TSMC
April 21, 2023 6:54 AM Subscribe
I Saw the Face of God in a Semiconductor Factory [ungated] - "As the US boosts production of silicon chips, an American journalist goes inside TSMC, the mysterious Taiwanese company at the center of the global industry." (part of wired's 'let's get physical' series; previously: 1,2)
In 1675, a French merchant named Jacques Savary published The Perfect Merchant, a mercantile manual that came to double as a guide for doing commerce around the world. Albert O. Hirschman[1] cites Savary to explain how capitalism, which would have been regarded as little but avarice as recently as the 16th century, became the sanest ambition of humans in the 17th.also btw...
Savary strongly believed that international trade would be the antidote to war. Humans can’t conduct polyglot commerce across borders without cultivating an understanding of foreign laws, customs, and cultures. Savary also believed the Earth’s resources and the fellowship created by commerce were God-given. “It’s not God’s will that all human necessities be found in the same place,” Savary wrote. “Divine Providence has dispersed its gifts so that humans will trade together and find that their mutual need to help each other establishes ties of friendship among them.”
TSMC’s success is built on its singular comprehension of this dispersion of providential gifts... I’ve thus come to see TSMC as both futuristic and a touching throwback: a tribute to Savary’s largely expired romance in which liberal democracy, international commerce, and progress in science and art are of a piece, both healthful and unstoppable. More practically, however, the company, with its near monopoly on the best chips, serves as the umbo of the region’s so-called Silicon Shield, which is perhaps the sturdiest artifact of 20th-century realpolitik. For an imperial power to seize TSMC, the logic goes, would be to slay the world’s goldenest goose.
- How Apple tied its fortunes to China [ungated] - "The company spent two decades and billions of dollars building a supply chain of unprecedented sophistication. Now, a reckoning is coming."
- What it would take for Apple to disentangle itself from China [ungated] - "The tech giant increasingly finds itself beholden to America's biggest geopolitical rival. But is diversification even possible?"
- Apple's Complex, Secretive Gamble to Move Beyond China [ungated] - "The company is laying the foundation to make phones elsewhere, from the screws on up."
- @ProfPaulPoast: "Are China and Russia in a military alliance? Yes."
- China willing to work with Russian military on several fronts - Chinese defence ministry - "China said its military was willing to work together with the Russian military to strengthen strategic communication and coordination..."
- The Sanctions Sieve - "The U.S. government is trying to stop China from selling chips to Russia that aid its war effort. It's failing."[2,3,4,5,6]
Mention in passing in the article is Cerebras. I looked them up and wrote this:
posted by seanmpuckett at 12:37 PM on April 21, 2023 [15 favorites]
TIL there's a company that makes an AI processor that takes up the entirety of a 300mm silicon wafer. Yes, the whole chip wafer is one functional unit. Roughly the equivalent compute of 80+ of the largest graphics cards available to consumers -- 850K AI tuned processing cores.I kind of love this, and I am kind of frightened by it.
It requires 20,000 amperes of power (at less than 1 volt) to run. The voltage is supplied by thick solid copper fingers that press into the wafer in hundreds of places.
Putting 20KW of power in means also it needs 20KW of absolutely uninterruptible cooling or it will pretty much vaporize. So, it's liquid cooled with redundant, hot-swappable coolant pumps and requires an external source of cold water for its own heat exchanger.
If you were wondering how corporations and governments with essentially infinite budgets who cannot/dare not run their AI models on someone's commercial cloud will run AI, this is it.
And of course the machine can network with others of its kind, to create a cluster in much less space and power than racks and racks of GPUs would. SkyNet in a shipping container. Just add a megawatt of power and a chilled water line as thick as your thigh.
posted by seanmpuckett at 12:37 PM on April 21, 2023 [15 favorites]
The main article was quite good. In my mind I think of TSMC as some kind of golden goose and that if China were to take over Taiwan they would get it and all the benefits that entails but the article reminded me that it wouldn't work that way. Just like TSMC is the only company that makes the chips they do, there's ASML that's the only company that makes the lithography systems they do, or the Japanese company that's the only one that makes the silicon wafers they do. If you take over Taiwan and by some miracle the TSMC factories aren't destroyed or sabotaged you probably aren't easily getting the wafer shipments you need to make the chips and if your litho machines need some work is ASML going to send a tech out to you? So you need to stay on the good side of all of these specialized companies in different countries otherwise or replicate what they do or your world-leading chip making plant can't actually do anything.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 1:53 PM on April 21, 2023 [7 favorites]
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 1:53 PM on April 21, 2023 [7 favorites]
That’s an astoundingly good article - and I am amazed to come away with a little hope for the future. Those people are not like me but they do seem in their own way to have a grasp of a universal sense of good. I am amazed that hardware has come that far; 2nm is pretty damned fine! I enjoyed reading something that treats AI as the backwater it truly is, I nstead of the second coming of Christ. It’s nothing more than code, rooted in human expression. When humans try to be inflexible they generally fail, and successful AI would require inflexible accuracy. Humans can be precise and can act with care, but that will not yield AI, but it can yield things like TSMC makes, and the devices it can power. Tech like that can be used to help fix some of the problems that plague us.
Can.
Whether or not that is the outcome is far from certain, but it s heartening to see some sign of a soul in tech after the past few years of bitcoin and NFT and cars that will kill you if the code is wrong.
Thanks for the post! I will read the other links when I get home this evening.
posted by cybrcamper at 2:12 PM on April 21, 2023
Can.
Whether or not that is the outcome is far from certain, but it s heartening to see some sign of a soul in tech after the past few years of bitcoin and NFT and cars that will kill you if the code is wrong.
Thanks for the post! I will read the other links when I get home this evening.
posted by cybrcamper at 2:12 PM on April 21, 2023
TSMC’s success is built on its singular comprehension of this dispersion of providential gifts... I’ve thus come to see TSMC as both futuristic and a touching throwback: a tribute to Savary’s largely expired romance in which liberal democracy, international commerce, and progress in science and art are of a piece, both healthful and unstoppable. More practically, however, the company, with its near monopoly on the best chips, serves as the umbo of the region’s so-called Silicon Shield, which is perhaps the sturdiest artifact of 20th-century realpolitik. For an imperial power to seize TSMC, the logic goes, would be to slay the world’s goldenest goose.
That's actually a good example of the recent concept technofeudalism.
posted by polymodus at 3:54 PM on April 21, 2023
That's actually a good example of the recent concept technofeudalism.
posted by polymodus at 3:54 PM on April 21, 2023
Good article, but it seems a bit… I don't know if naive is really the correct word, but… too in love with the subject to understand that beauty and grandeur don't count for fuck-all during a war.
In the run-up to the Great War, I'm told that residents of Leuven, home to one of the world's greatest libraries—a veritable palace of books, a monument to the written word in Europe from the days of the incunabula forward—assumed that any invading army would avoid the city, its university, and its famed library, as they had generally done in the past (except occasionally to steal from it, to benefit their own libraries back home, as one does). It had little military value, and to damage it would be an incalculable loss to the entire European world. Everyone's history was contained in the Université library.
The Germans deliberately burned it to the ground in 1914.
It did not matter that many of the books that burned were relevant to German history, or at least the history of the people who comprised modern Germany. Someone decided that burning the library would be a good way to stick a thumb in the eye of the Belgians, and so the library and all its books became ashes.
That is how war works.
The TSMC fabs may well be the most phenomenal facilities ever built, a testament to man's cleverness, to the impossible complexity and infinitesimal scale that humans can achieve only when working together—to construct items which are so mind-bendingly vast yet simultaneously so microscopic that no single person can fully comprend it—in each slice of silicon a little reflection of the divine. And none of that will matter one iota to the person or people who decide whether to blow them, and all of their delicate machinery and impossibly clean assembly lines, into so much scrap metal and toxic waste.
Ironically, there is a non-trivial chance that the weapons that destroy TSMC's fabs will be built around products that originated there.
Every single time that humanity has declared that something is so beautiful, so critical to civilization, so universally important that no one would dare risk it even in war, it has been proven wrong.
There is nothing that humans will not risk destroying, or work to destroy outright, when they are (or believe they are) fighting against an existential threat to their people, their culture, their civilization. Nothing is off the table, no obscenity against god or history or humanity is too great to be carefully considered as an option.
If a war starts in the Strait, the TSMC fabs will probably burn sooner or later, destroyed by one side if not the other, and the world will deal with the consequences. Assuming that parties to a war will act rationally has always been, and will always be, a foolish assumption.
posted by Kadin2048 at 6:34 PM on April 21, 2023 [16 favorites]
In the run-up to the Great War, I'm told that residents of Leuven, home to one of the world's greatest libraries—a veritable palace of books, a monument to the written word in Europe from the days of the incunabula forward—assumed that any invading army would avoid the city, its university, and its famed library, as they had generally done in the past (except occasionally to steal from it, to benefit their own libraries back home, as one does). It had little military value, and to damage it would be an incalculable loss to the entire European world. Everyone's history was contained in the Université library.
The Germans deliberately burned it to the ground in 1914.
It did not matter that many of the books that burned were relevant to German history, or at least the history of the people who comprised modern Germany. Someone decided that burning the library would be a good way to stick a thumb in the eye of the Belgians, and so the library and all its books became ashes.
That is how war works.
The TSMC fabs may well be the most phenomenal facilities ever built, a testament to man's cleverness, to the impossible complexity and infinitesimal scale that humans can achieve only when working together—to construct items which are so mind-bendingly vast yet simultaneously so microscopic that no single person can fully comprend it—in each slice of silicon a little reflection of the divine. And none of that will matter one iota to the person or people who decide whether to blow them, and all of their delicate machinery and impossibly clean assembly lines, into so much scrap metal and toxic waste.
Ironically, there is a non-trivial chance that the weapons that destroy TSMC's fabs will be built around products that originated there.
Every single time that humanity has declared that something is so beautiful, so critical to civilization, so universally important that no one would dare risk it even in war, it has been proven wrong.
There is nothing that humans will not risk destroying, or work to destroy outright, when they are (or believe they are) fighting against an existential threat to their people, their culture, their civilization. Nothing is off the table, no obscenity against god or history or humanity is too great to be carefully considered as an option.
If a war starts in the Strait, the TSMC fabs will probably burn sooner or later, destroyed by one side if not the other, and the world will deal with the consequences. Assuming that parties to a war will act rationally has always been, and will always be, a foolish assumption.
posted by Kadin2048 at 6:34 PM on April 21, 2023 [16 favorites]
TSMC's Taiwan facilities are probably already chock full of explosives to prevent them from falling into China's hands when it invades.
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 8:20 PM on April 21, 2023
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 8:20 PM on April 21, 2023
Every single time that humanity has declared that something is so beautiful, so critical to civilization, so universally important that no one would dare risk it even in war, it has been proven wrong.
MAD 'worked'?
also taiwan and china both have mcdonald's :P
posted by kliuless at 8:53 PM on April 21, 2023 [1 favorite]
MAD 'worked'?
also taiwan and china both have mcdonald's :P
posted by kliuless at 8:53 PM on April 21, 2023 [1 favorite]
Ukraine and Russia both did, too.
posted by Kadin2048 at 9:47 PM on April 21, 2023 [4 favorites]
posted by Kadin2048 at 9:47 PM on April 21, 2023 [4 favorites]
Is TSMC having a moment, for some reason? I just heard of them for the first time a couple weeks ago on the Ezra Klein Show. I'd never heard of them before.
Those kinds of coincidences unnerve me. I don't really believe in them. Has TSMC been operating in semi-stealth mode, and now they've decided to become a brand?
OTOH, TFA mentions a different episode of EKS, a year ago. So maybe this coincidence is really just a coincidence.
posted by gurple at 10:11 PM on April 21, 2023
Those kinds of coincidences unnerve me. I don't really believe in them. Has TSMC been operating in semi-stealth mode, and now they've decided to become a brand?
OTOH, TFA mentions a different episode of EKS, a year ago. So maybe this coincidence is really just a coincidence.
posted by gurple at 10:11 PM on April 21, 2023
TSMC might be having a moment, but it has definitely not been operating in any amount of stealth. For many years, electronics news sites like AnandTech and Tom's Hardware have covered TSMC multiple times per week. Literally hundreds of articles in the past three years just from those two outlets.
Plus it has always been a significant feature of business news from Asia. About a hundred stories in The Economist over the past 25 years.
posted by mbrubeck at 10:47 PM on April 21, 2023 [6 favorites]
Plus it has always been a significant feature of business news from Asia. About a hundred stories in The Economist over the past 25 years.
posted by mbrubeck at 10:47 PM on April 21, 2023 [6 favorites]
Nope, they've been the biggest kid on the block for decade or so - the whole Taiwan/China thing worries a lot of people though
posted by mbo at 10:52 PM on April 21, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by mbo at 10:52 PM on April 21, 2023 [1 favorite]
yeah, i'm pretty sure the moment comes mostly from all the attention a 'chip war' brings. it is after all "The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology." the technological has become (geo)political:
russia's new big mac: the big hit, which "falls apart more as you eat it." :P
posted by kliuless at 11:42 PM on April 21, 2023 [1 favorite]
- Italy Eyes Taiwan Chip Deals Ahead of Decision on China Pact - "Italian officials hinted in private talks with Taiwan that they may be willing to pull out of a controversial pact with China as they sought to secure help with semiconductors, according to people familiar with the issue. Officials from Rome's industry ministry discussed plans to increase cooperation on the production and export of semiconductors during recent meetings in Taipei, said the people who asked not to be named as the talks are not public. The officials told their Taiwanese counterparts that Italy may scrap its participation in China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a massive global infrastructure program." (Italy Minister Confirms Delegation Visited Taiwan For Chip Talks)
- Foxconn founder, seeking Taiwan presidency, has no plan to visit China - "Tension between Taipei and Beijing has surged in the run-up to January's election, as China stages regular military exercises near the island to assert sovereignty claims that Taiwan's democratically elected government rejects. Gou, who is one of Taiwan's most recognisable faces, launched a second bid this month for the presidential ticket of the opposition Kuomintang (KMT), which traditionally favours close ties with China."
- Germany's foreign minister: Parts of China trip 'more than shocking' - "She did not elaborate on specifics, although her remark came after she said China was becoming more repressive internally as well as aggressive externally. For Germany, she said, China is a partner, competitor and systemic rival, but her impression is now 'that the systemic rivals aspect is increasing more and more'. China is Germany's largest trading partner, said Baerbock, but this did not mean Beijing was also Germany's most important trading partner."
russia's new big mac: the big hit, which "falls apart more as you eat it." :P
posted by kliuless at 11:42 PM on April 21, 2023 [1 favorite]
re: cerebras...
"Cerebras was able to train these models in a few weeks on Andromeda, its 16-node CS-2 supercomputer, as there was no effort required to partition models across smaller chips, Feldman said."
"Cerebras was able to train these models in a few weeks on Andromeda, its 16-node CS-2 supercomputer, as there was no effort required to partition models across smaller chips, Feldman said."
- RedPajama replicates LLaMA dataset to build open source, state-of-the-art LLMs - "AI is having its Linux moment."
- A Tech Industry Pioneer Sees a Way for the U.S. to Lead in Advanced Chips - "CMOS chip making is dominated by Taiwanese and South Korean companies. The United States is now planning to spend almost one-third of a trillion dollars of private and public money in an effort to rebuild the nation's chip industry and regain its global dominance."
- Why China Could Dominate the Next Big Advance in Batteries - "Sodium, found all over the world as part of salt, sells for 1 to 3 percent of the price of lithium and is chemically very similar. Recent breakthroughs mean that sodium batteries can now be recharged daily for years, chipping away at a key advantage of lithium batteries. The energy capacity of sodium batteries has also increased."
- CATL launches ultra-high density 500-Wh/kg 'condensed battery' - "Other than the banner figure for specific energy, the company is giving little away at this point." (Nano-composite silicon anode promises EV range boost & 10-min charging)
By relying on supercooled electronic circuits that switch without electrical resistance and as a consequence generate no excess heat at higher speeds, computer designers will be able to circumvent the greatest technological barrier to faster machines, he claims.
“The nation that best seizes the superconducting digital circuit opportunity will enjoy computing superiority for decades to come,” he and a colleague recently wrote in an essay that circulated among technologists and government officials.
“It will shave off the peak of demand for lithium,” said Mike Henry, the chief executive of BHP, the world’s largest mining company... While salt is abundant, the United States accounts for over 90 percent of the world’s readily mined reserves for soda ash, the main industrial source of sodium. Deep under the southwestern Wyoming desert lies a vast deposit of soda ash, formed 50 million years ago. Soda ash there has long been extracted for America’s glass manufacturing industry.
With minimal natural reserves of soda ash and a reluctance to rely on imports from the United States, China instead produces synthetic soda ash at chemical plants fueled by coal.
Is TSMC having a moment, for some reason?
The "for some reason" is that the general trophy for "world's best chips" moved to TSMC starting around 2018 when Intel was having real problems getting their next node to work right while TSMC wasn't.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 4:50 AM on April 22, 2023 [4 favorites]
The "for some reason" is that the general trophy for "world's best chips" moved to TSMC starting around 2018 when Intel was having real problems getting their next node to work right while TSMC wasn't.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 4:50 AM on April 22, 2023 [4 favorites]
I'd forgotten that Wired wrote gushing prose and assumed that everyone reading Wired also knew what GCU put ^^ about Intel fumbling the move below 14nm between 2016-20. That the ground-work had failed when they ended their Tick and Tock pairing of smaller transistors then chip layout improvements. The bad call was made earlier, in 2013 when Intel cut back work on low-power mobile device chips (also why you have a Samsung, Qualcomm or Apple chip in your smart phone) which would have amplified their use of snaller transistors for these low-power designs.
posted by k3ninho at 1:38 AM on April 23, 2023
posted by k3ninho at 1:38 AM on April 23, 2023
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