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Comment by hedora | Hacker News Reader

So, they’re going to use a more power hungry process for the low end devices? The whole point of the Air and SE lines was that they were lightweight and compact.

Watching a company at that scale completely lose its own plot is depressing. Did they replace Cook with an LLM that compacted its context one too many times?

Edit: This is a bad look for intel too. How are Apple store employees/nerds going to explain this product line bifurcation? “This low end Apple gizmo is a hot mess because it has Intel Inside. Also, it’s $50 more than last year. MAGA!”

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What is the more power hungry process?

M5 uses a 3nm process

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/tsmcs-3nm-update-...

but Intel is proposing using their fab configured for the "earliest available sub-2nm advanced node manufactured in North America", according to the article (and from searching outside).

> So, they’re going to use a more power hungry process

This is exactly what Google did when their Pixel SOCs were fabbed by Samsung.

Performance and power efficiency were both substandard compared to TSMC but the chips were cheaper.

Is the 18A process more power hungry?

'Kuo said Apple plans to utilize Intel's 18A process, which is the "earliest available sub-2nm advanced node manufactured in North America."'

> How are Apple store employees/nerds going to explain this product line bifurcation?

I really doubt most Apple customers care. A few do, but they've long been the minority.

Yeah; but the ones that don’t care about the details often ask someone “which one should I buy?”

Currently, for MacBooks, the answer is “the small one doesn’t have a fan, so for sustained work like games or iMovie it is slower. However, it is smaller, lighter, quieter and cheaper”.

I really do not see how that advice would change with an 18A chip in the lineup.

Are their egos supposed to feel the performance hit? Is there some cabal of Taiwanese extremists propping up the Mac market?

In the days of Intel modems, advising against buying from AT&T and T-Mobile was sound, as the performance was worse than a Qualcomm model.

What makes you think they are going to be more power-hungry than if Apple manufactured them itself?

The article says it’s going on Intel 18a, which has better performance, but worse density/power consumption than TSMC’s comparable node:

https://www.techspot.com/news/106782-intel-18a-found-faster-...

Unless Apple is going to add active cooling or something to the Air, iPad and iPhone, I’d expect more thermal throttling on the intel chips (though the difference isn’t as stark as I assumed — it looks like Intel closed the gap a bit with 18a).

TSMC's 2nm is much, much higher demand. Apple's probably getting priced-out of the node by Nvidia in much the same way Apple bought out TSMC 5nm before.

Apple's cheaper products and hardware cash cows can't afford to pay that sort of tax, so it makes sense to boot them onto 18A. Those are the binned products that would have been throttling anyways.

TSMC and Apple have a long standing partnership, and I doubt TSMC is dumb enough to throw a massive amount of long term business away in exchange for short term AI bubble gains.

TSMC has even been cutting Apple special terms they don't give others:

> every time TSMC introduces a major upgrade, called an advanced process node, to its chipmaking, the defect rates of the dies stay relatively high until it can iron out the kinks. For 3 nm, the most cutting-edge node launching this year, the yield on wafers has recently been in the range of 70% to 80%, according to analysts, as well as one person with direct knowledge of the process.

That number would be a tough pill to swallow for TSMC’s customers, which typically pay for the wafer and all of the dies on it—including the bad ones. But in a break from standard practice, the Taiwanese manufacturer has only been charging Apple for dies that work—“known good dies,” in industry parlance—these people said.

https://archive.ph/yfGLp

I doubt TSMC has a choice. Any fab allocation Apple can pay for, Nvidia can afford twice over. With that kind of money Nvidia could swallow the cost of 40% broken dies and still turn out higher hardware margins than any 2nm iPhone ever could. Neither the iPhone Air nor Vision Pro justify Apple's push to dominate the latest nodes.

Novelty applications like "performance smartphone hardware" will have to wait on the sidelines. The datacenter needs it more than Apple or Qualcomm, and they've brought the beaucoup bucks to prove it.

> Novelty applications like "performance smartphone hardware" will have to wait on the sidelines.

A quarter of your revenue isn't a "novelty".

> Apple is by far TSMC’s largest customer, accounting for 23% of the Taiwanese chipmaker’s almost $72 billion in revenue in 2022.

https://archive.ph/yfGLp

You don't throw away a long term partner over short term AI bubble gains if you intend to be a long term business.

You're right that money talks. I just think you're forgetting which side has more leverage in this game.

Apple is most certainly not being thrown away, merely asked to compete at the market price if they want the latest node. Anything else is wasted money from TSMC's perspective, they still make legacy nodes Apple can perfectly well use for the iPhone if they want to save cash.

At most, TSMC will let Nvidia pay up front to build an additional Fab dedicated fully or partially to their use.

The way Apple already does:

> The investment includes “a multibillion-dollar commitment from Apple to produce advanced silicon in TSMC’s Fab 21 facility in Arizona,” according to Apple’s February announcement. The plan is to double Apple’s Advanced Manufacturing Fund from $5 billion to $10 billion, with TSMC Arizona a primary beneficiary.

https://www.aztechcouncil.org/tucson-chipmaker-tsmc-arizona-...

They aren't going to throw away a long term partner for short term gains.

Nvidia already did. They and Apple were the two primary investors in TSMC's Arizona plant.

Kissing ass gets you in the door with TSMC, but it doesn't protect you from other people outbidding the product you want.

> Kissing ass gets you in the door with TSMC

No, but being a long term partner gets you preferential treatment.

TSMC has literally been cutting Apple special lower pricing deals while signaling that given Nvidia's extravagant margins, they expect them to pay more per wafer than a normal customer.

> TSMC hints at price increase for Nvidia as response to its booming AI hardware business

https://www.techspot.com/news/103325-tsmc-hints-increasing-c...

Case in point:

> "TSMC's contribution to the world and the tech industry is under-represented by its financial results." Huang added that "raising prices is consistent with the value they deliver. I'm very happy to see them succeed."

Lowering prices for Apple while simultaneously raising them for Nvidia doesn't really support your argument.

If Nvidia is willing to pay up front to increase TSMC's production capacity, then they get wafers out of that new production capacity.

It perfectly supports my argument, if Apple has reduced access to TSMC capacity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_elasticity_of_demand

And they objectively do. In 2019 Apple had TSMC 5nm all to themselves; now they're fighting with Nvidia for capacity. Nevermind the rumor that Apple is sampling Intel Foundry Services, the mere fact that there is TSMC 2nm and 3nm capacity Apple is unwilling to buy is proof that their agreement is limited.

> Apple has reduced access to TSMC capacity

TSMC's capacity is not fixed.

> now they're fighting with Nvidia for capacity.

TSMC has literally been raising prices for Nvidia while lowering them for Apple.

The performance / power difference between Intel 18a and TSMC 3nm / 2nm is not going to be that wide. Certainly not enough to require active cooling on phones / tablets. The rumor says they are targeting the M series processors anyway, so probably looking at it for their laptops first where there is active cooling and the power envelope is more forgiving.

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