[pritovido]

"What made TSMC so successful? Is it primarily thanks to their business strategy?"

Basically they are riding the new wave of cheap devices that outnumber the x86 devices by 10x 20x.

Basically everything uses an ARM CPU these days, not just tablets and phones, but microwaves, TVs, projectors, refrigerators, ovens, 3D printers...

That makes those devices extremely cheap on volume and make innovations to happen faster than o a single company like Intel, that was not interested on those low margin products.

Intel is far from incompetent, they just decided to get advantage of their monopoly position to reap as big profits and margins as they could get for the longest possible time, instead of cannibalizing themselves with lower margins.

And it was great for them. Their executives have done great. They have just ruled the semiconductor industry and wanted to enjoy it.

[klelatti]

I suspect what Intel missed was that firms would be selling phones in very large volume for c$1000. That price includes enough margin to spend quite a lot on the SoC and associated research.

When the iPhone launched Steve Ballmer laughed [1] at the price and pushed a $99 competitor with MS software. The phone market was very, very different before the iPhone got real traction.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U

[mlyle]

> Basically everything uses an ARM CPU these days, not just tablets and phones, but microwaves, TVs, projectors, refrigerators, ovens, 3D printers...

Most of these things are not on bleeding edge 5nm or 7nm process, though. Most microcontrollers are more like 90nm (e.g. STM32 up to F7 is 90nm; STM32H7 is 40nm... many smaller micros of the M0 variety are even 180nm...)

Basically, if you're not video processing, or a real computing device, or something power sensitive, 90nm is still a pretty sweet place to be-- ~$300k for a mask set, easy to have 5V tolerant I/O if that's something you need, high likelihood of common I/O and core voltage, &c.

[MayeulC]

Plus, if you are doing microcontrollers (cortex M) and not microprocessors (cortex A), the lower leakage current of >40 nm nodes is interesting. Batteries for infraed remotes last years, not days.

[ragnarok451]

It's funny because this seems like a textbook case of the innovator's dilemma (from Clayton Christensen) in a nutshell - what worked for Intel was just working so well, that cannibalizing it with something new didn't make sense - until it was too late.

[FeloniousHam]

Ben Thompson on the latest Exponent[1]: "When you start out a company, you're walking around and you have complete freedom of movement. And then you get some processes in place, you get better at things, and now you're riding bike. And then you're driving a car. And eventually at some point, the best, most efficient companies are like bullet trains. They're so much faster than anybody else and so much more powerful and so much more efficient, it's like "how can I compete with that?" Well it's actually quite straightforward how you compete with it, you go somewhere there are no bullet train tracks."

[1] https://exponent.fm/episode-190-intel-apple-disruption-and-d...

[tosh]

I think you will like this essay:

https://jamesallworth.medium.com/intels-disruption-is-now-co...

discussed recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25092721

[rodgerd]

Intel have tried time and time and time again to get away from x86; some of their efforts have been underwhelming (the i960) while others were genuinely radical and innovative (the iAXP 432), and others were at least interesting (the Itanium).

[_ph_]

They tried a couple of times, but I wonder whether they tried hard enough. Admittedly, that the Itanium failed was partially AMDs fault, which breathed new life into x86 by their 64 bit extensions. But besides a slow start, Intel didn't seem to be in a hurry to push Itanium down the line and offer for example a cheap cpu+motherboard combo for enthusiasts. While Itanium for a while had a relatively large transistor count, by todays standards it is tiny, any smartphone cpu is way larger. The last Itanium was made in a 32nm process, imagine it in today 10nm. Especially with markets shifting, more computing in the cloud, Itanium based servers could be really strong, if Intel just would make them.

Also, Intel declined to make a cpu for the iPhone, dropped their own ARM line and also didn't get into fabbing for other companies when they still had a large lead in fab technology.

I do get the impression, Intel was far to happy selling x86 chips. Which worked and gave them lots of revenues, till they got stuck with the 10nm process. And of course while TSMC grew into the power it is today.

[dboreham]

And they made ARM devices for a while.

[rodgerd]

Yeah, ditching their ARM line looks very foolish now, doesn't it?

[kunai]

IIRC this is also exactly what happened with IBM and original PowerPC Macs way back in 2005 that prompted the switch to Intel and x86.

Funny how 15 years out it's the exact opposite now.

[mekster]

> Intel is far from incompetent, they just decided to get advantage of their monopoly position to reap as big profits and margins as they could get for the longest possible time

That sounds exactly like an incompetent strategy by being lazy ignoring possible competitors.

[lmm]

Nothing incompetent about making a fat profit. We'd like to imagine that companies should always innovate as hard as possible, but it's not always the winning strategy.

[olliej]

I think the point that they were trying to make is that sabotaging long term profits by maximizing short term profits is less profiterole over the long term. Which would make it incompetent for the company, but because of earlier cashing out, possibly not incompetent for the specific people making those decisions.

[lmm]

We'd like to think that long term strategies are always better, but again that's not always true. Sometimes it's better to realise some profits now.

[mekster]

But Intel saw it coming when they're left out of the mobile market and ARM had been advancing rapidly for over a decade, not to mention x86 has been too old now.

[lmm]

That doesn't necessarily mean that there was a better path available to them. If Intel moved away from x86, a lot of their strategic advantages would disappear; they'd be one player among many, and they wouldn't have the vertical integration advantages of people actually making full ARM-based systems. Meanwhile there's plenty of money to be made from x86 for decades yet, from clients that put a high value on backward compatibility (which Apple don't, not in the same way - after all, they've done this twice already).