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Comment by ckastner | Hacker News Reader

In another submitted story regarding the rumor that Intel might rely on TSMC for some of its future products, one comment indicated that [1] "Intel’s fab capacity is several times TSMC’s".

I haven't fact-checked that, but given Intel's market share, it sounds plausible.

Intel may be behind on process and microarchitecture, but as long as they can ship that volume, and with a far better gross margin than AMD (Intel 53%, AMD 44%), I wouldn't count them done just yet.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23976605

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The irony is that the more of TSMC's capacity Intel contracts, the less AMD has access to.

Between Intel, Apple and Nvidia, AMD might catch the short end of the stick there.

AMD and TSMC have really excellent relationship. Nvidia on the other hand does not, since it's rumoured most of their next gen GPUs are going to be made on Samsung 8nm because TSMC bid high against Nvidia and wouldn't budge. Apple might be the only company with a better relationship with TSMC than AMD. Apple and AMD together should be able to keep Intel's pressure low.

Paying TSMC to fab chips is going to cost more than producing chips in their own fabs, reducing Intel's profit margin the more they do so.

TSMC also knows full well that Intel will switch back to their own fabs the instant it's practical for them to do so, making them a less reliable long term customer than Apple, AMD, etc. and so won't be inclined to give them priority or much of a break on pricing.

Given that AMD is fabless these days, you would have to compare Intel's gross margin to AMD and TSMC's combined to have an oranges to oranges comparison. In that light AMD is doing pretty well.

The other factor is going to be that TSMC has 5nm in risk production already. If they bring 5nm fabs online before Intel has a real answer to their 7nm process, AMD could be buying capacity from the 7nm and 5nm fabs at the same time.

Where does the meme come from about AMD being ahead on microarchitecture? Head-to-head single-threaded benchmarks are mixed results for Rome vs Skylake and its descendants, which seems to indicate that Intel had a microarchitecture comparable to AMD's, but years ago.

I wonder if this is merely an advantage of Intel's larger process size. It seems a threshold has been crossed at 14nm or 22nm where the smaller sizes can't be driven at higher clocks because of voltage and heat dissipation issues. So AMD is forced to trade clocks for cores, whereas Intel's larger (and very mature) process sizes can sustain higher frequencies.

For the most part it's a worthwhile trade for AMD because you get much greater overall compute power with only marginally diminished frequencies, but it's still something for Intel to hang its hat on in benchmarks.

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