This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page. Terms of use.

509089-facebook-data-center-prineville-oregon

For the last few years, phone and tablet SoCs have been the driving force behind product cycles and foundry technology improvements. Over the terminal decade, yearly product introduction cycles for phones became the norm, and the unabridged semiconductor industry retooled to friction match this requirement. Now, TSMC thinks the flower is off this item rose.

HPC — high-performance calculating — has replaced phones as the major driver of acquirement, according to TSMC. While this includes some hardware common to the PC, similar GPUs, it also includes accelerators, new specialized types of microprocessors designed for inference and machine learning workloads, AI processors, and a wealth of other types of products. There's probably even some overlap between categories; some companies like Qualcomm have played up the idea of leveraging its SoC capabilities of CPU, GPU, and DSP in the same package as a heterogeneous compute platform.

TSMC HQ

TSMC headquarters in Hsinchu, Taiwan.

TSMC, meanwhile, is expecting the profits for those wins to wind up in its ain coffers. The company projects annual acquirement for 2022 could be up as much as fifteen per centum, with the semiconductor manufacture as a whole growing roughly viii percent. This graph from Statista shows market share data for TSMC versus everybody else.

TSMC-MarketShare

Whoof. GlobalFoundries and UMC bank check out alright, merely everybody else is cached back in the minor leagues (and UMC actually isn't a leading-border foundry). Samsung, were information technology on this graph, would presumably account for as much market share as GF, simply Samsung isn't a pure-play foundry (it builds hardware for its own utilise every bit well).

Shifting over to HPC as a revenue driver, as opposed to the phone marketplace, implies some interesting things about the hereafter of phones. It was companies like Apple and Samsung that pushed foundries to roll out yearly cadence updates and indirectly encouraged a reduction in capability betwixt foundry nodes. The reason we at present hear so much about second- or 3rd-generation procedure nodes is because everyone now expects each new SoC to offer improved performance on yearly cadences, even when those cadences don't align with foundry upgrade cycles.

Overall, we don't expect introduction speeds to deadening down much. While shifting abroad from phones with their yearly cadences might seem attractive in certain businesses, there's an army of marketing teams and a keeping-up-with-the-jones' mentality that push for yearly production cycles, fifty-fifty when they don't necessarily make much sense. TSMC's sales growth may also be the result of winning dorsum Qualcomm, which is rumored to exist moving dorsum to TSMC with the Snapdragon 845.

Top paradigm credit: Facebook data center