TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge • Hacker News Board

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

#151

Post by lacker » Thu, Apr 01, 2021, 3:56 PM UTC

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…

I think "lying" is pretty harsh. The pandemic caused many, many people and companies to have trouble predicting future demand. To me, it's a miracle that the American economy has kept going as strong as it has. I know it's very important for car manufacturers to predict future demand, and I know it's an extreme frustration for many people whose logistics are screwed up, but really, it shouldn't be a surprise that the car manufacturers mispredicted the impact of a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic.

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

#152

Post by baybal2 » Thu, Apr 01, 2021, 4:00 PM UTC

icefo wrote: post #115

pjc50 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Manufacturing you'd need billions and the support of your government. But a design business? There's quite a lot of those around. Bare minimum estimates, working backwards: - $? for marketing and distribution, physical inventory costs - $100k/y for one field engineer (FAE) - $250k for first successful manufacturing run - $250k for first full mask run with bugs - $100k bringup boards, test equipment, engineering time…

Do you know how it is to work on software in this industry ? Be it for the tools or embedded software programming or in VHDL / verilog. I'm still in university and I've always liked hardware and low level related stuff but I've heard bad things about software in hardware companies like Qualcomm.

The wage disparity in between semi industry at large, and almost everything else is a matter of legends...

Almost every part of semi industry is very bad on effort to salary ratio, and players like Intel, or Qualcomm are far from the worst, they actually do very well on salary front, and attracting talent. It's Asian companies who score the worst on that.

TSMC process development job is 100:1 lottery win + 20 years of your life for $50k a year salary. Know people with first hand experience of that.

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

#153

Post by toast0 » Thu, Apr 01, 2021, 4:01 PM UTC

ip26 wrote: post #128

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…

Older levels of performance wouldn't cripple humanity. But putting together something that actually works out of a big parts bin is a crapshoot, and supporting a deployment of machines which are each completely unique is an IT nightmare. We could do it if we had to, of course.

I think the best chances to get something useful would be to collect x86 consoles. x86 means you've got a well supported target, and consoles means you've got limited hardware variations.

Military could probably pressure Microsoft to give them some way to turn an original xbox into a PC; and if you give people $50 for an original xbox most will be happy.

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

#154

Post by rendang » Thu, Apr 01, 2021, 4:27 PM UTC

chrisseaton wrote: post #146

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…

> 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.

I had taken parent poster to mean that car manufacturers hate keeping large stocks of their component parts, not of finished cars.

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

#155

Post by orbifold » Thu, Apr 01, 2021, 4:32 PM UTC

baybal2 wrote: post #25

orbifold wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

> 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. Unless you talk about countries where people simply don't pay for software no matter what. Some companies are just fine with 10 years old pirated Virtuosos in places like China. It was a big surprise to me that even software which probably has less than 100 licensees globally i…

Yes, I can totally believe that, the software itself is actually distributed in a fairly convenient format, given that some of it is only compatible with some obscure RedHat version, so installation amounts to copying files from an iso image and pointing it to a license server. It probably is also easy to patch out the License server code. I would be fairly surprised if those places also had access to current gen PDKs and the required memory compilers. We have to basically order memory blocks by mail and don't get access to the tools to generate them ourselves.

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

#156

Post by kcb » Thu, Apr 01, 2021, 4:41 PM UTC

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…

That list is wildly incorrect. Delta Electronics doesn't have anything remotely close to a 1.4T USD market cap.

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

#157

Post by incrudible » Thu, Apr 01, 2021, 4:42 PM UTC

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…

> Semiconductor engineering is complex, but probably not so complex that your average Math Olympiad couldn't pick it up in a month or two.

We have a chip shortage going on for months now, if all it took was two months and a bunch of smart people, those billions of dollars in chip orders would've made it happen. That tells me it has to be a bit more complex than you think.

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

#158

Post by dirtyid » Thu, Apr 01, 2021, 4:43 PM UTC

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…

Some choice quotes from Mark Liu, chairman of TSMC this week agreeing with you:

* "It's economically unrealistic for all the countries to build additional chip production capacity,"

* “Uncertainties led to double booking, but actual capacity is larger than demand,” How quickly those concerns are resolved “really depends on future U.S.-China negotiations.”

* each country developing its own domestic semiconductor industry would lead to a lot of “nonprofitable” capacity.

>what you going to do with all the fabs build in the US when you are hit with downturn?

Priority sourcing from domestic fabs, let TSMC whither, by design. Semi is oil now, there's more strategic/geopolitical considerations than supply/demand curve. US/EU/CN do not want Taiwan to have semi dominance, it's not in anyone's interest. Current TSMC position is happenstance due to poor industrial policies that countries are scrambling to address. IMO press releases and capex spending around Arizona announcement suggest TSMC wasn't prepared to built US fab, let alone 6. US pressured them, EU failed to. There's a good chance TSMC/Taiwan will try to delay their silicon shield evaporating for as long as they can. Probably not a coincidence big ticket US weapons sales are scheduled around when fabs would be up.

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

#159

Post by somethingwitty1 » Thu, Apr 01, 2021, 4:45 PM UTC

gumby wrote: post #135

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…

I just saw something about this. The reason Apple hasn't been impacted is because their sales have been dropping for the past few years on iPhones and other devices. That trend hasn't changed during the pandemic. While many of the other players predicted drops during the pandemic, and initially it did, that demand dramatically increased, especially in the desktop market (AMD, Nvidia, etc). It is hard to fault companies from predicting the massive increase in a market that has been decreasing for decades(?) now. There is limited capacity at TSMC and Samsung. They leave buffer, but that was quickly consumed because almost everyone needed more capacity. It takes potentially years to increase capacity (build a new fab, etc), they have no room to allow any companies to adjust their capacity reservations.

So at the end of the day, it isn't that Apple was necessarily better...their demand just didn't change and continued the downward trend in certain product areas, giving them breathing room.

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

#160

Post by TimTheTinker » Thu, Apr 01, 2021, 4:54 PM UTC

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…

I did some materials engineering coursework in college, and I think your comment significantly underestimates the technical complexity of We had many brilliant minds working on these problems for decades, but it took time, skill, effort, and money over these decades to achieve each milestone of development. Now each of these firms (and each of their suppliers) has trade secrets that go deep, and barring some unlikely breakthrough of brilliance, these secrets can't be independently discovered by the brightest minds in any less than the time it already took to discover and develop them in the first place.

There's also the problem of supply chains -- modern fab tech requires a ton of downstream tech: the fab machines, the parts in them, and the places those parts were developed and manufactured... and the machines that were required there as well (repeat...). Also the raw materials, especially rare earth minerals.