TSMC sees chip shortage lasting into 2022
If you look at the numbers 50% of TSMC&#x27;s revenue is made up by the 5nm and 7nm as of 2021. And just one company, Apple, makes up 25% of TSMC&#x27;s revenue. While the M1 is a great chip - it also just launched and Apple has been one fourth of TSMC&#x27;s revenue for years. This means that around 40 to 50% of the top performance nodes suitable for general purpose use in data centers, workstations, etc. is being used for mobile devices -&gt; mostly phones and tablets.<p>On one hand I have to thank Apple for pushing semiconducter development and making ARM a real x86 replacement outside the DC. However, it seems really wasteful and like a mis-allocation of resources to put the top performing silicon in devices that don&#x27;t really need it. Even the M1 architecture is handicapped by Apple itself. Besides the most obnoxious use of M1 Mac mini&#x27;s in DC basically for the sole purpose of iOS and macOS app development, the CPUs are mostly used in consumer devices. Their main purpose for use in consumer devices? To eliminate the need for a fan and to improve battery life. Both of these things are great but also just not high on the list of problems humanity needs to solve.<p>What I am trying to say is that, for the last few decades, it at least seemed like &#x27;real&#x27; work drove semiconductor development. From cloud giants to a local companies data center, performance and power efficiency were what drove and purchased the bleeding edge CPU&#x2F;GPUs (I suppose in some ways GPUs were driven by consumers&#x2F;entertainment reasons). Now it seems like luxury products are taking on that role.<p>I call these mobile iOS&#x2F;Android products luxury products because outside of novelty purposes no one is really producing movies or something of value beyond a word document on these devices. Traditional laptops and desktops &quot;won&quot; in a way for the same reason that the M1 processor exists; mobile operating systems still have never matured to replace then so instead even Apple is bringing mobile software <i>back</i> to the traditional computer.<p>The most worrying aspect of this development of course is how locked down most of these devices are. iOS devices are of course in a walled garden and even macOS has more &amp; more restrictions. I can easily imagine a day where consumer level electronics are completely locked down and the only way to get a open&#x2F;free platform is to buy server hardware - if that is even possible. Server hardware is also moving to ARM and while not locked down in a software or hardware way it is locked down in the sense that only a few companies can buy it or at least no one so far is interested in selling single digit volumes of ARM servers. The days of open computing for the general person certainly seem numbered.