I would rank it probably as:
1) TSMC
2) Samsung
3) Intel
AMD now divested into Global Foundries used to be on there as well, but they're pretty much dead in the water at this point. Both AMD and Nvidia use TSMC now actually. It's kind of funny that Intel is the only remaining foundry within the United States at this point except for maybe Texas Instruments, which lets be honest, doesn't really count.
You're exactly right. There's a lot of money to be made outside of 3/7/10nm. I'm not sure why geeks get hooked on having the smallest/biggest or nothing and assuming anything else is failure
>most chip production doesn't occur at cutting edge nodes
Of course, but the margins are much better on cutting-edge nodes. Being second-to-market on a node doesn't save you much on capital costs, but you have to compete harder on wafer pricing. TSMC have about 5x the revenues of GF and the gap is widening.
> Of course, but the margins are much better on cutting-edge nodes.
No, not anymore for at least a decade, and this is the very reason GloFo bailed out on the "Arms Race." Extreme capex with uncertain payback times looked very scary to their investors.
I've no idea if that's true but assuming it is, then from next year it's pure profit and they are the big fish in a pond of 2 (or 3?) fish with no new fish in sight. People will be using this process for years and years to come. With so little competition at 7nm and the high barriers to entry (even over time) they can surely maintain their margins for much longer than at previous nodes. I'm not saying bailing wasn't the right decision for Global Foundries and the risk might be higher now, but so the rewards.
I don't think Texas Instruments deserves to be counted out. Their revenue last year was greater than Nvidia. Given that the margins on microcontrollers and DSPs are not nearly as large as on GPUs, they're shipping a lot of chips.
Granted I have no idea what their process node is, which they don't advertise anywhere presumably because people buying microcontrollers and DSPs do not really care about an arbitrary silicon feature size number. It's probably not cutting edge, but they're a big foundry regardless.
GlobalFoundaries is definitely not dead either. They even do 14nm which is hardly very outdated (and is probably the last practical node anyway).
ST has been boasting about their new STM32G series as being their first 90nm product, though I doubt it'll start a nm race in the microcontroller world...
Well there ya go. Been using the ESP32 for a while, yet blissfully ignorant of it being a 40nm device. Though I guess that explains how they can get all that SRAM in at that price point?
The word "foundry" refers specifically to a company that manufactures others' chip designs for them, such as TSMC. Intel discontinued it's foundry business AFAIK.
The more general word would be "fab", which is any semiconductor manufacturing facility.
AMD now divested into Global Foundries used to be on there as well, but they're pretty much dead in the water at this point. Both AMD and Nvidia use TSMC now actually. It's kind of funny that Intel is the only remaining foundry within the United States at this point except for maybe Texas Instruments, which lets be honest, doesn't really count.