Apple to occupy 90% of TSMC 3nm capacity in 2023

Some people may criticise the &quot;monopoly&quot; Apply have of TSMC latest nodes, but I think it&#x27;s ultimately good. TSMC need to know they have a customer for new nodes in order to invest in them, thats what Apple are in the unique position to give with their war chest of cash. This investment by Apple eventually leads its way to other customers and smaller businesses. The whole industry thrives on the wake Apple leaves behind.<p>As a complete other aside, I&#x27;m excited to see what comes with the M3, particularly any neural cores. I would be much more excited about all the new AI tools if they could be run locally, Apple are again in the unique position to be able to make that possible for the masses. WWDC is hopefully going to be super interesting.<p>What we need is a sudden and massive increase in memory on these chips to make having LLMs viable on everyday affordable devices. I do wander if that may be something Apple surprise us with.

It&#x27;s astonishing how TSMC is the only company in the world that can do this. They are just so far ahead of everyone else in manufacturing. It&#x27;d sure be nice to have more capacity.<p>The Economist had a good article a few months ago about the volume of chip manufacture by country and process size. The takeaway is Taiwan leads &lt; 10nm, the US and Taiwan lead 10-22nm, and that &gt; 22nm is an interesting mix including South Korea and China.<p>Chart: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.economist.com&#x2F;img&#x2F;b&#x2F;400&#x2F;834&#x2F;90&#x2F;media-assets&#x2F;image&#x2F;20230204_ASC624.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.economist.com&#x2F;img&#x2F;b&#x2F;400&#x2F;834&#x2F;90&#x2F;media-assets&#x2F;imag...</a><p>Article: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.economist.com&#x2F;asia&#x2F;2023&#x2F;02&#x2F;02&#x2F;americas-hoped-for-asian-semiconductor-pact-looks-tricky" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.economist.com&#x2F;asia&#x2F;2023&#x2F;02&#x2F;02&#x2F;americas-hoped-for...</a>

&gt; Apple has booked nearly 90% of chip supplier TSMC&#x27;s first-generation 3-nanometer process capacity this year<p>No surprise, the N3B (&quot;first gen&quot;) process has bad economics and poor yields. Everyone else is waiting for N3E, which is pretty different to N3B.<p>See: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.semianalysis.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;tsmcs-3nm-conundrum-does-it-even" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.semianalysis.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;tsmcs-3nm-conundrum-does-it-e...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fuse.wikichip.org&#x2F;news&#x2F;7048&#x2F;n3e-replaces-n3-comes-in-many-flavors&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fuse.wikichip.org&#x2F;news&#x2F;7048&#x2F;n3e-replaces-n3-comes-in...</a>

Tim Cook must sweat bullets every time he reads a headline about China potentially invading Taiwan.

I’d love some super smart technologist in this forum to give a realistic and practical pathway to disrupting apple in the mobile or “computer” market.<p>Given the fact that Apple has such a dominant position in every part of the supply chain infrastructure I’m challenged with being able to see how any organization could possibly come up with something that pushes Apple into bankruptcy.

&gt; while Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo believes that new 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro models coming in 2024 will feature M3 Pro and M3 Max chips.<p>I am really excited about the M3. The M1, with its unified memory it can already run decently large LLMs. It would be great if Apple was able to make the M3 even better at that. In addition, it seems like there is a lot of momentum in releasing models that the user can run on consumer hardware. I would love to have my own private LLMs running on my own hardware

Is there any projection on when and if Intel will catch TSMC? Seems TSMC keep managing to deliver every single planned process improvement on time.

And this is what we call monopsony.

Wasn&#x27;t this already announced but at 100%? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.extremetech.com&#x2F;computing&#x2F;343291-apple-has-procured-tsmcs-entire-first-run-of-3nm-chips" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.extremetech.com&#x2F;computing&#x2F;343291-apple-has-procu...</a> or they are just changing their order?

The article quotes 36gb of ram for the m3 MacBook pros. Which made me wonder: why do we use power-of-2 gb ram configurations? If apple does 12&#x2F;24&#x2F;36, is that reasonable, or is there a reason not to?

This could mean Qualcomm will release again something like the Snapdragon 888 and Snapdragon Gen 1, when they temporarily switched from TSMC to Samsung, with disappointing results.

Who gets the remaining 10% capacity?

...and when M3 laptops come to market, M1 laptops (10x the performance 95% of users will need) will drop to $499, a giant shovel of dirt spread over the Wintel coffin

Given what has transpired about the Chips act for foreign manufacturers including TSMC I find it incredibly dumb and shortsighted of TSMC to hedge all their bets on Apple.

I feel this is a complete waste of leading tech: going into another slate of Apple products that do not need these advancements. I feel these slots should go to GPUs for AI and Apple is just hogging the capacity. It’d be one thing if Apple actually worked on AI softwares a bit and made it readily available to developers.