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For the last few years, phone and tablet SoCs have been the driving force behind production cycles and foundry technology improvements. Over the final decade, yearly product introduction cycles for phones became the norm, and the entire semiconductor manufacture retooled to match this requirement. Now, TSMC thinks the flower is off this particular rose.

HPC — high-performance computing — has replaced phones equally the major driver of acquirement, co-ordinate to TSMC. While this includes some hardware common to the PC, like GPUs, it also includes accelerators, new specialized types of microprocessors designed for inference and car learning workloads, AI processors, and a wealth of other types of products. In that location's probably fifty-fifty some overlap between categories; some companies like Qualcomm have played up the idea of leveraging its SoC capabilities of CPU, GPU, and DSP in the same parcel every bit a heterogeneous compute platform.

TSMC HQ

TSMC headquarters in Hsinchu, Taiwan.

TSMC, meanwhile, is expecting the profits for those wins to wind up in its own coffers. The company projects annual revenue for 2018 could exist up as much as 15 percent, with the semiconductor industry as a whole growing roughly 8 per centum. This graph from Statista shows market place share information for TSMC versus everybody else.

TSMC-MarketShare

Whoof. GlobalFoundries and UMC cheque out alright, but everybody else is buried back in the pocket-sized leagues (and UMC really isn't a leading-edge foundry). Samsung, were information technology on this graph, would presumably account for as much market share as GF, but Samsung isn't a pure-play foundry (information technology builds hardware for its own employ besides).

Shifting over to HPC equally a revenue driver, equally opposed to the phone market, implies some interesting things about the hereafter of phones. Information technology was companies like Apple and Samsung that pushed foundries to roll out yearly cadence updates and indirectly encouraged a reduction in capability between foundry nodes. The reason we now hear and so much almost second- or third-generation process nodes is considering everyone now expects each new SoC to offering improved performance on yearly cadences, fifty-fifty when those cadences don't marshal with foundry upgrade cycles.

Overall, we don't expect introduction speeds to slow downward much. While shifting away from phones with their yearly cadences might seem bonny in certain businesses, there's an ground forces of marketing teams and a keeping-up-with-the-jones' mentality that button for yearly product cycles, fifty-fifty when they don't necessarily make much sense. TSMC's sales growth may also be the result of winning back Qualcomm, which is rumored to be moving back to TSMC with the Snapdragon 845.

Tiptop image credit: Facebook information heart