Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…They are truly the only foundry at the leading edge that does not in any way compete with their customers. They don’t have their own end-product division. They don’t design their own chips. It is truly, they only serve their customers, and they do not compete at any other part of the value chain with them. If you’re asking yourself, how did the world arrange itself in this way, such that you could have a trillion-dollar company that doesn’t do any design, that doesn’t do any architecture, that doesn’t do any EDA tools like Cadence or Synopsys? They’re they’re not NVIDIA, they’re not ARM, they’re not Cadence Synopsys, they’re not ASML, like they’re not their own equipment vendor. What enabled this? One of the things that I think is underappreciated and we didn’t talk that much about with Morris, but the rise of ARM. If you try to play forward a world where Intel and the x86 architecture had maintained its dominance, you wouldn’t have had this window, this opportunity for the value chain to rearrange itself. But the fact that there was an architecture, as we talked about on our ACQ2 episode with Rene from ARM, this architecture that became dominant in phones and then computers and then servers and now is coupled on with all these AI chips, you open the door to have a dedicated foundry for ARM chips in a way where if it had stayed x86, it’s not like you could start a new foundry for all the fabless x86 companies. For the longest time, Intel was the only x86 company. And then AMD of course is the second source, that AMD is a TSMC customer. That’s the one edge case is like, well there is AMD that designs x86 chips that TSMC manufactures, but that’s not the common case of the way it would’ve gone for in an x86-dominated world. It would’ve been fully integrated Intel. One super straightforward and enormous example of this is Apple. If ARM hadn’t become such a viable CPU architecture platform and Apple hadn’t standardized their Apple silicon on ARM, probably Intel would be making all of the leading edge chips that go into your iPhone. They already had the Intel relationship. Macs were running on x86 Intel chips.…

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