from Hacker News

Apple is saving “billions” on chips thanks to unique deal with TSMC

by specto on 8/7/23, 8:46 PM with 10 comments

• by Crunchified on 8/7/23, 8:57 PM

  This kind of deal is quite smart - there is a big incentive for TMSC to increase yields quickly, reducing overall costs all around. This really leverages Apple's long-term commitments to purchase high-end chips into huge investments into TMSC's manufacturing processes. The economies of Apple's scale are very apparent here!

• by ChrisArchitect on 8/8/23, 1:07 AM

  [dupe]

  More discussion over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37036217

• by animatethrow on 8/7/23, 10:58 PM

  A classic anticompetitive case of 'the rich get richer'. The world's wealthiest corporation, Apple, which closed today with a $2.8 trillion market cap, uses its money to (1.) ensure none of its competitors can make 3nm chips, so competitors cannot initially offer the same performance per watt, and (2.) force TSMC to eat costs that smaller competitors normally must eat. Apple did this same thing when launching the M1 and many praised the M1 as revolutionary....

  If you compare Geekbench scores[1][2] and top 500 "green" supercomputer rankings (gigaflops per watt)[3], you see x86-64 still reigns supreme not only at peak performance but also real world scientific performance per watt:

  [1] https://browser.geekbench.com/processor-benchmarks

  [2] https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks

  [3] https://www.top500.org/lists/green500/list/2023/06/

  Apple's laptops nowadays essentially amount to ultra premium Chromebooks. Nice rigs for running a web browser and doing npm+JS dev. Everyone doing serious AI and science is on AMD64 though, particularly AMD64+nVidia, running either Linux or Windows+WSL. The cheapest Apple you can buy with 64GB is $2399 (Mac Studio). Go to pcpartpicker.com and you can build a nice 64GB rig for under $1000 and get minimum 3 to 5 year warranties on all the individually user replaceable components you buy. But if you buy a Mercedes for 2.5x the price of an equivalently comfortable Toyota you get to flex that three pointed star badge on the front of your car....

• by cubefox on 8/8/23, 12:24 AM

  So this could mean Qualcomm moves again to Samsung for their next SoCs.