LOGIC

Shots are being fired at merchant silicon.
Amazon’s Graviton3 completely commoditizes generalized CPU compute while also bringing advanced packaging, PCIe 5.0, and DDR5 to the server market ~6 months before Intel and AMD.
Server and rack level system architecture choices propel Graviton 3 to new heights in cost per unit of compute.
There’s something special about the packaging behind the paywall.

There is a battle brewing in the photoresist, coater, and developer market due to EUV advancement. This battle could cost Tokyo Electron their dominance over a $5B+ annual revenue market and lead to some photoresist companies such as TOK to lose a major market. JSR and Tokyo are bringing Metal Oxide Resist (MOR) to the market to fight off Lam Research’s encroachment with their dry resist technology.

Intel could follow the path of many other American goliaths such as IBM and General Electric. A slow slide to irrelevancy, spinning off business, and bringing shame to what was once pride for American ingenuity. Instead of that conservative route, they are going to put the metal to the floor, spend every dime Intel makes on investing in more manufacturing, design, and in general catching up in technology.

SemiAnalysis has been hearing murmurings about TSMC’s N3 having poor yields, poor metal stack performance, being very expensive, and being too late for Apple’s 2022 iPhone. These can’t be confirmed, but we can confirm that TSMC N3 is now shipping in Q1 2023.
The hiccup on N3 brings many questions about TSMC’s competitive positioning versus Intel 20A and Samsung 2nm. Both these nodes are very aggressive and aimed at getting back into a competitive position against TSMC. Intel and Samsung even claim the nodes will bring leadership.

Low utilization rates, countless divested assets, cut R&D and capex, and still doesn’t make money in the greatest semiconductor boom of all time.
Playing up on nationalism while having their largest fab and ongoing investment in Singapore.