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Comment by _hao | Hacker News Reader

> The first is that people don't recognize how important TSMC is, and how much its hardware powers.

TSMC might be the the best and ahead of everyone in technological sense, but there are enough semiconductor companies worldwide to handle a potential TSMC demise. So what if our hardware stops improving at breakneck speeds (which might happen anyway in the near future..)?

I can argue that would be a good kick in the ass for every software dev that writes shitty bloated code. People like that won't be able to "just add more CPUs" to their problem and they'll have to do some actual engineering again. The state of software dev and performance today is abysmal given the amazing hardware we have.

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TSMC is dominant in technology AND volume. It chip shortage would be massive. Redesigning everything that has a TSMC chip in it to use something else would be a massive undertaking. What do you think the stock market would say if Apple announced that they could not make a iPhone/Mac until they redesign they hardware to use intel chips, because the only other manufacturer of chips good enough is Samsung, and they wont sell chips to their competitor?

> TSMC is dominant in technology AND volume. It chip shortage would be massive. Redesigning everything that has a TSMC chip in it to use something else would be a massive undertaking.

That's true and yet I'd say that's not my problem? The market will be fine. If anything that means more software work for me. New opportunities will arise. People won't buy a new phone every year for a while (which is objectively a good thing!). The M series MacBooks are so good now there's virtually no reason to upgrade to M2 or M3 if you have the M1 (like in my case). I fully expect to use this computer for the next decade. My desktop PC is basically unchanged since I built it in 2016 (+1 extra SSD I've added after, but that was it). The i7-6700K in there is still chugging happily along.

Apple have more than $100 billion of cash at hand. They will be fine no matter what happens. It's not like they didn't change chips before :)

Just because your needs are met doesn’t mean all needs are met. There is a lot of tech still to invent!

Of course. However, that wasn't my point which was that the world won't stop turning if TSMC suddenly vanishes.

> Redesigning everything that has a TSMC chip in it to use something else would be a massive undertaking.

Qualcomm switches their Snapdragon SOC between TSMC and Samsung in one generation. I think the difficulty is overstated. Clocks might have to be lowered to keep the thermal envelope.

I suspect the biggest problem (in context of semiconductors) would be the lowered production capacity, building new Samsung factories would take time.

The problem is, just having TSMC not provide ICs for a couple of months would probably rip world economy apart. Yes, I think the west can absolutely pick up where TSMC right now is. The machines come from the Netherlands anyway. Intel has some good fab technology too. But just imagine Apple not being able to sell any phone or computer for several years, what consequences this would have. And this would affect most companies relying on the TSMC technology.

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