Tuesday, August 7th 2018
TSMC Fabs Offline, Hit by a Virus, Production Impacts Confirmed
TSMC is the most popular semiconductor foundry, has been called the "savior of fabless chipmakers," and is also one of Taiwan's most valuable companies. It's also the principal foundry for chipmakers such as NVIDIA and AMD (GPUs). Its most valuable production, however, is that of Apple's A-series application processors that drive the main breadwinners of the company - iPhones. Imagine the cataclysm unleashed if a virus were to spread in the company that contract-manufactures extremely complex chip designs. According to Reuters, that cataclysm is upon TSMC.
According to DigiTimes, a WannaCry-variant ransomware infected not just workstations at TSMC, but also certain fab machines (which are driven by computers). The infection has caused a shutdown of several of TSMC's fabs, including its high-volume 12-inch ones. These machines apparently run on unpatched Windows 7, probably because they're connected to a private network instead of the Internet. TSMC has tasked all of its human resources to disinfect the affected machines. The company hopes to have its fabs fully operational by Monday (13th August), but not before the downtime affects the supply-chains Apple and other high-value clients. An estimated $179 million is wiped from TSMC's Q3 revenues due to this downtime. Although it could affect shipments of APs to Apple, impact on the inventories of Apple products could be minimal, according to market analysts. It remains to be seen if TSMC's other clients see similarly minimal impact; or if TSMC is prioritizing a trillion-dollar client.
Sources:
Reuters, DigiTimes
According to DigiTimes, a WannaCry-variant ransomware infected not just workstations at TSMC, but also certain fab machines (which are driven by computers). The infection has caused a shutdown of several of TSMC's fabs, including its high-volume 12-inch ones. These machines apparently run on unpatched Windows 7, probably because they're connected to a private network instead of the Internet. TSMC has tasked all of its human resources to disinfect the affected machines. The company hopes to have its fabs fully operational by Monday (13th August), but not before the downtime affects the supply-chains Apple and other high-value clients. An estimated $179 million is wiped from TSMC's Q3 revenues due to this downtime. Although it could affect shipments of APs to Apple, impact on the inventories of Apple products could be minimal, according to market analysts. It remains to be seen if TSMC's other clients see similarly minimal impact; or if TSMC is prioritizing a trillion-dollar client.
42 Comments on TSMC Fabs Offline, Hit by a Virus, Production Impacts Confirmed
Lack of supply is not price fixing, and has nothing to do with price fixing, and isn't a valid defense to price fixing charges either. So if you think they are trying to use this as excuse for price fixing, sorry you're wrong.
New process never arrives on schedule
u have any idea how the share market works....searching for logic....take this
in the past 1-2 year amd, nvidia, intel all share jump nonsensically amd jumped 1000% nvidia 900% intel 75% .....what a win win for the market.....and people think bitcoin is the only scam
BOTTOM line : Just because of few ignorant fanboys who hate to accept the reality company always win and consumer loses at the end.
I guess that can fall under a fool and his money are soon parted ? like the vid cards and the miners got the prices up as they are / were . I can do with out that new card if you know its a should be 400 buck card and its listed at 1000 + bucks . I don't need it that bad i'll run off the CPU graphics till prices get more to real ..lol.... or find something else better to do in the meantime
AFAIK, AMD was working on 12nm GPUs for production at TSMC. NVIDIA sources all of their GPUs from TSMC. TSMC also has other customers besides them. It's not TSMC's place to announce who is going to be affected by the problems. It could easily reach us consumers by way of market forces.
Don't mean to derail though. Glad I got my GPU purchases out of the way for awhile....regardless if the virus thing is true or not, I can safely ignore this crappy side of the industry.
You on the other hand, are you not the same guy who believes in flat earth theories? I think that speaks volumes about who is the "ignorant" here.I don't recall a case against TSMC? You are thinking of the DRAM/NAND cartel cases.
And I promise you their stock is already tanking in relation to this news, which make no mistake, hurts the executives more than it could ever help.
Employees are the weakest link in any security system. It only takes one brief lapse of judgement to unleash something like WannaCry.
Who has the most to gain by the downtime?
Also, you'd be surprised how far back some OSes go for the machines that work on the tools. I remember running around trying to find a machine that could work with Windows NT because a tool was down and they needed an NT box to use their software that communicates with the tool. And these tools are 20 something years old... NT 4.0 is quite the upgrade as it is... These are machines that still make wafers and such. I work for a company that makes the tools that Companies like, TSMC and Samsung use to make their chips, and if they want a tool that runs on a certain OS, we aren't going to argue with them, lol. You try telling your customer that just signed a check for a billion to change OS's..... LOL, no one wants to be that guy here...