunch.
It is literally across street from one of the Ohio East-2 availability zones. If they were making rack-mounted server boards, they could just walk them across the street and plug them into the cloud.