American chipmaker AMD ranks third in terms of revenue among customers of Taiwan's TSMC. Only Apple and MediaTek are ahead of AMD in this indicator.
This position of AMD provides the company with the opportunity to work more closely with TSMC and influence its next-generation hardware development strategies.
At the moment, cooperation with TSMC brings Apple 25.93% of revenue, MediaTek - 5.8%, and AMD - 4.36%. Qualcomm, Broadcom, NVIDIA, Sony and others follow.
For a long time, AMD was a client of TSMC and GlobalFoundries, however, the latter closed its advanced technological processes in 2018, and the American manufacturer focused on cooperation with the Taiwanese company. TSMC currently manufactures CPUs, GPUs and SoCs for AMD using N7 and N6 technologies.
Companies such as NVIDIA and Qualcomm have slashed TSMC orders in favor of South Korean Samsung Foundry. This determines the relatively low profit margin provided by cooperation with TSMC.
According to Tom’s Hardware portal, AMD will increase its stake in the Taiwanese company, and will also use the N5 in future processors based on Zen 4. AMD will increase cooperation with TSMC after the acquisition of the American software developer Xilinx.
NVIDIA's transfer of customer orders for Ampere GPUs to Samsung Foundry has allowed it to surpass Qualcomm and Broadcom in TSMC's revenue rankings. NVIDIA is manufacturing the A100 data center core in partnership with a Taiwanese company. Probably, NVIDIA will transfer production of products based on Ada Lovelace and Hopper to TSMC.
With the start of the use of N3 technology in 2022-2023. Intel is likely to step up its partnership with TSMC, which now has a 0.84% revenue share. According to experts, in the future Intel may become one of the three largest customers of the Taiwanese manufacturer.
Late last month, news outlet TTV said AMD and Qualcomm were unhappy that TSMC had reserved a large chunk of 3nm processors for Apple. The chip maker favors the corporation because it offers more expensive and long-term contracts.
In this regard, AMD and Qualcomm are forced to turn to Samsung for the production of 3nm chips. In November, rumors spread that AMD would be the first purchaser of these chips. The South Korean company promises to start shipping in the first half of 2022, but analysts believe Samsung won't make it until 2023.
bbabo.Net