Mark Roulo (nothanks.delete@this.xxx.com) on September 30, 2013 3:15 pm wrote:
> David Kanter (dkanter.delete@this.realworldtech.com) on September 30, 2013 1:41 pm wrote:
> > Some of this is just customers squawking about TSMC's pricing. The optimal strategy for
> > TSMC is to charge as much as they can for a new process to get all the customers with a
> > high willingness to pay and gradually lower pricing to expand the customer base. So some
> > of the complaints are just customers trying to negotiate in the public arena with TSMC.
>
> I get that, but I also figure that TSMC should be giving customers
> *SOME* reason to move to the newer process. If the costs are the
> same, why shouldn't the customers stay at the N-1 process? I'd expect
> that the technical and schedule risk would be lower when staying with
> a known process.
>

They are giving their customers some reasons, better performance/power consumption/density but it will cost so only the leading edge customers who need improvements in these areas to get their new products to sell will bite. For ARM SoCs this means in practice the prices won't drop and may even go up. This will allow Intel to eventually do to ARM what it does to AMD, float above and around it and concentrate on getting a product mix price structure that's slated to maximum profit.


>
> > Intel's approach to metallization is much more cost effective, but
> > means more restrictive design rules and a bit of a hit on density.
>
> That is useful to know. So maybe Intel *does* have a cost edge ...
> and with their larger volume per design, they can afford to take a higher
> hit in NRE in exchange for a lower per-part cost.
>
> [And I keep coming up with the idea that Apple would be a good customer
> for Intel foundry business ...]
>