Re:Apple Has Reportedly Rejected TSMC's Chip Price Hike of 6%
by dylan604 on Wednesday September 28, 2022 @02:59PM
(#33011811)
That's the point of the comment I made. TSMC knows that Apple can't just jump ship to another vendor. There isn't another vendor that can do what Apple needs. Currently. As long as that is true, Apple is stuck at TSMC.
Apple could say that they will accept the 6% increase, but then lower their investment in new fabs 6%. I honestly don't know which number is bigger.
It wouldn't be easy for Apple to just go to another fab. They'd have to find another vendor with the capacity and then they'd have to tweak things to match the new fab's design rules. Not trivial for something like M* chips. I suspect Intel would be happy to have Apple in their nascent foundry biz, but not sure they would have the capacity right away and also suspect the design would require a good amount of tweaking to get it in production in an Intel fab.