One executive said of TSMC’s expansion: "We received a notice from TSMC that it is giving 4,000 New Taiwan dollars ($145) a day as an extra bonus for every worker willing to come during the Lunar New Year… that is literally at least double the average daily wage for front line workers. Even if that’s only roughly a few extra days of building time [during the holiday], they don’t want to fully stop at all. That shows their commitment to speed up construction and development and confidence for future demand."
That’s a nice bonus alright. Wages will shot up this year, I assume a lot of other lower margin players will feel the pain but overall it will be good for the country. Possibly even get serious about immigration laws/incentives to alleviate the shortage of skilled workers.
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That’s what’s supposed the happen in a normal universe.
Intel is in trouble then.
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/21/tech/intel-new-ceo-pat-gelsinger-outlook/index.html
It would be optimal if margins were higher and profits were reinvested. But based on what I read here, wages are far below their market value, so rising wages is good all around.
Nothing new if you follow the developments in the semi industry but its nice summary of the chip shortage and the massive power TSMC and Samsung hold now.
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Chips are the new oil.
“South Korea and Taiwan are now primary providers of chips like OPEC countries once were of oil”
This makes no sense on its face. TSMC’s biggest customer is Apple, and an iPhone costs $1000. How can a Tsmc wafer cost $1,600 on average? Someone unpack this.
Plenty of chips can be made from a single wafer.
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Thanks
~600 A14s per wafer I think.
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I want to add that the 5nm wafers that Apple uses probably go for way higher than 1.7k USD. Possibly closer to 17k USD and that’s just the fabrication, the chip packaging also costs a significant amount.
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It says “average revenue”. Not sure if that means selling price, or gross profit? Could be the latter. I can’t imagine a finished wafer selling for that low price.
That’s Like 2 and a half bucks a chip?
Lol. Foxconn makes 8 bucks just by assembling an iPhone.
Since they charge different amounts for different chips I’m saying I’m assuming that what they mean is the average marginal revenue the weighted average marginal revenue of all the chips that they sell.
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Revenue is income / sales.
No way that $1700 figure applies to something like a n5 a14 wafer.
Perhaps the average is skewed by the fact that most of their sales (I assume) are on low-tech process nodes that are much cheaper to produce. Big 5nm wafers will be a lot more expensive than 1.7K, but very few of them being made, so not a big factor in the bottom line.
Yep. Plenty of stuff being made that’s not bleeding edge.
Anybody know what the reject rate is on something like that? I’m guessing they must be throwing away at least 50% of them. Or perhaps the design incorporates massive redundancy to work around failed logic blocks?
The idea of making 12 billion transistors flawlessly just boggles the mind. When I were a lad 12,000 was a lot.
Ya, that was an average cost. I think the 5nm wafers cost about 17,000 usd so about 30 usd per iPhone chip.