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posted by martyb on Friday November 30 2018, @03:25AM   Printer-friendly
from the making-a-big-deal-out-of-small-things dept.

For more than 30 years, Intel Corp. has dominated chipmaking, producing the most important component in the bulk of the world’s computers. That run is now under threat from a company many Americans have never heard of.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. [TSMC] was created in 1987 to churn out chips for companies that lacked the money to build their own facilities. The approach was famously dismissed at the time by Advanced Micro Devices Inc. founder Jerry Sanders. "Real men have fabs,"[*] he quipped at a conference, using industry lingo for factories.

These days, ridicule has given way to envy as TSMC plants have risen to challenge Intel at the pinnacle of the $400 billion industry. AMD recently chose TSMC to make its most advanced processors, having spun off its own struggling factories years before.

[*] "fab" is shorthand for Semiconductor fabrication plant.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-28/intel-s-chipmaking-throne-is-challenged-by-a-taiwanese-upstart


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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday November 30 2018, @05:03AM

    by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Friday November 30 2018, @05:03AM (#768170) Homepage Journal

    - and x86 chips.

    TMSC is the only fab that makes so many as to be a leading manufacturer; Arm chips are so chip that Intel and AMD make far more money making Ixx chips.

    Consider that the ARM7TDMI is still popular despite having but 64kb of firmware address space. For my disk drive encryptor I copied the inner loops of its implementation into its 32-bit RAM space of its RAM space despite that particular SoC had only 1,800 BYTES of RAM! Consider also that iToys and Androids both use Arm. Intel and MIPS are in that space but ARM is dominant by far.

    ARM Holdings makes metric fucktons of Samolens by licensing lots of IP for a great many different varieties of cores but they don't make any fardware.

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