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

101–110 of 260 posts

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

#101

Post by monkeydust »

ballenf wrote: post #96
Kliment wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every single fabless semiconductor designer failed to predict demand because their customers lied to them. The car industry pulled a really dick move last year, and then pulled an even more dick move in the opposite direction, and now everyone is screwed. Back in early 2020 the car manufacturers decided that demand for cars would go down, and because they have a religious aversion to keeping any stock, cancelled lots…

Maybe we need a futures market for fab slots. Then we could just blame speculators for price swings instead of a particular industry.

A futures market here could help investment in fabs.

Allow manufactures to hedge / lock in future value.

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

#102

Post by Xorlev »

baybal2 wrote: post #88
Kliment wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every single fabless semiconductor designer failed to predict demand because their customers lied to them. The car industry pulled a really dick move last year, and then pulled an even more dick move in the opposite direction, and now everyone is screwed. Back in early 2020 the car manufacturers decided that demand for cars would go down, and because they have a religious aversion to keeping any stock, cancelled lots…

The thing about a car is that BOMs are monstrously large. If you have 1000 ICs in a car, and one of them is missing, that's a $100,000 car you can't sell. Car industry haphazardly buying out last stocks of ICs will not help them work around that "one missing chip" problem, and production lines are potentially stuck for many more months. The panic was undue, well, or best say of no use. The are screwed, but its of no…

And now STM32 are really tough to find for hobby electronics when one used to find them everywhere, and cheap.

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

#103

Post by rasz »

IshKebab wrote: post #28
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.

Completely pie-in-the-sky. Chips aren't fungible.

Yet here we are https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNje63vx73s Chinese "Motherboard" made using salvaged VRMs and transistors, salvaged capacitors, salvaged Intel Chipset!, and made to work with retired Intel Xeons and older DDR3 ECC memory.

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

#104

Post by rasz »

baybal2 wrote: post #88
Kliment wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every single fabless semiconductor designer failed to predict demand because their customers lied to them. The car industry pulled a really dick move last year, and then pulled an even more dick move in the opposite direction, and now everyone is screwed. Back in early 2020 the car manufacturers decided that demand for cars would go down, and because they have a religious aversion to keeping any stock, cancelled lots…

The thing about a car is that BOMs are monstrously large. If you have 1000 ICs in a car, and one of them is missing, that's a $100,000 car you can't sell. Car industry haphazardly buying out last stocks of ICs will not help them work around that "one missing chip" problem, and production lines are potentially stuck for many more months. The panic was undue, well, or best say of no use. The are screwed, but its of no…

>undocumented high temperature protection

sneaky market segmentation by STM?

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

#105

Post by ethbr0 »

ekianjo wrote: post #76
blagie wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

> Youtube isn't sticking around As an end user it would be manageable but dont forget that the whole world runs on servers and many Industries would collapse if computing power is gone

Computational power If we lost a few decades of processor improvements, it would be about as parent noted.

If we lost worldwide connectivity or all undersea backbones between some terrestrial networks... it would be civilization-altering.

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

#106

Post by keanebean86 »

baybal2 wrote: post #95
alberth wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "the next 3 years, i.e 3nm in 2022 and 2nm in 2024" I wish the industry would standardize on using "transistors per square millimetre" as the metric for their node size instead of "nm".

Even that is not exactly the same. Cells, or logic gates per mm° is too rather ambiguous, as different implementations of same logic families do things differently, and the metric gets even wronger for different logic families. The best I believe will be a whole cell library metric using some lowest common denominator blocks like registers, adders, bus pieces etc

I'm going to be that person and say it doesn't matter. Either you're a consumer who really only cares about a finished product's performance or you're a chip designer who has the time and money to research past the nm number.

All us armchair semiconductor fabrication experts can have a good old time arguing ove who's 2nm is better. The real world will continuing doing it's thing.

*I know this is hacker news and some of you might be real experts. I know nothing. Please don't feel disrespected.

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

#107

Post by fnord77 »

hyko wrote: post #91
User23 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only chance the USA has in a hot war for Taiwan is using nukes to which the PRC would respond in kind. That would be even worse for semiconductor availability than reunification. So let’s cool it with the macho idiocy and instead focus on diversifying the semiconductor supply chain to areas that aren’t inevitably going to fall back under Chinese control.

There’s nothing macho about a conflict of this magnitude, it would be absolutely horrible. But we have to set clear expectations and unambiguous boundaries to avoid a dangerous miscalculation, not pretend we have contingency plans that don’t actually exist. There is nothing inevitable about a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. My sense is that the Chinese leadership are far too insightful to actually start that war, but you…

> My sense is that the Chinese leadership are far too insightful to actually start that war, but you never know.

I think it's not too hard for a dictator to become out of touch and go off the rails, mentally. Or turn paranoid or whatever. Hopefully he isn't using stimulants.

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

#108

Post by mastax »

bigdogc wrote: post #5

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

You can read around the parallax propeller 2 forums for an idea of what it takes on the low end - they were very open about the process. IIRC they have one guru who does software and Verilog, one who does RTL layout (term?) and the rest are support staff who do other things at the rest of the company most of the time (PCB designer, assembly, sales, HR, etc.)

The raspberry pi pico team also did a good podcast episode talking about this - I think it was a podcast called innovation coffee or something like that. Hosted by a guy from ARM Europe.

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

#109

Post by rasz »

carlmr wrote: post #4
LatteLazy wrote: post #2

Careful setting next year's quotas based on last year's shortages...

True, but where do you see demand dropping off? I would actually assume demand will go up even more, since the economy was slowed down due to the pandemic.

Crypto bans would free a large portion of GPU demand.

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

#110

Post by blackearl »

foobarian wrote: post #83
User23 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only chance the USA has in a hot war for Taiwan is using nukes to which the PRC would respond in kind. That would be even worse for semiconductor availability than reunification. So let’s cool it with the macho idiocy and instead focus on diversifying the semiconductor supply chain to areas that aren’t inevitably going to fall back under Chinese control.

You should look at the stockpile sizes. Unless Russia gets involved it would not be a balanced situation at all.

The stockpile is a ridiculous measurement. How many would it take to have mutually assured destruction? A dozen? One of the most worthless dick measuring contests in history.
Post reply on HN