One day the founder and head of Advanced Micro Devices, Jerry Sanders, said: “Only real men have fabs”. Well, in this case the Big Three of the Asian chip manufacturers including TSMC, UMC and Chartered, really deserve being called “real men”, as they almost own the monopoly for production of chips of any possible complexity.
Of course, the biggest part of these chips are the chips for electronic appliances of all kinds, which production does not require top-end technologies. And the users of this equipment simply do not know anything about the manufacturers of the chips used in it, the same as any average car owner doesn’t actually know, which small company assembled the carburetor for his car.
The PC owners are usually more curious, although not all of them, of course. And surely they are not interested in everything. For example, not too many people care about the name of the DSP manufacturer in their hard disk drive. However, there is a special nomination where computer users are more or less familiar with the manufacturers’ names, so that they at least know who TSMC and UMC are. Of course, we are talking about NVIDIA and ATI graphics processors. Besides, AMD’s recent plans also suggest that the technical potential of these two independent manufacturers will also spread over the CPU field. So, who these two majors actually are? How did they grow to what they are today?
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