Intel focus on low volume high end chips is another reason they are behind.
In what way?
TSMC doesen't design or sell the chips. If they have limited capacity they will of course charge more for manufacturing mobile chips if they can sell the capacity to Nvidia/AMD/Apple instead.
ARM chips (and that's pretty much by design based on ARM's business model) are close to being a commodity.
Apple is of course an exception but they are not directly part of the CPU market. And ARM and Qualcomm are barely bothering trying to compete with them because there doesen't seem to be a lot of point. They themselves are pivoting to datacenter because there is just more money to be made there.
> Intel focus on low volume high end chips is another reason they are behind.
I guess that's complicated. It seems like an optimal strategy if you are a chip designer (e.g. Nvidia or AMD vs Qualcomm). Not so much if you are a fabricator. Of course Intel being both makes things a lot harder for them.
That’s the entire point. Intel is behind because their vertical market strategy of using their own fabs only for their own chips doesn’t give them enough volume compared to TSMC who has volume because they are a foundry.
> ARM chips (and that's pretty much by design based on ARM's business model) are close to being a commodity.
ARM doesn’t manufacture chips. The entire argument is that it’s a strategic interest for Intel to manufacture chips in the US. ARM is irrelevant to this conversation.
> Apple is of course an exception but they are not directly part of the CPU market. And ARM and Qualcomm are barely bothering trying to compete with them because there doesen't seem to be a lot of point. They themselves are pivoting to datacenter because there is just more money to be made there.
Apple, Nvidia and to a lesser extent all of the companies that are designing chips and using TSMC as a foundry are more relevant than x86 chips.
Between phones, tablets, watches, and Macs, Apple, etc alone sells more devices with Arm chips than PCs and servers sold by Intel.
They have enough scale to fund leading edge processing.
Qualcomm is a bigger seller of processors than anyone since every mobile cellular chip that I’m aware of except for the very few designed by Apple for the low end 16e is sold by Qualcomm.
> Qualcomm is a bigger seller of processors
Yes, even for their highest end mobile chip (Snapdragon 8 Elite) the estimated OEM price seems to be under <$200.
A midrange AMD EPYC 9004 chip is $4000-6000. Presumably the gross margin is also higher. So hardly a fair comparison. Of course Intel seems to be propping up it's server marketshare by dropping its margins, so I wouldn't be surprised if they are lower than Qualcomm's.
> But you notice in the case of Google
They design their own mobile SoCs though which seems like a fairly serious effort for a hobby project (although being an off the shelf design like almost all ARM chips besides Apple's maybe not)
Not sure on volume, but Samsung and Mediatek are major players too. I dont think Google has used anything from Qualcomm since Pixel 5 (2020).
IIRC intel makes 2-3x in client sales what it does in datacenter.
IMO that's much less of a case for laptop and desktop (let alone server). Even if people don't understand the technical details e.g. Apple's superior performance per watt (or its implications at least) is something a lot more people notice.