TSMC Q4 2022 Earnings Thread
Record numbers, but all eyes are on utilization rates and capital spending guidance for 2023.
TSM came in on the low end of previous guidance for revenue due to utilization issues from economic weakness. $TSM Margins were above guidance, primarily due to foreign exchange changes. TSMC specifically cited utilization rates as a bit of a drag.
N5 and N7 grew in 2022, but there is some weakness now.
Q4 had a slight decrease in wafer shipments year on year, but huge ASP increases from N5

Intel earnings thread /1
Datacenter and AI group did totally horribly...
Literally no operating profit.
The worst quarter in the last couple of decades of the history of datacenter.
$INTC $AMD $TSM $NVDA $MRVL The guide down on Q4 is immense!
Q1 $18.4B Revenue, $1.98 EPS
Q2 $15.3B Revenue, -$0.11 EPS
Q3 $15.3B Revenue, $0.25 EPS
Q4 $14.5B Revneue, -$0.01 EPS
The business is imploding.

#OCPSummit22 kicking off. First keynote by Intel
"We have an amazing track record of improving energy efficiency" - @intel Zane Bell
Umm...
He's talking about datacenters, but Moore's law slide here is a bit funny given the history.
The bit on server resilience is very important. Intel is releasing a spec for immersion cooling, and will offer warranty too
"Air is running out of steam. It's time to embrace immersion cooling" - @intel Zane Bell
"More energy in immersion cooling than ever, the time is now"
#OCPSummit22

The story of Cormac, an African American mechanical engineer who has done everything he's supposed to, but been screwed over by life and our American system.
He doesn't want a handout, just a job.
Please read, like, and retweet this thread.
Reach out if you can help!
1/13 Cormac did everything right in life, everything our society says.
He took dual enrollment and AP classes in high school.
He went to a state university with a scholarship + job that covered a chunk of the costs.
He chose to pursue mechanical engineering at a top 50 school!
2/13

Intel Is Throwing The Kitchen Sink, But Is The Turn Around Plan Reasonable?
Deep dive on Tower Semiconductor Fabs/IP
Intel Culture Shift
Future Product And Roadmap Competitiveness By Business Unit
$INTC $TSM $TSEM $NVDA $AMD $MRVL $AMAT $ASML $LRCX $KLA
semianalysis.substack.com/p/intel-is-thr… I mapped out Tower Semiconductors capacity. I also wrote a lot about their specific differentiated technologies.
In short, Intel acquired ~2 million wafers per year of a lot of niche technologies and great people to help accelerate their foundry push.
$INTC $TSEM $TSMC $UMC $GFS

The story about Alibaba/THead 5nm Arm server chip is more complicated than it seems!
$BABA/Chinese media say in-house independent design
Taiwan media has said it uses a Taiwan based design house
The theory is it's externally designed to get around IP restriction.
/1
$NVDA $SFTBY On first glance, stellar specs. SpecInt score matching the best current chips from AMD and demolishing Intel.
2 die package with 60B transistors!
64KB+64KB L1 cache, 1MB L2 cache, 128MB L3 cache
8 channel DDR5 4400, 96x lanes PCIe 5.0
2.75-3.2GHz, 250W TDP
Damn impressive!
2/

The new Macbook Pro's are HALF as efficient as the Macbook Air/Pro 13" in web browsing!
Battery life is a massive improvement over the successor, but efficiency is down quite a bit compared to these original M1 Macs.
Part of this is due to screen differences, part due to SOC/mem. With the die shots Apple released. I think there are some errors in it.
Using them for face value, @Locuza_ + @andreif7 calculated die sizes:
M1 Pro 245.08-245.92mm^2
M1 Max 429.17-432.35mm^2
Both noticed some these, but it should be
M1 Pro 241.7mm^2
M1 Max 383.5mm^2

TSMC node transitions are slowing down heavily!
At N7, cost/transistor stopped scaling
At N5, cost/transistor went up and SRAM scaling slowed
At N3 cadence moved to 2.5 years and power/SRAM scaling poor
And now N2 is 2025
This Intel/Samsung moment to catch up!
$TSM $INTC $SSNLF N7 is an absolute monster, exiting Q3 at over 170,000 wafer per month run rate.
N5 is the slowest ramp for TSMC ever, still trodding along under 60k WPM average for the quarter.
IoT is the biggest grower, followed by seasonal smartphone ramp. HPC took the back seat this quarter

Report from DigiTimes stating TSMC is going to negotiate with equipment and materials suppliers about 15%+ price cuts!
Simultaneously they are doing 20% price increases.
The latter is likely, I don't think the prior is possible.
Explanation👇
$AMAT $ASML $LRCX $KLAC $TOELY $TSM These SemiCap firms have a vested interest in seeing competitors such as Samsung $SSNLF, Intel $INTC, $UMC, GlobalFoundries, SMIC, etc.
Customer concentration is bad for suppliers!
How can TSMC get price cuts agreed when SemiCap can deprioritize them and sell everything anyways?

Biggest takeaways from $AMD earnings.
$3.85B revenue, +99% YoY
48% Gross Margin
Guidance upped to 60% YoY to $15.61B!
1. AMD is now a high end company. They are foregoing the low end market which used to be a refuge and are fully moving to the high end. 2. Enterprise, Embedded and Semicustom that includes consoles and datacenter CPUs grew 19% QoQ and 183% YoY to $1.6B, flat share vs Intel from Q1 to Q2
3. Client Computing and Graphics had revenue grow 7% QoQ and 65% YoY to $2.25B, flat share vs Intel from Q1 to Q2
$INTC $AMD