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

asia.nikkei.com

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

#141

Post by lenkite »

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…

When I first studied about JIT in college, I asked my professor: Doesn't this manufacturing methodology lack fault-tolerance and isn't it deeply susceptible to natural calamities or economic failures ? He replied that it was proven, adaptable and reliable. Other suppliers would come in if some suppliers failed.

JIT (aka lean manufacturing) today has now permeated pretty much most of the global supply chain. Human civilisation is far more fragile at the moment than in the last few. hundred years.

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

#142

Post by Der_Einzige »

User23 wrote: post #75
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 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.

I'm personally willing to end the world to prevent the dystopia of hegemonic china.

The total suffering in the world from hegemonic china is far higher than in a post WW3 world. You might think this is a joke but I am deadly serious. We need to take a very extreme stand against techno-authoritarianism or else life isn't worth living.

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

#143

Post by Der_Einzige »

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.

We can shoot down some of those nukes. Maybe china has to fire 20 on taiwan before one of them gets through our anti-ICBM weapons on our naval ships.

Means that we might come out of a war with china with only a few cities lost. Might actually be worth it.

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

#144

Post by dcolkitt »

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.

> a bunch of their engineers and a bunch more technicians and managers with the right kind of skills

In a WWII scenario, how long does it take to rapidly retrain a bunch of people with these skills. We have no shortage bunch of brilliant, quantitatively minded people trading derivatives and writing ML models to recommend TV shows. In a total war scenario, I assume most would be drafted for the war effort. Semiconductor engineering is complex, but probably not so complex that your average Math Olympiad couldn't pick it up in a month or two.

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

#145

Post by qchris »

Tade0 wrote: post #68
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…

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.

I absolutely believe it-I use one professionally to maneuver an underwater ROV. They're intuitive, already familiar to a lot of people, and surprisingly reliable.

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

#146

Post by chrisseaton »

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…

> because they have a religious aversion to keeping any stock

In the US people love to keep huge numbers of cars in stock. Apparently most people buy from stock there, and almost nobody does JIT, for some reason. So this isn’t the case everywhere.

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

#147

Post by Leary »

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.

Better Dead Than Red is alive and well, hahahaha.

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

#148

Post by coryrc »

georgeburdell wrote: post #121

Selfishly... so will all this CapEx by TSMC, Samsung, and Intel put pressure on wages? I’m in the industry at a large company getting 3% raises, 10% of comp as stock, and a salary about 1/3 less than a software dev. All while being highly reviewed. I write a lot of software for my job (although it’s not my title) and I’ve been thinking of trying for pure software jobs even if the work is more boring (I do semiconduct…

I switched for the money

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

#149

Post by [deleted] »

dcolkitt wrote: post #144
codeulike wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> a bunch of their engineers and a bunch more technicians and managers with the right kind of skills In a WWII scenario, how long does it take to rapidly retrain a bunch of people with these skills. We have no shortage bunch of brilliant, quantitatively minded people trading derivatives and writing ML models to recommend TV shows. In a total war scenario, I assume most would be drafted for the war effort. Semiconduct…

[deleted]

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

#150

Post by Leary »

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…

They haven't been churning out amphibious ships that you would expect them to if they thought invasion was imminent.
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