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Comment by refulgentis | Hacker News Reader

You can sleep a _little_ better: the narrative around this ended up being focused around TSMC, but it's simply because that's the most visible part of the chain, they're first to a new node and all the newest gadgets need the newest node, so all the newest gadgets are on TSMC. They're not solely responsible for like 90% of chips or anything.

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TSMC might not be responsible for 90% of the chips, but estimates are they account for 28% of the mature market [1]. They don't only do new nodes, but older nodes as well. Between them and UMC (also Taiwan based), those 2 companies account for 41% of all modern IC production. Micron and Powerchip are also big fabs out in Taiwan and if someone were to say that 50-60% of all 45nm+ ICs were made in Taiwan I would not be surprised.

If there was a geopolitical struggle and the fabs in Taiwan were impacted for months or years, we would see the effects of that for years or even decades. Its why China, US and EU are all trying to build some more resiliency in the supply chain. Its also why Taiwan has resisted allowing tech/expertise to leave, since the amount of leverage they have lets them punch way above their weight and makes them such a strategic partner to the rest of the world.

[1] https://semiwiki.com/forum/index.php?threads/tsmc-has-the-la....

TSMC is also a bit more geographically diverse than a lot of people assume. Their largest fabs are split between three different cities in Taiwan, so a fire isn't going to knock them all offline. And their smaller or less-advanced fabs include several more locations. So it's not quite like the semiconductor industry has put all their eggs in one basket, even for leading-edge logic nodes.

From a geo-political perspective Taiwan is one basket, and not the strongest basket either.

TSMC alone is >50% of all semiconductors. Add other Taiwanese foundries, and you will get in between 60% and 70%.

Add the fact that many globally single vendor members of semiconductor supply chain are also in Taiwan, including many consumables.

Yes, it's very close to truth.

Especially in the automotive sector which is mostly using relatively ancient processes.

New Tesla Model S is rumored [1] to use latest AMD Ryzen chipset. Even Model 3 and Model Y are using 14nm Intel Gordon Peak chips.

[1] https://wccftech.com/amd-navi-23-rdna-2-gpu-reportedly-power...

Some of the SoCs are using leading edge nodes - but most of the microcontrollers, power electronics, etc. are using 90nm+ nodes.

As someone with a new phone, managed to find an nvidia card at msrp, and who likes computers made by team red, no sorry, I'm still not going to sleep good at night. You tell the population they cant get new iPhones, you watch the anarchy. Not just plebs, but the stock market react to Apple saying no new iPhones, actually no iPhones in stock at all. It would be devastating not from a "I can't have the shiny new gadget waaa".

Apple can quell the stock market crash, depression, and ensuing national mental health crisis by going back to what they were doing, industry standard practice, dual sourcing from Samsung fabs.

AMD/Team Red...well, same thing. They're not due to be on the TSMC node you're worried about until 2022 at the _very_ earliest

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