Now the design of chips is not as good as the OEM production of chips. At present, there are many companies that can design chips, there are Huawei, millet, OPPO, etc. in China, but the chip design is good, and there is no good foundry to achieve it, just like Huawei's Kirin chip, the performance is not worse than the snapdragon of the same generation, but it is lost in the FOUNDC link. Therefore, there is no shortage of companies designing chips, what is missing is the company of foundry chips, and in terms of chip foundry, what is currently doing well is TSMC and Samsung.
These two foundries are so famous because they work on the core components of mobile phones or computers, either CPUs or GPUs. The Snapdragon 8gen1 mobile phone chip is Samsung OEM, NVIDIA's graphics card is basically Samsung OEM, and TSMC's OEM has Apple's A series and M series chips, and AMD's CPU and GPU. Both of these are currently the larger and more well-known foundries, who is the first of them?
Many people may choose: TSMC, but the data of Knometa Research research institute tells us that Samsung is the boss of the chip foundry. In 2020, it accounted for 17% of the total global foundry output, and expanded to 19% in 2021, while TSMC's total foundry output in the past two years has hardly changed, all of which are 13%. For this data, many friends may feel a little incredible, saying that TSMC is good at OEM, why is it lagging behind Samsung in terms of output?
This is easy to understand from the perspective of the main customers served by these two foundries. Samsung's main OEM in 2021 is the boss of the mobile phone chip industry, Snapdragon, and the boss of the GPU industry, NVIDIA, while TSMC's FOUNDRy is Apple and AMD, both of which are not as large as the previous two in their respective fields. Although AMD's Ryzen™ 5000 series CPU is also A TSMC OEM, the two legs held by Samsung are too thick, the arms can't twist the thighs, and they still lose to Samsung in terms of production.
In addition, Knometa Research data also tells us that wafer foundries have not escaped the rule of two and eight. Samsung, TSMC, Micron, SK Haihushi, Jiaoxia/ Western Digital, these wafer foundries account for more than 50% of the world's production capacity, can eat meat. And other Huahong, Shanghua, UMC, SMIC, Lijidian, Huahong Semiconductor and dozens of other foundries to divide the remaining share, barely able to drink soup. So we have to try to get into the front two and avoid doing the back eight.