Zhang points out that HPC, IoT and automotive electronics platforms will become the three major driving forces for TSMC's strong growth in 2018, with smartphones no longer seen. Zhang added that HPC's growth will From the use of artificial intelligence in the consumer electronics products, as well as the need to encrypt money mining, while the strong growth of cryptocurrency mining demand, in this law said that the financial chief He Limei, co-CEO Liu Deyin, Wei Zhe are constantly Mentioned.
The crypto-currency mining wave also swept across another semiconductor giant, Samsung, which in its latest law predicted that the next quarter of 2018 will see the flagship smartphone mined with second-generation 10nm process products and virtual currency In the meantime, the market is even more pronounced that Samsung has contracted Russian bitcoin miners to start producing bitcoin mining chips.
Encrypted currency mining to become the semiconductor market for a long time not seen New Year's Eve, but it really relies on the new growth kinetic energy it? This product specifications by the technology needs and encryption currency market conditions and rules discussed in two ways:
From the product specifications of the technical requirements, the most advanced process as the main acquirer
Efficiency is the most important specification required for mining chips. The most advanced manufacturing process node in the first quarter of 2018 is 10nm, while GlobalFoundries and UMC do not have 10nm process plan. Therefore, in the short term, the semiconductor demand arising from the encryption of money will affect TSMC, Samsung will have a positive and positive impact, but for GlobalFoundries and UMC, the impact is small.
The market conditions and rules for cryptocurrencies make the miner's long-term profitability model unclear
At present, the largest market for cryptocurrencies is Bitcoin bitcoin (due to the fact that circulation volume and price fluctuate from time to time, it is harder to keep statistics on it, but the industry's current understanding is bitcoin, which roughly accounts for over 80% of the overall cryptocurrency market.) If cryptocurrency The monetization model that mines bring and the current wave of investments in the mines are based on soaring bitcoin prices.
Due to the design mechanism of bitcoin itself, the difficulty of mining is actually getting higher and higher. Under the same computing power, the number of verifiable times per unit time can be proportional to the total amount of bitcoin in the market, and each time The amount of mined ore (the amount of bitcoin issued for certification by the system) will also continue to fall with the total amount of bitcoin accumulated.
Predictably, if the price of bitcoin stagnates, the profits of mines will keep shrinking.In other words, the current profitability of virtual currency mining mines is still hard to see in the virtual and highly volatile virtual currencies Profit business model bitcoin price changes like roller coaster gear up and down, in 2012 more than 20 dollars per unit of bitcoin, in December 2017, bitcoin has come to 20,000 US dollars per unit, however, at the beginning of February 2018 Again below 8 thousand dollars.
Liu De-yin, TSMC's co-chief executive, said in previous law that he would also like to emphasize that the demand for cryptocurrency in 2018 will be treated with caution because it is still in the early stages of development and it is difficult to predict future demand.
In such cases, Tuo Tuo currently considers only virtual currency exploration as a short-term impact on foundries. As energy in the semiconductor's long-term growth momentum is less clear.