[ankit219]

A weird article.

Apple was not the first or the only company to look to East Asia for cheap manufacturing, elctronic equipments, chips, or cheap labor. The trend was started and accelerated by motor companies and hardware just followed suit.

Then, some other points are just...there. Apple is America's semiconductor problem because Apple is so big it purchases things in bulk and gets discounts - like every other big company in every industry.

TSMC sold 100% of the capacity to Apple for 3nm chips because no one else had the designs ready, Apple needed them in bulk, and the yield wasn't that high. It is problematic, but you need to mention these things when making a claim.

The problem is two fold - other companies are not really innovating and experimenting at semis with a scale at which Apple is. This is a market failure more than an Apple failure. Others were reliant on Qualcomm, broadcomm, samsung, and Intel, with slower pace of innovation. Then there is Asian countries with cheap economies of scale.

It's one thing to assume the most nefarious intent from the start and then look at everything from that lens. It mostly leads to paranoia, not insight.

[trhway]

> Apple is America's semiconductor problem

It isn't Apple who is the problem here, it is Intel who refused to manufacture ARM chips for Apple. So Apple didn't have much choice as there aren't much fabs around to choose from. Now Intel, sore looser, is competing for CHIPS money against TSMC/Apple (and Intel will definitely get and waste a lot of those CHIPS money thus making the problem even worse). The article, which looks like a hit-piece, is written by a think-tank funded by Omidyar who is pushing for CHIPS and seems to be connected with Intel a bit here and a bit there. Did somebody say "submarine"?

[DrScientist]

Yep, the omission of mentioning the Intel/Arm dynamic in the article is very telling.

Notable also is the omission of Nvida - which I also believe mostly uses TSMC.

[ankit219]

The market changed recently. With ARM (and not sure how many others), it democratized chip design to an extent that companies could design their own requirements, simulate, add standard functionalities, and then find a third party fab which can manufacture that in bulk. The core value transferred from one company doing everything in a centralized manner to three distinct sections - chip design done by individual companies, fab + manufacturing on given designs (eg: SK Hynix, TSMC), and ARM which enables both these sections to function as they do. As with tech markets, once democratized, the overall pie increases massively. (This is a gross simplification and at conceptual level. Not this clear cut, but this is pretty much the value chain)

ARM allowed companies to focus on design, and not having to worry about manufacturing. Nvidia is mostly dependent on TSMC, but truth is they can move to SK Hynix and Samsung without a drop in quality. (Basically whoever has the capacity to build the chips at their nm level).

I laud the authorities for stopping Nvidia/ARM acquisition a couple of years ago. More than any other acquisition, this would have skewed things up massively.

[baxtr]

>It's one thing to assume the most nefarious intent from the start and then look at everything from that lens. It mostly leads to paranoia, not insight.

That’s a marketing tactic that even works on HN I’m afraid. Create an enemy and then tell a story about that nemesis.

Our human storytelling brains need to hear tales of good and evil.

If you want to get an article like that ranking that’s one way to do it. Unfortunately.

[tsunamifury]

On the other hand if you have ever worked at a high level in these companies they are hardcore evil. Maybe not in this case but they 100% do the evil thing and press it to their advantage.

[actionfromafar]

Sure but there are different kinds of evil. Some larger categories are:

  - Screw everyone if I get more money and power
  - Self-aggrandazing evil
  - Hurt people for fun evil
  - Comic-book style take over the world evil

I think these are sorted in order of commonality. The top one is also the kind boardrooms attract at the upper echelons, just because of how the game is played.

[DrScientist]

I think you've missed perhaps the most common one.

- get them before they get you/ we have to do it because our competitors will.

ie fear is the driver, 'survival' is the goal.

[cgio]

That reads like a bad rationalisation of evil. Survival at the expense of someone else is not survival, it's the law of the jungle. The law of the jungle in the jungle is not evil, but we can do better than that, and we broadly expect better than that from others. So we should do better, even if sometimes to the intentional detriment of our profits and bonuses.

[DrScientist]

Depends on whether you define evil by actions or motives.

I'd argue that the use of motives to define evil is often used as a - when they do it it's bad/ but when I do it it's fine - excuse.

For that reason I'm not really interested in the 'evil' part of this conversation - rather more what drives perceived bad outcomes.

So all I'm saying is fear is a big driver of many of those bad outcomes. That's not to justify it - but rather understand it as a first step to fixing it.

Note I'm also not saying whether the fear is rational or not.

[tsunamifury]

Yes it’s primarily variations of your first one. At the owner level it has some flavor of the final one you list though.

I’d encourage you to have a conversation with Theil or Larry at some point and really hear in person how detached to the point of ‘evil’ they can get — and wrapped up in reshaping society for their own egotistical reasons.

[stavros]

What high level have you worked in these companies at? What things did you see? Can you post some examples?

[baxtr]

That’s the story you’re telling yourself to make sense of the world.

[Y_Y]

I would call this "understanding" and reckon it you could use it as a reply to pretty much any comment. Unless you see things exactly as they are and apply no interpretation, then this is the mechanism by which humans "make sense" of the world.

I guess you mean that the story is harmfully reductive or demands further critical examination, but I just want to defend telling oneself stories as a thinking tool.

[baxtr]

I agree that as human beings we can’t live without stories as thinking tool. Although I wouldn’t call it “understanding” but “interpreting”.

I wanted to say that good vs evil are hardly absolutes. No one at a large corporate comes to work saying: today I will be evil again.

Instead they tell themselves they’re helping investors getting a good return, or that they’re “smashing Google for copying iOS”.

There is a great quote by Shakespeare saying: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

I’d say storytelling makes it so!

[msrenee]

People committing genocide also presumably don't wake up saying they're going to be evil again. Being able to justify an act to yourself doesn't make it not evil.

[lnsru]

Think about recent Boeing adventures. I will put these doings definitely in the evil category.

[tsunamifury]

I brokered some portion of the omnibus agreements between the big 4.

The many parts of the agreements were clearly net negative outcomes for markets and users. Basic forms of collusion and cartel making were common.

[sunshinerag]

That is paranoia that the OP mentions.

[fundad]

A few other things jumped out to me: - Automotive's advanced features require chips but not the most advanced chips (by design, for reliability). - Micron's HQ is in the US but has operated globally since 1998 including design. ("Micron really went global in terms of its operations once it acquired the TI DRAM operations in 1998") - TSMC's 90% share of global semi is why Apple can get the exclusive on advanced processes. - Isn't a lot of CHIPs Act money help prop up Intel who didn't succeed in mobile and is laying off thousands anyway? - Apple did not cause poor pay and working conditions in China, the conditions, pay and environmental protections are how China attracts businesses. - Apple can not tax you because they can not arrest you if you don't pay 30% commission. - Massimo is medical device company, I'm curious how big a semi concern they are.

[alephnerd]

> Automotive's advanced features require chips but not the most advanced chips

Exactly, and if Matt Stoller was honest he would bring up that point.

Most automotive chips use 28nm, 40nm, and 60nm nodes and China has been very competitive in this space now because of existing capacity built from OSAT and AMTP consolidation in China by Taiwanese and Malaysian/Singaporean players like UMC before the 2019 HK protests, MediaTek, and ASMPT from the 2000s-2010s.

It's analog chips, 28nm/40nm nodes and Packaging that have been getting a significant amount of CHIPS funding, as well as similar funding from the Japanese, Taiwanese, South Korean, Malaysian, and Indian governments recently.

From a NatSec perspective, it's those kinds of nodes that have a critical impact as most weapons systems can subsist on a Intel i7 and Nvidia Maxwell comparable CPU and GPU.

Think EWS, C-RAMs, Guidance Systems, etc.

> Isn't a lot of CHIPs Act money help prop up Intel who didn't succeed in mobile and is laying off thousands anyway

Those layoffs are staff who don't have experience with High NA EUV processes (aka staff who didn't skill up). I can safely say that.

The CHIPS funding is a mix of subsidizing High NA EUV nodes as well as domestic OSAT and AMTP/Packaging capacity.

[duskwuff]

Also probably worth mentioning that a lot of the automotive chip shortages were a result of industry-specific factors:

1) Auto manufacturers incorrectly predicted that the pandemic would result in much lower sales, and reduced their component orders accordingly. When auto sales stayed stronger than expected, they were forced to buy those parts on the open market - reducing the number available to other customers.

2) A couple of major semiconductor manufacturers had incidents at their facilities (most notably, a fire at a Renesas fab) which limited production.

[doctorpangloss]

Autos manufacturers assembled 1000 parts in China and call it 1 chip for import quota purposes.

There was no “chip” shortage. There was an assembly labor shortage in China, a real shortage, cause by the disruption of the pandemic.

[duskwuff]

> There was no “chip” shortage.

Where are you getting that idea? There was absolutely a chip shortage! A lot of electronic components which were readily available before 2020 became unavailable or prohibitively expensive, and stayed that way for as long as a year or two afterwards.

[fundad]

BTW, the quote is from Sanjay Mehrota's Oral History https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...

[hintymad]

A weird article indeed, and it shows the weak mentality of the author. Apple picked East Asia because East Asia were more productive and reliable. The real question to ask is why the chip manufacturing in the US has been declining in the last two decades?

[threeseed]

> This is a market failure more than an Apple failure

Arguably it's a Microsoft failure more than anything.

If they had delivered a version of Windows for ARM capable of seamlessly emulating x86 code with no compromises and released it a decade ago the world would likely be different.

[aleph_minus_one]

> If they had delivered a version of Windows for ARM capable of seamlessly emulating x86 code with no compromises

This is hardly possible on most ARM chips because x86 has a much stronger memory model than ARM. Also concerning "with no compromises": common x86 implementations have a very fast implementation of the SIMD instruction sets (SSE..., AVX/AVX2, perhaps AVX-512) that is much slower to emulate on ARM because their SIMD instruction set is different. The only reason why people don't realize this is that a lot of common software makes no intense use of these SIMD instructions. Then there are the subtle parts that (as far as I am aware) the ARM FPU handles multiplication of denormalized floating-point numbers slightly different than x86 (both implementations are allowed by the standard) etc.

[rob74]

Well, Apple seems to have achieved this (for all intents or purposes) on MacOS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_(software)#Rosetta_2 - "In some benchmarks, x86-64-only programs performed better under Rosetta 2 on a Mac with an Apple M1 SOC than natively on a Mac with an Intel x86-64 processor"), so there's no reason why Microsoft shouldn't be able to do the same for Windows? Of course, Apple designed the M series ARM CPUs specifically for their devices, but I'm not sure how much care went into optimizing x86 emulation?

[happymellon]

The M1 was significantly faster than other ARM chips.

Why? My impression is that due to Apples permissive licence, they are able to make more changes. If we just look at the mess that ARM is making of Qualcomm situation, where we finally have a performing alternative chip.

Arm hasn't granted anyone else the ability to make significantly modified chips for multiple platforms, so Nuvia were fine while it was all just research.

> Arm's claim against Qualcomm and Nuvia is about protecting the Arm ecosystem and partners who rely on our IP and innovative designs, and therefore enforcing Qualcomm's contractual obligation to destroy and stop using the Nuvia designs that were derived from Arm technology

Its rather telling that Qualcomm are allowed to make mobile chips, but not these ones because they want to "protect the ARM ecosystem".

RISC V can't come soon enough.

[rickdeckard]

  > Arm hasn't granted anyone else the ability to make significantly modified chips for multiple platforms,

Of course they have. Many of the licenses are TLA (Technology License Agreements) but ARM has also made ALA (Architecture License Agreements) with several companies, apart from Apple also with Qualcomm, nVidia, Broadcom, Samsung and many others.

  > so Nuvia were fine while it was all just research.

Nuvia wasn't just "research", they got a very permissive license from ARM to create ARM-based server-architecture and build a business with that, with the licensing contract explicitly limiting their IP to use for servers and only to Nuvia.

Qualcomm acquired Nuvia with the clear plan of using their IP for other use-cases ("powering flagship smartphones, next-generation laptops, and digital cockpits, as well as Advanced Driver Assistance Systems, extended reality and infrastructure networking solutions"). Apart from the fact that Nuvia had no license for these markets, the acquisition voided the license they had and the contract states that without license all the IP developed under the license has to be destroyed.

There is no dispute on this, Qualcomm confirmed this in court, but they argue that they have ANOTHER license they want to transfer the IP to, and that the terms of the ARM-Nuvia Agreement are offending and "a threat to the industry"

  > Its rather telling that Qualcomm are allowed to make mobile chips, but not these ones because they want to "protect the ARM ecosystem".

Because Qualcomm is in progress to fragment the ARM-ecosystem, by using its dominant position in Smartphone chipsets to establish its custom architecture as the new standard for other industries. For decades, ARM is carefully avoiding this to happen, by allowing selected partners to "explore" evolutions of the IP in a industry but with methods to make sure they can't diverge too much from ARM's instruction set.

ARM has designed new architectures (Blackhawk, Cortex-X) which achieve comparable performance to Nuvia's IP, but Qualcomm's assumption is that they can apply Nuvia's IP on top of their existing architecture without the need of licensing any new ARM design.

[voidfunc]

Why would Microsoft build something almost no customers were asking for?

Even now ARM is niche.

[h0l0cube]

I'll assume you mean niche in the desktop space.

So there's a catch 22 here. ARM was niche on desktop because no-one made the first move. That is, until Apple launched the M1, which is exactly the failure of imagination of Microsoft that GP is talking about. Though a quick google shows they did indeed investigate this avenue in 2016 for Windows 10, though they obviously didn't commit to it:

> On December 7, 2016, Microsoft announced that, as part of a partnership with Qualcomm, it planned to introduce support for running Win32 software on ARM architecture with a 32-bit x86 processor emulator, in 2017. Terry Myerson stated that this move would enable the production of Qualcomm Snapdragon-based Windows devices with cellular connectivity and improved power efficiency over Intel-compatible devices, and still capable of running the majority of existing Windows software (unlike the previous Windows RT, which was restricted to Windows Store apps). Microsoft is initially targeting this project towards laptops.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_10#Features_in_develop...

[teknologist]

To show them that their battery life could go from 2.5 hours to 8 or more, perhaps. That was the Mac experience that customers weren't asking for yet "wowed" them when it came.

[antifa]

> customers weren't asking for

they definitely were asking for longer battery life and cooling systems less noisy than a fighter jet, but the supply side of the market was a desert filled with minefields and duds until the M1.

[aleph_minus_one]

> To show them that their battery life could go from 2.5 hours to 8 or more, perhaps.

x86 already was on its way towards such a goal.

[threeseed]

Years later.

And it took the threat of the PC industry moving to ARM to light a fire under Intel.

[teknologist]

x86 is an overcomplicated behemoth never intended for low power computing. It’s lipstick on a pig for mobile x86 at this point

[franga2000]

ARM tends to have better performance per watt, leading to improved battery life and thinner/lighter devices at the same performance and price point. Are you sure nobody is asking for it?

[jocaal]

Correction, ARM chips tend to be designed for better performance per watt. The instruction set has nothing to do with it. For a long time intel and amd neglected the mobile markets. That is about to change.

[everettp]

What? Per Wikipedia: "With over 230 billion ARM chips produced, as of 2022, ARM is the most widely used family of instruction set architectures."[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture_family

[PetitPrince]

Niche in the laptop and desktop caategory I assume?

[roshankhan28]

i dont really agree with the microsoft failure part, could explain why do you have this point of view? would love to hear it :)

[johnea]

It never ceases to amaze me that the "magical invisible hand" folks instantly leap to socialism whenever they actually need to invest in innfrastructure 8-/

If intel/amd/etc can't build their own fabs, and expect we-the-people to pay for it, then we-the-people should jump to socialism and nationalise the lot.

If we have to pay for it, we should own it...

[fsflover]

> It's one thing to assume the most nefarious intent from the start and then look at everything from that lens. It mostly leads to paranoia, not insight.

The intent is pretty clear and uncontroversial: profit by all means, like any other for-profit entity. Real problems arise when the company becomes (nearly-)monopolistic and their actions start to harm whole industries, like in this case. In other news, monopolies are bad for you.

[SkiFire13]

> because no one else had the designs ready

Do you have a source for this?

[ankit219]

https://technode.com/2024/03/27/tsmc-sees-strong-demand-for-...

Right now there are three. Intel, Apple, and AMD. In 2022, there was one.

Samsung manufactured for Qualcomm who were in testing phase.