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Discussing USA TSMC, Intel Buyouts, Nvidia RTX 5000 Supply, and RDNA 4 w/ Asianometry (Patreon)

Published:
2025-01-19 02:01:59
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

Content

The next episode of Broken Silicon will see us be joined by Jon of Asianometry once again! Please feel free to ask any questions involving Nvidia, AMD, Intel, TSMC, or other semiconductor companies you want - especially if they relate to the bigger picture, geopolitics, and manufacturing. Jon is one of those guests that allows for more "business-y" and "technology" oriented subjects. But at a minimum the subjects below are likely candidates:

How Taiwan has faired since the earthquakes of 2024

Nvidia RTX 5000 Series Supply (Amongst Reports of NO order cuts w/ TSMC)

AMD's Market Share opportunities with RDNA 4

TSMC producing 4nm AMD products in the USA (but not Intel)

TSMC USA vs Taiwan Production Economics

If TSMC will get the go-ahead to manufacture the latest LATEST nodes in the US

Intel's Situation with Arrow Lake

Intel Buyout Rumors

The history of Intel, how it got here, and where they are headed relative to AMD

Evolving Silicon Economics - If nodes keep increasing in price, is there improvement?

Advanced packaging and manufacturing of silicon over the next few years...

You have ~14 hours (Till late Sunday Morning US Central Time) to submit below!

Last time Asianometry was on: https://youtu.be/Y6wnDTEnEqY?si=cuP_rtYBEDbLEBQT

https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/gaming-monitors/amd-is-now-reportedly-making-all-american-ryzen-9000-cpu-dies-at-tsmcs-arizona-fab/

https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20250116PD231/tsmc-nvidia-cowos-market.html

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/tsmcs-arizona-fab-21-mass-produces-4nm-chips-at-a-higher-price-than-taiwan

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/tsmcs-arizona-fab-21-mass-produces-4nm-chips-at-a-higher-price-than-taiwan

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/tsmcs-arizona-fab-21-mass-produces-4nm-chips-at-a-higher-price-than-taiwan

https://www.investopedia.com/sandp-500-gains-and-losses-today-intel-soars-as-takeover-speculation-spreads-8776716

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/intels-arrow-lake-fix-doesnt-fix-overall-gaming-performance-or-correct-the-companys-bad-marketing-claims-core-ultra-200s-still-trails-amd-and-previous-gen-chips

Comments

Kiln God

Did AMD buy a lot of wafer capacity at TSMC Arizona? Does this mean AMD can put made in America on RDNA4? I assume coolers and assembly will be overseas any rumors to the contrary?

Question Generated By JensenGPT

RDNA4 cards are already starting to show up at warehouses and in retail stockrooms in some parts of the world, meaning RDNA4's launch probably isn't very far away. And yet, AMD has not announced a release date, specs, or pricing yet. What the heck gives here? Why does it always seem like AMD is so unsure how to handle Radeon marketing?

Intel FanBoy

Which company do you think would actually get regulatory approval to acquire Intel?

Kiln God

Specifically for Jon - How competitive is Intel's 18A?

Kiln God

Tom and Jon - If Intel gets bought by an Elon led consortium I see this as the end of the line for x86 laptops, long live Arm! Do you see differnently?

Paul Hope

Could Musk buy Intel and get a huge government subsidy for making America Great Again?

Dig Wiggler

Will Amd ever actually go for marketshare with dGPU? I feel as if they have too many other priorities right now to use the capacity. Server, AI, and the huge push into laptop this makes me thing Amd doesn't really want to actually go after the desktop gpu market. The money just isn't there for them. 9070XT: $599+

transpose1195

As foundries ramp production lines in new geographies, what approaches do they take to ensure new fabs perform as well as the R&D line at the headquarters? Does TSMC have any advantages or challenges here? Intel often touted "copy exactly" but maybe that's just pithy marketing.

Planet 9

Hi Jon, Given all the talk about the possibilities Switch 2’s node of choice, what is your take? (Thinking more about available capacity and cost per chip than end user experience)

AllenC

How likely is it for Taiwan to collapse and what might trigger it, accounting for the PRC's and the legislature's recent actions? And how will it affect chip production and node development?

Alberto M

1) Is there room/markets for new semiconductor designers using old nodes? 2) Will there be a RISK-V renaissance where more people design chips without paying license fees? How far are we from RISK-V APUs? 3) Is there anybody competing with ASML to build the semiconductor machines of the future? 4) What technologies would he bet are going to be important in the next 5-10 years? 5) Are GPUs more likely to get improvements from AI/logic processes than die shrinks? 6) How is AI improving semiconductor design? Are we already seeing results?

Robert S Barnes

Him and Daniel Nenni are my favorite guests

QuickJumper

I've noticed a stark contrast in how Intel and AMD approach chip innovation. Intel either makes small iterations or jumps into multiple major changes at once (like Arrow Lake combining PowerVia, RibbonFET, and new packaging). Meanwhile, AMD shows a more balanced evolution: they started with basic chiplets in Zen 2, enhanced their Infinity Fabric interconnect, added unified L3 cache in Zen 3, introduced 3D V-Cache stacking, and with each generation they've also improved their core microarchitecture - like Zen 4's front-end improvements with better branch prediction, larger op-cache, and wider issue width. Is Intel's 'all-or-nothing' approach to architectural innovation actually holding them back compared to AMD's parallel progress in both packaging and microarchitecture?

Dylan M

Hi Tom and Asianometry 1. When will risc-v start to be competitive with x86? And what will be the advantages in those early days? AI? Battery? Cost? 2. At some point, in the not too distant future, could you see AI cores replace GPU cores to streamline APU design? Could we switch to neural rendering or emulate raster on them. Besides AI and GPU cores are both just parallel processors / SIMD machines, right? 3. Ive wondered for a while if high end APUs will come to desktop. With the arrival of DIGITS, do you think this kind of machine will become more mainstream, or stay ultra high end? Do you think AMD might make something similar?

Gian Violi

Hi Ton and Asianometry, What is the biggest challenge (s) to solve for advance packaging to become cheaper? How big of factor of the new nodes pricing for advance chips? Are new nodes more expensive mostly because of the advance packaging requirements or is it mostly the higher density and increased multipatterning?

KarbinCry

Are TSMC's US fabs decreasing the security of semiconductor supply chain? They decrease perceived importance of ROC to the West, thus decreasing West's investment in defense of ROC and lowering the risk of invading Taiwan. However, those US fabs are actually still completely insufficient, and making Taiwan truly non-crucial would mean building up capacity resulting in 2x oversupply.

KarbinCry

With rampant over-investment in leading edge capacity, are we heading into a significant crunch for TSMC too? Samsung is mothballing fabs, Intel can't fill them. If there is any weakening or even stall of growth of AI demand, will TSMC also be hit with the pains of malinvestment?

Chris Rijk

Intel’s share of the CPU market in DIY has collapsed to about 10% in many countries in the West - any idea how they’re doing in the East?

Frobozz

Are chances improving that the AI hardware built into GPUs and/or CPUs will get used for games? Are we going to see AI NPC’s or other tangible benefits soon?

Cleansweep

Do you see any signs that there's progress towards building out non-silicon/packaging parts of the PC/mobile hardware supply chains outside of Taiwan?

Lucas

For how much longer do you think the market will continue to bear the cost of increasingly more expensive nodes? Between the Crypto and AI crazes there have been a number of successive events of extreme demand where the price barely mattered, but surely this will eventually have to come to a head. What do you think might that look like, will demand just slow down or will there be some sort of crash? There is already more capacity than the industry really knows what to do with.

Kiln God

Jon - Do you seen any technology like Tenstorrent that might change the future of gaming?

Chris Rijk

Based on Nvidia’s benchmarks, Blackwell looks to be quite a modest improvement over Lovelace in pure rendering performance in gaming. Was Nvidia’s focus elsewhere or is this an example of how performance is limited by silicon? Should they have waited for TMSC’s 3nm process to be ready? The rate of improvement in silicon is slowing, so should we expect the rate of improvement in silicon products to slow down by the same amount? (Just to be clear, I'm using Blackwell as an example for deeper trends in the industry - are they the canary in the coalmine? Nvidia shouldn't be R&D limited so if they're struggling already while also moving to GDDR7 then maybe many others will be in the same boat in a few years)

Chris Rijk

For a long time, TVs used interlacing as a low cost way to achieve a certain resolution and frame rate. Is frame generation in games a modern equivalent of this? Do you consider it to be the right way forward or like interlacing, is it more of a short-term workaround that will eventually be replaced with better solutions?

KarbinCry

What is the most undervalued, underexplored part of the semiconductor industry/supply chain? Last year some, like ultrapure quartz, came to the fore. We also hear more about packaging, albeit only in context of “CoWoS”. What’s next?

Chris Rijk

Looking at Intel and AMD from a long term historical perspective, in isolation or together, have they ever been in similar situations to where they are now? How much of their current situation has been driven by their history?

Nicolas Terroir

Hello, with the release of battlemage and Blackwell, the msrp of those cards seem to be a little dubious : European retailers listing show those cards to be more expensive. But most reviewers does not seem to challenge those prices in their reviews: the B580 is at parity in performance and price with the RX7600 XT, but that is not the conclusion of most reviewers. Do the review process needs to be change?

Nicolas Terroir

Does NPU have a use case in a PC? Is there a risk that it will break compatibility with existing CPU? What happens if the software require a NPU?