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by pjc50 2393 days ago
IoT is a thing .. that Intel failed to get into. They don't have anything that scales down that well. That market is dominated by ARM, implemented by all sorts of lower tier vendors like MediaTek.

FPGAs really need a tooling unlock to take off so they can be useful to people who haven't been on the ASIC design course.

> It won't make sense for anyone else in the US to compete

TSMC?
1 comments
monocasa 2393 days ago
TSMC isn't a US company.
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pjc50 2393 days ago
Correct, but they do a lot of fab work for other companies. It's not absolutely necessary to have your own fab to be competitive unless your volumes are huge... at which point you can afford it.

Apple have $245bn on hand, so they could have a dozen $20bn fabs if they felt the need. Bezos has $180bn and no idea what to do with it.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/29/apple-now-has-tk-cash-on-han...

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monocasa 2393 days ago
They could, but the answer to "what should I spend $20b on" for both pretty clearly isn't "a fab where at the end of the day you might get a fraction of a percent better costs on bare dies from the vertical integration versus just buying from TSMC or whoever"

Fabs are both a commodity, and take a high capital investment. Unless you have a geopolitical reason to create one and you get .gov kickbacks to make it happen, then there's way better uses of your money.

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