One of the great benefits of being fabless has been the ability to not worry about process, and just use the best node for your product. If you are fabbing bleeding edge chips, since N7 TSMC has been the unquestioned leader of customer service and process. At 16FFL we saw close partners of TSMC like Apple dual source with their old partner Samsung when 14LPP was working and 16FFL didn't have the volumes that Apple demanded. After all of the FUD on 14LPP iPhones being worse than the 16FFL iPhones apple stopped dual sourcing and probably never will again (at the very least for the same products). For the loyalty of AMD, APPLE, and to a lesser extent MediaTek TSMC rewards them with dibs on wafer capacity and prefered pricing. In the specific case of Apple they help shape the PDKs and get the new version of TSMC nodes 3-4 Qs before everyone else. With benefits like these moving part or all of your future capacity to a non TSMC fab WON'T happen even if Samsung or IFS have a node with say 5-10% better PPAC.
This is further supported by intel's claim that "We have engagements with 7 out of 10 of the largest fabless customers.". It is a safe guess that Apple and AMD are two out of those three. A year ago I would have assumed the third was MediTek because they only do business with Samsung on their lower end products where the better pricing is critical for competing with qualcomm and ending up in Samsung's phones. Other than this they seemed to be pretty loyal to TSMC, however the i16 deal obviously debunked that. Time will tell if they will ever leave TSMC for their more high end products. But now I couldn't even give a guess as to who the third might be.
With this information in mind how far would IFS or Samsung need to pull ahead to snag the likes of AMD or Apple for at least some of their business? Two full nodes; what about three? Would Samsung be able to snag AMD without too much difficulty given the two don't compete? Would IFS have an easier time snagging Apple than Samsung?
To be clear I don't expect these firms to ever leave the TSMC inner circle anytime soon, but it is interesting to think about what it would take for them to leave. Folks like Qualcomm and Nvidia will always be involved with all players, and cloud providers will go to whomever can give them the best chip. I suspect Broadcom and CISCO are also in a similar place. Snagging AMD or Apple would require these upstart foundries to be best in class across a wide variety of metrics.
This is further supported by intel's claim that "We have engagements with 7 out of 10 of the largest fabless customers.". It is a safe guess that Apple and AMD are two out of those three. A year ago I would have assumed the third was MediTek because they only do business with Samsung on their lower end products where the better pricing is critical for competing with qualcomm and ending up in Samsung's phones. Other than this they seemed to be pretty loyal to TSMC, however the i16 deal obviously debunked that. Time will tell if they will ever leave TSMC for their more high end products. But now I couldn't even give a guess as to who the third might be.
With this information in mind how far would IFS or Samsung need to pull ahead to snag the likes of AMD or Apple for at least some of their business? Two full nodes; what about three? Would Samsung be able to snag AMD without too much difficulty given the two don't compete? Would IFS have an easier time snagging Apple than Samsung?
To be clear I don't expect these firms to ever leave the TSMC inner circle anytime soon, but it is interesting to think about what it would take for them to leave. Folks like Qualcomm and Nvidia will always be involved with all players, and cloud providers will go to whomever can give them the best chip. I suspect Broadcom and CISCO are also in a similar place. Snagging AMD or Apple would require these upstart foundries to be best in class across a wide variety of metrics.
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