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As someone who has had to endure over a year of very close to the metal (in this case, imagine centuries old, gnarly, rusty random pot metal, maybe) development on a Renesas platform, I'm tempted to think "fewer Renesas products? Awesome!!" but obviously that would be childish. I'm sorry for all the people hurt by this, fire is no joke. Edit: added missing words.
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You can sleep a _little_ better: the narrative around this ended up being focused around TSMC, but it's simply because that's the most visible part of the chain, they're first to a new node and all the newest gadgets need the newest node, so all the newest gadgets are on TSMC. They're not solely responsible for like 90% of chips or anything.
TSMC is also a bit more geographically diverse than a lot of people assume. Their largest fabs are split between three different cities in Taiwan, so a fire isn't going to knock them all offline. And their smaller or less-advanced fabs include several more locations. So it's not quite like the semiconductor industry has put all their eggs in one basket, even for leading-edge logic nodes.
Ouch. Automakers were already struggling with chip supply. This is going to shut down production lines.
Already has... I know some people who work IT for a large automotive facility in Ontario that have been laid off for 3-4 weeks already. It really feels like nobody appreciated just how critical to all aspects of our lives semiconductors have become - tiny little chips have caused heavy industry to grind to a halt in some places.
This is horrible. What keeps me up at night is thinking about TSMC. One company. Just needs an earth quake, fire, explosion, something and the whole world is crippled. I know we have samsung, intel, etc other fabs. But if TSMC ever went down it would make the thailand floods for hard drives look like a joke.
TSMC Signs Deal For More Than 100 Water Tankers As Taiwan Drought Expected To Worsen https://wccftech.com/tsmc-signs-deal-for-more-than-100-water...
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you mean like how TSMC is building a fab in arizona and samsung in texas?
I think they have a Chinese move against Taiwan more on the mind than an earthquake or other natural disaster.
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Nothing would really happen. We’d keep using 2 year old processors from Intel, and pay more for them. The GPUs, whose price is high because of cryptocurrency, will not be missed. These auto manufacturers could pay a little more for a general purpose CPU instead of ASICs.
Auto manufacturers can't just put in a general purpose CPU. Embedded CPUs have functionality general purpose CPUs don't have. Not to mention it would take months to design new hardware and write new software. The chips being put into cars today were selected at least 5 years ago.
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you mean like how TSMC is building a fab in arizona and samsung in texas?
But TSMC's Arizona plant will make 5nm chips in 2023, by which time 5nm wont be the leading-edge node - 3nm will be. It's nice to see some geodiversity however. In any case, TSMC is dependent on ASML, which has a monopoly on leading-edge EUV tech. There is a decent amount of competition at older nodes, like > 40nm. So we'll still be able to make some chips if TSMC completely goes out of business, but obviously it won…
> science
I believe science has access to more compute than it needs. I could be wrong now, but last I checked, a few years ago, the huge computational clusters (both public and private, e.g. @ pharma companies) were under-utilized, especially on legacy-hardware-that-is-still-pretty-damn-good, and scrambling to find ways to engage with outside clients to fill out capacity.
Ouch. Automakers were already struggling with chip supply. This is going to shut down production lines.
>Automakers were already struggling with chip supply TBH, that is their own fault. When the pandemic started a year ago, they chickened out thinking people won't have money to buy anymore cars and halted production, cancelling orders for semiconductors. Then, when the demand for cars exploded, since nobody wanted to be on a subway/bus full of people carrying a contagious virus, they wanted their chips to resume produ…
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It might even be a good investment to build a fab just to clean up in the event of a shortage. Kind of like how if anyone in Texas had the good foresight to winterize they could have made a year of profit in a few days...
you mean like how TSMC is building a fab in arizona and samsung in texas?
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you mean like how TSMC is building a fab in arizona and samsung in texas?
I think they have a Chinese move against Taiwan more on the mind than an earthquake or other natural disaster.