Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) is the largest foundry in the world. The company has about 500 customers, which includes three tech big names at the top of the list. No points will be awarded if you tell us which company is TSMC’s number one customer. That’s because the answer is so obvious, especially if you’re a loyal AndroidGeek reader, as we mention it often. After Apple, can you name TSMC’s second and third largest customers? Hint: the Huawei is not on the list!
Apple is TSMC’s main customer. The foundry makes the A-series Chipsets used in the iPhone (The Bionic A14, for example, which is used in the iPhone 12 and the Bionic A15 with improvements that will be used in this year’s iPhone 13-series). It also produces Apple’s ARM-based 5nm M1 Chipset. This M1 chipset contains 16 billion transistors and will release the M2 sequence which can even be built using TSMC’s 4nm process node.
TSMC builds the powerful M1 chipset for Apple containing 16 billion transistors. So Apple, TSMC’s main customer, is a pretty easy choice. But guessing TSMC’s second biggest customer can be a little more difficult. First, until this year, Huawei was right behind Apple. However, in July 2020, the US Department of Commerce introduced a change to its export rules.
Foundries using American technology to build Chipsets are not allowed to ship components to Huawei, even if those Chipsets are Kirin branded and designed by the beleaguered manufacturer. The batch of TSMC customers, according to Digitimes (by NewDynamics) shows that Huawei has been replaced by AMD. Using TSMC’s 7nm process node in 2019 allowed AMD’s Zen 2 Ryzen 3000 processor to take the deal from Intel, which at the time was having problems with its 10nm and 7nm chipset. AMD will continue to use a 7nm process until the Zen 4 core is used; which will be built using the 5nm process node. Bearing in mind that Apple is focused on using 5nm components and may switch to 3nm in next year’s A16 Bionic series for the iPhone 14, we can say that AMD is TSMC’s biggest 7nm customer. AMD is expected to remain TSMC’s second largest customer by the end of this year. There are rumors that the qualcomm will return Snapdragon chipset production to TSMC with Snapdragon 898+ expected in the second half of 2022.
In third place is MediaTek. First announced in 2019, the chipset designer’s Dimensity 5G components will roll off TSMC’s assembly line using the 7nm process. The 5G Dimensity 2000 sequence is expected to begin shipping during the first quarter of 2022. It will not only utilize ARM’s V9 architecture, but will also be manufactured using TSMC’s 4nm process node.
A wildcard here is Qualcomm. The last Snapdragon SoCs to come out of the TSMC factory were the Snapdragon 865 2020 and the Snapdragon 865+. But for this year’s 5nm Snapdragon 888 (and the supposed Snapdragon 888+), the Samsung Foundry was tasked with the task. And that should remain unchanged for next year’s Snapdragon 898 chipset, which will supposedly increase performance by 20% and will have a triple architecture with large Cortex-X2 and Cortex-A710 cores and a small Cortex-A510 core .
A change is expected in the second half of next year, when the Snapdragon chipsets will supposedly return to TSMC with the release of the Snapdragon 898+. This component will supposedly be produced using the TSMC’s 4nm process node. Earlier this year, we shared the word of industry analysts who say the world is too dependent on TSMC. As the research firm Capital Economics noted, relying on Taiwan for Chipsets “represents a threat to the global economy. Just consider that the research agency says 92% of the world’s most advanced Chipsets come from TSMC, being the Samsung Foundry of Korea South responsible for the rest.