Quote:
Originally Posted by Flamingi
There are basically three big players in the semiconductor world: TSMC, Intel and Samsung. TSMC is producing ALL of AMDs processors and GPUs (which includes PS5 and Xbox Series X) as well as Nvidia GPU and a big part of Apple Silicon. Just to give you an idea about which scale of production we are talking about. Intel is only producing for them selves, while Samsung produces their own chips, the rest of Apple silicon as well as most of the CPUs you will find in phones (Is there anything Samsung does not do? They even built the Burj Khalifa!). All the things I just numbered are in very big demand due to Covid obviously.
With foundries of that scale everything needs time, a lot of time. We're talking about 5-10 years until you notice the effects of decisions made today. Unfortunately the biggest of those foundries TSMC is running on 110% since they introduced their 7nm manufacturing node. With Intel only producing for themselves there is basically only Samsung that can supply chips in a sufficient manner. Ramping up the capacities is not possible in reasonable time frames (they are building new facilities, but you can probably imagine it takes years until they are ready to go live).
Apart from the automotive industry, you can directly see the effects of that shortage in the supply for graphics cards. They are currently going for double the MSRP (although miners buying up all the cards worsen the situation additionally).
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This is true, but TSMC is actually not a supplier of note for what there is a shortage of currently in automotive. The chips that are in short supply are not-too-exciting parts from Renesas, Infineon, NXP, STM, etc. that are all fabricated on much older nodes like 28nm and up. Well, TSMC does fab quite a bit of older process stuff too, but they are not close to the only game in town for these types of chips. Infineon, Renesas, NXP (Freescale), STMicro, UMC, Global Foundries, TI, etc. manufacture the bulk of these chips. TSMC is only the bottleneck for < 20nm, so that mainly affects the newest products from Apple, AMD, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Broadcom, Xilinx, Intel (Altera).
https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Tec...s-chip-factory