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TSMC doesen't design or sell the chips. If they have limited capacity they will of course charge more for manufacturing mobile chips if they can sell the capacity to Nvidia/AMD/Apple insteadThat’s the entire point. Intel is behind because their vertical market strategy of using their own fabs only for their own chips doesn’t give them enough volume compared to TSMC who has volume because they are a foundry.
> ARM chips (and that's pretty much by design based on ARM's business model) are close to being a commodity.
ARM doesn’t manufacture chips. The entire argument is that it’s a strategic interest for Intel to manufacture chips in the US. ARM is irrelevant to this conversation.
> Apple is of course an exception but they are not directly part of the CPU market. And ARM and Qualcomm are barely bothering trying to compete with them because there doesen't seem to be a lot of point. They themselves are pivoting to datacenter because there is just more money to be made there.
Apple, Nvidia and to a lesser extent all of the companies that are designing chips and using TSMC as a foundry are more relevant than x86 chips.
Between phones, tablets, watches, and Macs, Apple, etc alone sells more devices with Arm chips than PCs and servers sold by Intel.
They have enough scale to fund leading edge processing.
Qualcomm is a bigger seller of processors than anyone since every mobile cellular chip that I’m aware of except for the very few designed by Apple for the low end 16e is sold by Qualcomm.
> I guess that's complicated. It seems like an optimal strategy if you are a chip designer (e.g. Nvidia or AMD vs Qualcomm). Not so much if you are a fabricator. Of course Intel being both makes things a lot harder for them.
That’s exactly the issue. Intel the chip designer would be better off if they used TSMC and Intel the fabricator would have a lot more funding if other chip designers trusted them enough to use them as a foundry.
Every company that both tries to be vertically integrated and a “platform” fails at one or the other.
Google - The Google Pixel is an also ran hobby project. But they are relatively successful with their products across iOS and Android
Apple - a great vertically integrated product. But no one uses Apple Music on Android unless they are an iPhone family with the one off Android user. iTunes has sucked from day one on Windows and Safari for Windows was rapidly abandoned.
Microsoft - the Surface laptops have gained some traction. But sales are miniscule in the grand scheme of things.
But you notice in the case of Google and Microsoft, they aren’t crazy enough to manufacture their hardware.