blastdoor wrote:Yeah, but GF didn't have the high-volume, high-margin customers that TSMC has. TSMC has Apple, Huwaei, Qualcomm, and AMD. GF had AMD and... chirp, chirp.
Did GF just run out of money, or did they find they had been going down a failed path and not have enough money to restart from the beginning? If it was the latter, it's not impossible for the same thing to happen to TSMC, or Samsung... arguably you could say it already happened to Intel.
Point is, there's no guarantee that TSMC will succeed at any of these nodes. As JBI said, this stuff is hard. Somewhere along the line, there will be a process node that is too hard for anyone to succeed at. If nothing else, you absolutely positively cannot make a chip with features smaller than the atoms your circuits are made at -- and most likely, the limit for mass produced parts is going to be a few iterations before that. We don't yet know where the end will be, but it can't be too many shrinks away.
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