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

131–140 of 260 posts

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

#131

Post by MangoCoffee »

1. can we afford to just build fab without consideration of profit? what you going to do when you can't turn a profit with all the fabs in the US?

2. TSMC and the rest of the foundry industry are exposed to the highly cyclical nature of the semiconductor industry. we are seeing the high demands for chip because of covid and car vendors' f'ck up. what you going to do with all the fabs build in the US when you are hit with downturn?

we saw Intel struggle with 10nm and 7nm delay. i think its wiser to invite fab company like TSMC and Samsung to build fab in the US even with smaller capacity.

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

#132

Post by unixhero »

dalyons wrote: post #112
ethbr0 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously. We're talking about horrible things, here. But if it came to a nuclear exchange, China has ~300, and the US and Russia ~6,000 each. Total yield numbers are harder to come by(?), so those are +/- considering tactical-scale inventory. Historically, this was because China's nuclear doctrine was to limit their stockpile to a minimal deterrent. Personally? Sitting about 40km from a priority US target, I'd suppo…

> Personally? Sitting about 40km from a priority US target, I'd support the US risking a strike to guarantee Taiwan's freedom What? That doesn’t make sense. If the US triggered nuke slinging over Taiwan the Taiwanese would be ash, not free.

And retalliation would be immediate and dooming.

Mutually assured destruction

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

#133

Post by packetlost »

oivey wrote: post #130
eloff wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the bright side, the new processes will have a longer life. When your 135nm process is replaced by 14nm within a less than a decade, there's a huge gap there and the old process isn't worth much. If you go from 14nm to 2nm, you can still use 14nm for a lot of price sensitive customers.

The density increase is similar between those two jumps, isn’t it? Density significantly drives the price of chips since you can use it to create more chips per wafer. Maybe developing chips at 2 nm will be much more difficult due to quantum effects?

Before you start reaching quantum effects, you'll run into crosstalk problems where electrons on 1 circuit path can jump through the silicon substrate to other paths, effectively causing a short. There is a limit to how much you can do with silicon as your substrate simply because of the size of the atoms.

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

#134

Post by tehjoker »

ethbr0 wrote: post #90
bkor wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Shouldn't contracts prevent that sort of behavior (without proper compensation)? That depends on how big the customer/order is, no? If (as a manufacturer) you could get away with not having it in a contract, why include it? Similarly, instead of actually cancelling they could also "lie". Say that there are capacity issues, etc. That the capacity issue is mostly because they resold the existing manufacturing capacit…

As with all things, an optimization (e.g. agile, JIT/lean manufacturing) is predicated on certain assumptions. In this instance, "we exist in an ecosystem where our suppliers can rapidly respond to volatile demand from us." If the assumptions fail, then it's not a failure of the optimization, but an incorrect application of it. Maybe we don't currently live in a world in which elastic semiconductor availability at sc…

Nearly all industries have moved to Just-In-Time to reduce costs, at the cost of making the entire economy more fragile. We saw this highlighted in the pandemic as suddenly there were no reserves of hospital capacity due to JIT optimization.

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

#135

Post by gumby »

ksec wrote: post #47

1. TSMC were spending ~$30B per year on capital expenditure already. 2. Since leading edge node is forever increasing in cost, the next 3 years, i.e 3nm in 2022 and 2nm in 2024 are expected to be higher. ~$100B investment aligned with their initial plan / trend / target anyway. 3. So really the major news is stopping ( or to be precise, delaying ) price reduction. Which is unusual but understandable given the current…

> The only company that is not affected is possibly Apple.

This is an interesting point. Apple is pretty hard nosed on their predictions and capacity reservations, to the point where they could be funding part of this expansion at TSMC (as they have done for Hon Hai, among others, for decades).

I continue to be astonished by Apple’s ability to manage their supply chain so tightly (which requires not just an iron fist but very very intense internal process). They seem to be the only ones who can manage to do that.

And it’s not like other big companies are lazy; the part that really amazes me is that their process hasn’t leached out to other companies, as so much else does in the Valley.

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

#136

Post by sitkack »

rasz wrote: post #104
baybal2 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I doubt it. You want a part to shutdown if knows it is going to fail, not pull everything high and cause the device to catastrophically malfunction.

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

#137

Post by BuckRogers »

swalsh wrote: post #86
ksec wrote: post #47

1. TSMC were spending ~$30B per year on capital expenditure already. 2. Since leading edge node is forever increasing in cost, the next 3 years, i.e 3nm in 2022 and 2nm in 2024 are expected to be higher. ~$100B investment aligned with their initial plan / trend / target anyway. 3. So really the major news is stopping ( or to be precise, delaying ) price reduction. Which is unusual but understandable given the current…

I find it concerning how few companies exist to do this work. I really hope Intel's new foundry business is successful.

Their 20B investment into their Arizona campus has me convinced. They're doing the right thing (if you live in the US), my 5900X is pretty unreliable and I never had issues with my Intel systems. The stars have aligned so I'm going to buy their chips from here on out.

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

#138

Post by londons_explore »

KMag wrote: post #71
londons_explore wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If latest chips were unavailable (war, civilisation collapse), we'd do just fine with existing chips for decades or maybe even centuries. With clever software, you can eek much more real world use out of hardware. For example, your PS3 is probably sitting with its CPU idle right now, when it could be doing useful computations for someone else who needs more computing power.

> existing chips for decades or maybe even centuries. Chips experience solid-state diffusion, so I'd expect the expected survival probability of chips (ignoring any infant mortality effects) to go something like feature_size / sqrt( time ). If this is true, then I'd guess modern process nodes would have very low survival rates out at 100 years. Though, it's been over 20 years since I had any solid state chemistry, an…

But the failure rate in observed time for non-nand components is very very low.

Take a 5 year old phone, and the chances of the main board being bad might be 10%... But the chances of the main CPU being bad is probably under 0.1%. The other 99% of failures are mostly water damage, physical damage, bad soldering, fatigue failure, bad nand, etc.

Maybe they'll all fail at once, but I somehow doubt it. IC's from the 1970's are still going strong, also with a low failure rate.

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

#139

Post by speeder »

Kliment wrote: post #73
ksec wrote: post #47

1. TSMC were spending ~$30B per year on capital expenditure already. 2. Since leading edge node is forever increasing in cost, the next 3 years, i.e 3nm in 2022 and 2nm in 2024 are expected to be higher. ~$100B investment aligned with their initial plan / trend / target anyway. 3. So really the major news is stopping ( or to be precise, delaying ) price reduction. Which is unusual but understandable given the current…

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…

Now I know why my business, that has nothing to do with semiconductors are booming too.

I own a store that sells parts and tools to attach things to each other (originally we sold nuts and bolts but those are unprofitable without gigantic volumes).

In the last months suddenly we started to get an unusually high amount of orders from factories intending to use our products in manufacturing, while until then all we ever got was orders for replacements parts and maintenance.

Since we are a store, not a manufacturer, our prices aren't lowest as possible... so we are very confused about why Toyota/Honda and others for example, called us wanting parts, instead of calling our supplier, since we know they have their contact anyway (I won't say who it was but for example one time a manufacturer asked us if a product would help them, and asked us to design something for their production line... we did, then they ordered the product from our supplier and never paid us anything for all "free" engineering work we did for them).

So now I can guess what happened: car industry cancelled non-semiconductor orders too, their slots got sold, and now they want it back... so my store that tends to have higher stock than others keep getting new clients willing to pay through the nose to have parts because our own supplier doesn't have them in stock and can't deliver any in short term...

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

#140

Post by ip26 »

MangoCoffee wrote: post #131

1. can we afford to just build fab without consideration of profit? what you going to do when you can't turn a profit with all the fabs in the US? 2. TSMC and the rest of the foundry industry are exposed to the highly cyclical nature of the semiconductor industry. we are seeing the high demands for chip because of covid and car vendors' f'ck up. what you going to do with all the fabs build in the US when you are hit…

1. Yeah, we certainly could, but profit is what got us from 50um to 3nm.
Post reply on HN