It is clear that TSMC has been one of the key figures in AMD’s revival and success. Sunnyvale decided to move to a wonderful business model when it divested its stake in GlobalFoundries in 2012. It was a movement questioned by some and supported by others, but the truth is that it ultimately proved successful.

Maintaining a business model with its own semiconductor factories requires a large financial investment both in research and development to be able to jump into increasingly advanced nodes in time, and in machine and human talent to be able to manufacture them. It goes without saying that AMD wasn’t at its best before Zen, and the last thing it needed was to keep spending more and more.

Therefore, and seeing where AMD has come, it is clear that the company made the right decision in the end, I have no doubt about it. The adoption of the “fairytale” model has allowed the now giant Sunnyvale focus on the development and design of your GPUs and coresit gave him the opportunity to centralize all his resources in developing new truly competitive architectures and freed him from the burden of his own factories.

However, this could become a double-edged sword, according to analysts. AMD is completely dependent on TSMC, as The Taiwanese giant is in charge of “cooking” the chip recipes what happens to Sunnyvale every year. The 5nm chiplets that give life to the Ryzen 7000 have left their factories, as have the 6nm I/O chips that accompany these processors.

The idea that investors convey to us is this TSMC’s delay in moving to the 3nm node could hurt AMDand would give Intel a chance to take the lead with its next-generation nodes. They are not without reason, and having own factories is ultimately an advantage if the company has enough resources for them to progress both in production capacity and in nodes.

This is evident AMD won’t be the only one hurt by TSMC’s delay in leaps to new manufacturing processes, but it’s also important to remember that when these types of delays occur, the Taiwanese company ultimately has to decide which client to allocate most of its production to, and in the face of AMD’s lack of a situation that would also be severely affected , as TSMC would almost certainly prefer Apple.

On the other hand, it should also be taken into account that the advanced nodes that TSMC uses, based on GAA (gate all around) transistor technology, are rank behind more advanced Intel alternatives, according to analysts. Personally, I think AMD could eventually pursue a deal with Samsung if necessary, which in fact NVIDIA already did at the time to manufacture the Ampere GPUs used in the GeForce RTX 30.