Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge

asia.nikkei.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 260 posts

Re: TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge

#61

Post by insert_coin »

Guthur wrote: post #55
insert_coin wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One word: Financialization. The 70s started the trend of financializing (is that the word?) everything, that meant that at every step of every productive process someone packaged it into a tradable "paper", which got packaged with other paper from other productive processes and then re-sold and repackaged again and again to the market as proxies of the value from those productive processes. Holding paper assets turne…

Doom doom money doom doom. Nonsense. Top 10 companies https://fxssi.com/top-10-most-valuable-companies-in-the-worl... Most of these are providing goods and services that 100s millions of people are getting value from, with the possible exception of Facebook :p As an aside I must admit I had never heard of Delta Electronics before at all; nearly 50 years old and 5th most valuable company. Out of the top 10 you do get…

Those companies, maybe with the exception of Facebook and Microsoft, are literally only possible because of paper money. Take out the paper they hold from their balance sheets and their size goes down in half. Take away their ability to own their markets by issuing debt bonds, which would mean competing with the revenue generated by their own products, and you kill them.

Apple became the biggest company in the world not only because they create products everyone wants, but equally because they are masters at managing money and debt. That is what gives them the edge in production as they barely produce anything. They are probably the best at managing financial assets by far.

And Tesla, well Tesla is very bad at building cars, they are bankrupt without paper profits. They shouldn’t be on that list.

Semiconductors is not harder than any other cutting edge industry that has come before. Taiwan is not special, they are 20 million people. A good chunk of them trained and educated in the US.

Re: TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge

#62

Post by hyko »

baybal2 wrote: post #21
sschueller wrote: post #12

Maybe we should start pulling chips of trashed electronics. There must be hundreds of thousands decently fast chips going into our trash. How many dead xboxes and PlayStations have chips in them that are still good? I'm thinking of a reverse pick and place machine that pulls chips of boards (boards that can not be used to fix other dead devices) and is able to test each valuable component for later reuse.

> Maybe we should start pulling chips of trashed electronics. There must be hundreds of thousands decently fast chips going into our trash. This is already been happening for decades on industrial scale in countries doing eWaste recycling. Just a decade ago, you could've still find people selling refurbished chips in Shenzhen on every corner. Now it kinds of became a much more low profile enterprise. The US defence d…

My first reaction to this plan is that it’s for the birds. The government would be better off just building a fab themselves. The raw materials aren’t that hard to get hold of; integrating consumer electronics into military systems would likely take just as long, if not longer (with all sorts of other negative effects on quality and security). I guess the analogy is with scrap metal drives in WWII, but this situation is nothing like that at all. It’s a fantasy scenario that makes no sense.

We defend Taiwan with everything we’ve got. There is no plan B, and it’s not just about semiconductors.

Re: TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge

#63

Post by squarefoot »

baybal2 wrote: post #21
sschueller wrote: post #12

Maybe we should start pulling chips of trashed electronics. There must be hundreds of thousands decently fast chips going into our trash. How many dead xboxes and PlayStations have chips in them that are still good? I'm thinking of a reverse pick and place machine that pulls chips of boards (boards that can not be used to fix other dead devices) and is able to test each valuable component for later reuse.

> Maybe we should start pulling chips of trashed electronics. There must be hundreds of thousands decently fast chips going into our trash. This is already been happening for decades on industrial scale in countries doing eWaste recycling. Just a decade ago, you could've still find people selling refurbished chips in Shenzhen on every corner. Now it kinds of became a much more low profile enterprise. The US defence d…

"The US defence department, colloquially known as the pentagon, ran a wargame scenario a few years ago to see what will happen if US will be hit with a worst case scenario, years long semiconductor unavailability due to sabotage of domestic fabs, massive industry wide cyberattack, or something happening to Taiwan."

There is also the danger of counterfeit chips. It is already a plague for those of us hoping to get some good deals from Chinese vendors, but the US Navy as well was hit at least once with fakes.

https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/criminal-ccips/l... (.pdf document)

Re: TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge

#64

Post by blagie »

athrowaway3z wrote: post #44
baybal2 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe we should start pulling chips of trashed electronics. There must be hundreds of thousands decently fast chips going into our trash. This is already been happening for decades on industrial scale in countries doing eWaste recycling. Just a decade ago, you could've still find people selling refurbished chips in Shenzhen on every corner. Now it kinds of became a much more low profile enterprise. The US defence d…

I can kinda see the value of getting a million PS3 cpus for in your new drone swarm or industry controllers. But how is gathering generic decades old hardware going to help? For Computation as a service its not that valuable or easy to install. And for reuse in 'new' devices it's even more questionable. All this stuff barely just works in this specific configuration.

I'm only doing a few things on machine with around 32GHz worth of processing power (# of processors * GHz) that I couldn't do on my 80486 running 33MHz with a few MB of RAM. Emacs starts up a little bit faster. Pages in Chrome are more interactive than in Lynx, Mosaic, or Netscape. My word processor fits more text.

On the whole, that 1000x increase in performance mostly bought the ability to have most of the code that runs be interpreted or JITed rather than statically compiled, to play videos, to do some heavy numerics and graphics (including things like family photos and videos), and so on.

It's hard to think of anything I really /need/ in a life-or-death sense or an economic-survival sense that couldn't be done on older hardware with appropriate software. There's a ton of things I want, that help, or where migrations would be massive projects.

If computers were to entirely disappear, and I couldn't automate things, communicate digitally (emails, messaging), word process, write code, I think that'd be a major systemic-collapse-level implosion of society. A lot of people would simply die.

On the other hand, if computers were to regress to 33MHz-level performance, Youtube isn't sticking around, but we'd likely adapt as a society with some structural change, but without such a collapse.

Re: TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge

#65

Post by nindalf »

cwhiz wrote: post #60
throwaway4good wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes sense for China to overinvest in national chip manufactoring due to sanctions. However for the west, of which Taiwan here is a part of, it is very risky. If the west no longer supplies China's chip market, it would need significant less chip manufactoring capacity.

If the west can’t supply China, the west should ban Chinese imports.

You assume there would be malice involved. Even today TSMC prioritises some customers (Apple) over others (car manufacturers). In a future Taiwan that is a part of China, TSMC might have a new pecking order where Huawei is at the top and now Apple is chip constrained. You'd ban all Chinese imports unless one Chinese company rewrites it's contracts? Of course not.

Re: TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge

#66

Post by madengr »

orbifold wrote: post #13
bigdogc wrote: post #5

How much would it cost to start a design semiconductor business? On the low end of the budget.

The professional tools are licensed at 100k-200k/year per seat each, there is no way around them if you want to actually tape out the chip. An experienced backend engineer needs 3-4 months to take a design from Verilog to a file that can be send to a Foundry. You also need access to a PDK from a manufacturer like TSMC and probably will have to license some of the digital-analog components (PLL, IO-Pads) from someone.…

100k-200k is low. I know a full suite of the 500 pound gorilla is $550k.

Re: TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge

#67

Post by unionpivo »

athrowaway3z wrote: post #44
baybal2 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe we should start pulling chips of trashed electronics. There must be hundreds of thousands decently fast chips going into our trash. This is already been happening for decades on industrial scale in countries doing eWaste recycling. Just a decade ago, you could've still find people selling refurbished chips in Shenzhen on every corner. Now it kinds of became a much more low profile enterprise. The US defence d…

I can kinda see the value of getting a million PS3 cpus for in your new drone swarm or industry controllers. But how is gathering generic decades old hardware going to help? For Computation as a service its not that valuable or easy to install. And for reuse in 'new' devices it's even more questionable. All this stuff barely just works in this specific configuration.

because for a lot of things you don't need that much cpu power.

Creating something that can read several sensors (switches and buttons are also sensors), and putting aggregate status updates on a serial line, or displaying status lights, triggering relay or something similar can be done, on decades old gaming consoles, and is probably one of the most common use of processors in the world today.

In fact it is easier than trying to use modern cpu, that wasn't designed for that.

Not everything is about computation, in fact in terms of units sold its probably a minority.

Re: TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge

#68

Post by Tade0 »

hyko wrote: post #62
baybal2 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe we should start pulling chips of trashed electronics. There must be hundreds of thousands decently fast chips going into our trash. This is already been happening for decades on industrial scale in countries doing eWaste recycling. Just a decade ago, you could've still find people selling refurbished chips in Shenzhen on every corner. Now it kinds of became a much more low profile enterprise. The US defence d…

My first reaction to this plan is that it’s for the birds. The government would be better off just building a fab themselves. The raw materials aren’t that hard to get hold of; integrating consumer electronics into military systems would likely take just as long, if not longer (with all sorts of other negative effects on quality and security). I guess the analogy is with scrap metal drives in WWII, but this situation…

IIRC the US navy is currently using XBox controllers:

https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/19/16333376/us-navy-military...

Of course this is a far cry from ripping a SoC from a smartphone and putting it into e.g a bomber drone, but I assume there's much more being done - just not published.

Re: TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge

#69

Post by codeulike »

hyko wrote: post #62
baybal2 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe we should start pulling chips of trashed electronics. There must be hundreds of thousands decently fast chips going into our trash. This is already been happening for decades on industrial scale in countries doing eWaste recycling. Just a decade ago, you could've still find people selling refurbished chips in Shenzhen on every corner. Now it kinds of became a much more low profile enterprise. The US defence d…

My first reaction to this plan is that it’s for the birds. The government would be better off just building a fab themselves. The raw materials aren’t that hard to get hold of; integrating consumer electronics into military systems would likely take just as long, if not longer (with all sorts of other negative effects on quality and security). I guess the analogy is with scrap metal drives in WWII, but this situation…

The government would be better off just building a fab themselves.

But you can't just 'build a fab' can you? Thats the point. You need a shipment of ASML's magic EUV machines and a bunch of their engineers and a bunch more technicians and managers with the right kind of skills for running a large cutting edge fab.

Re: TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge

#70

Post by mkr-hn »

codeulike wrote: post #69
hyko wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My first reaction to this plan is that it’s for the birds. The government would be better off just building a fab themselves. The raw materials aren’t that hard to get hold of; integrating consumer electronics into military systems would likely take just as long, if not longer (with all sorts of other negative effects on quality and security). I guess the analogy is with scrap metal drives in WWII, but this situation…

The government would be better off just building a fab themselves. But you can't just 'build a fab' can you? Thats the point. You need a shipment of ASML's magic EUV machines and a bunch of their engineers and a bunch more technicians and managers with the right kind of skills for running a large cutting edge fab.

You only need those for the latest and greatest. A lot of options open up if the priority is any decently fast processor over the latest. Multi-CPU systems fell out of favor in the consumer space because single CPUs got so fast with these processes, but multiple CPUs with an older process is fine in this scenario.
Post reply on HN