this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2025
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Oh I know - but I’m saying they should halt efforts now, because they’ve been going on for several years (I think close to 4-5?) at this point.
I was also under the impression that Mainland was still meaningfully behind the cutting edge, that TSMC was absolutely not resting on their laurels, and that the prospect of the CCP fabs fully catching up isn’t super likely. Out of curiosity, do you have any references/articles about recent ~~CSMC~~SMIC/etc lithography advancements?
The Chinese state industries have been happy enough to throw big chunks of their GDP at the problem of high end chip fab, and it's paying dividends.
That's not to say TSMC is idle, but the whole problem of living on the bleeding edge is that you've got nobody to crib from. All your next-gen advances have to be earned through high end R&D and brute force engineering and lots of money and time. Their rivals can reverse engineer their technology, learn from TSMC's mistakes, and generally coast in their wake.
What's sort of incredibly about America's Intel is that they haven't done any of this shit, clinging to their dead-end chip design long after its expiration date and missing the boom in demand for high end chips entirely.
Nothing you couldn't just Google up yourself, I'm sure. I picked up SMIC based on their advances in DUV lithography employed by ASML and it paid out big. The high margins on sale are justifying comparatively lower success rates of manufacturing.
This is the most baffling thing to me. How could Intel leadership be so incompetent? They had the inside track to hundreds of billions in revenue and just decided to coast.
If I remember correctly, but it's been awhile since I read the discussion about Intel so I could be misremembering, the problem with Intel started when the C-Suite stopped being engineers that moved up in the company.
Because modern western business is about cashing out the business to squeeze out a couple extra bucks each quarter. They aren't interested in making a product, just cutting costs, raising prices, and issuing stock buybacks
For the leadership, it was a cash cow. They got a fat dividend doing very little, even as upstarts blasted past them.
At some point, the effort to get from $10B to $100B isn't worth the pressure. How many extra yachts do I actually need?
Your points are exactly why it is surprising. Most executives don't think like me and you. If you give them a million dollars, they say they need 10 million. If you give them a billion dollars, they say they need 10 billion. There is no end to their greed. Look at how Google and Amazon are still trying to strong-arm their industries to get even more billions of dollars. Musk is out there demanding a trillion dollars.
CEOs and execs at large multinational corps like Intel don't usually coast. They might make strategic blunders, but they usually push to make as much money as they can. If they fail, they fall back on their golden parachutes. If they win, they get shitloads more money.
I think hidden in there is a misconception about capitalism, that its about competition and being the best. While its a nice myth for grade school civics about why we are capitalist its just not the case. Capitalism is about profit. As long as you have it and its growing you are doing well. Intel did get very complacent, but it was still projected to grow and be profitable.
Well, it's about maximum profit. So if they could make more, it's insane that they wouldn't. But it might be that profit in the short term was higher by not spending as much money on R&D, and if there's one thing stock markets are great at it's incentivizing short term profit over long term viability.
Sure. If you show up with a bag of money, they're going to tell you they need two bags.
But if you ask them to work twice as hard to get that second bag? Suddenly, you're asking too much.
They do. They're just not the companies people get excited about. Tons of US business is conducted by C-levels who are barely more than figureheads, commanding massive salaries to glad hands a few friends in between golf games.
Steve Balmer is the out layer. Sam Alton is the out layer. Elon Musk is the norm.
Interesting, thanks. And yeah, I too find it utterly baffling at how Intel is turning into a has-been before our eyes. They were The Chip Guys for ages, and then the fucking quants got put in charge and carved away so much of the engineering leadership and underpinnings that it’s a husk of what it was in the 80s and 90s.
I would, however, point out that TSMC’s whole deal is “define, and produce at scale, the bleeding edge of integrated circuit designs”, so the bit about them cribbing off of people hasn’t really been a variable in their equations for at least a couple decades. They have been major (arguably, the predominant) pioneers in chip lithography for a while now.
That's meant to say they can't do that from the front of the pack. There's not much to crib from that they don't invent.
That's a burden on TMSC that guys like Samsung and SMIC don't suffer from, at least until they can match pace. For the time being, other firms can close in on TMSC by following in their footsteps (or, at least, avoiding their errors).
Ah, yes, fair point 🍻
Intel: did I hear somebody say we should announce our newest 14nm+++++++++ platform?
14a =1.4nm. Given that they cancelled 18a to leap frog to 14a is not a confidence builder.