The Semiconductor Equilibrium Is Shifting

[soAsian]

The Semiconductor Equilibrium Is Shifting

Specialized processors are capturing a growing share of the semiconductor market, but that doesn’t spell the end of the general-purpose chip.

www.bain.com

trend to watch:

1. First, within GP silicon, GPUs will likely continue to take share from CPUs. An example of this is Nvidia’s data center GPU computing business, whose annual revenue has grown by 16 times in the last six years, to $5 billion in fiscal 2021.

2. value-managed relationships will emerge between traditional GP silicon vendors and their CSP customers, which will closely collaborate with the silicon vendors as they increasingly customize their GP processors and add accelerators and other enabling IP

3. for select ultra-high-volume computing workloads, hyperscalers will likely build custom ASICs in order to gain computation efficiency advantages over competing CSPs

 

[Paul2]

The Semiconductor Equilibrium Is Shifting

Specialized processors are capturing a growing share of the semiconductor market, but that doesn’t spell the end of the general-purpose chip.

www.bain.com

trend to watch:

1. First, within GP silicon, GPUs will likely continue to take share from CPUs. An example of this is Nvidia’s data center GPU computing business, whose annual revenue has grown by 16 times in the last six years, to $5 billion in fiscal 2021.

2. value-managed relationships will emerge between traditional GP silicon vendors and their CSP customers, which will closely collaborate with the silicon vendors as they increasingly customize their GP processors and add accelerators and other enabling IP

3. for select ultra-high-volume computing workloads, hyperscalers will likely build custom ASICs in order to gain computation efficiency advantages over competing CSPs

All things datacentre pale in wafer volume to the consumer market. Consumer dies can handle the volume, and thus will keep their presence in the "professional" space in some "pro" version just because of that.

Remember, Xeons only exist thanks to Intel's multi-decade dominance. The last time when AMD was much of a trouble for Intel, Xeons were still just differently fused Pentiums.

 

[count]

All things datacentre pale in wafer volume to the consumer market. Consumer dies can handle the volume, and thus will keep their presence in the "professional" space in some "pro" version just because of that.

Remember, Xeons only exist thanks to Intel's multi-decade dominance. The last time when AMD was much of a trouble for Intel, Xeons were still just differently fused Pentiums.

This time it's different, as the consumer volumes are driven by mobile applications designed by fabless and systems companies and manufactured by foundries (primarily TSMC). So while in the past it was Intel using it's consumer scale in PCs to open the door into datacenters, this time the scale advantage belongs to the fabless ecosystem. Those high performance GPUs and ASICs all leverage the same processes designed for mobile.

 

[hist78]

(This time it's different, as the consumer volumes are driven by mobile applications designed by fabless and systems companies and manufactured by foundries (primarily TSMC). So while in the past it was Intel using it's consumer scale in PCs to open the door into datacenters, this time the scale advantage belongs to the fabless ecosystem. Those high performance GPUs and ASICs all leverage the same processes designed for mobile.

Also the volume difference between PC and mobile devices, such as smartphones, is drastically different. In 2020 there were about 275 million PC sold worldwide. It's a big number but there were 1.38 billion smartphones sold worldwide during the same period of time. Apple alone sold about 200 million iPhones and Samsung sold about 235 million smartphones. And we haven't talked about other mobile and IoT market yet. I'd say the scale of economy for IDM (such as Intel) is no way to compete against the fabless/foundry ecosystem.

 

[Portland]

Tsmc is the leader. The one thing said about the Taiwanese is they will need to be the parents nightmare of losing their son to war if they want to keep their freedom.

I work with Israelis and I'm around the Taiwanese and probably will work with them soon. The killer instinct isn't there.