TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co) is the company that manufactures all the GPU silicon for AMD and NVIDIA. Apart from that also Qualcomm and Mediatek are large customers. TSMC has reduced production prices for chips manufactured with 20nm or 28nm structures, which might lead to a little price cut regarding products from the afore mentioned vendors.

According to a report on DigiTimes the utilization of TSMC's 20nm as well as 28nm production lines dropped to a value between 60 and 70 percent during the second quarter of 2015. A fab needs to maintain 80 percent utilization per production line to write black numbers. It appears that TSMC wants to increase the number of orders by reducing the manufacturing price.

It appears that AMD and NVIDIA will benefit from the reduced prices. Both graphics chip makers let TSMC manufacture their complex GPUs, which incorporate more than eight billion transistors. At the same time it looks like TSMC is going to lose a substantial amount of orders, since Apple, the largest customer for 20nm chips is going to switch back to Samsung. The Korean electronic giant will be manufacturing Apple's A9 system-on-a-chip using 14nm and 16nm FinFET technology.




Source: DigiTimes