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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

#161

Post by comte7092 »

ethbr0 wrote: post #97
foobarian wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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…

It’s not “dusting off historical documents” it’s official government policy on both sides of the straight that there’s “one China”.

One could argue that the only reason why the ROC hasn’t declared independence is because they’d fear that it would provoke an attack from across the straight, but the reality is that independence is not a cut and dry issue in Taiwan.

Take some time to actually educate yourself on the issue before advocating for nuclear war.

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

#162

Post by monocasa »

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.

If you're talking about dealers, they're very different from the manufacturers. Pretty much every car has someone who's bought it already (whether that be an end consumer or a dealer) by the time it rolls off the line.

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

#163

Post by shigawire »

throwawayzRUU6f wrote: post #56
nindalf wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why don't we see funding for this at a government level Because America fell asleep at the wheel while Taiwan did not. TSMC and other Taiwanese chip manufacturers benefited from a government that saw the need to be a part of high value manufacturing. Meanwhile America of the 90s and 2000s assumed that it would be the most powerful country in perpetuity and so it wouldn't matter where something was being produced as…

> need rare earth metals, almost all of which is mined and refined in China This is usually presented as an ace up the sleeve that China has secured through shrewd strategic thinking. In reality, rare earth metals are neither particularly rare, nor are they expensive, nor are they in high demand. Rare earth metals are more common than silver or mercury, somewhat rarer than cobalt. The ones with excellent magnetic qua…

My understanding is that they are hard to extract economically without destroying the environment. Also I believe more come from Brazil now anyways?

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

#164

Post by lainga »

blackearl wrote: post #110
foobarian wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What leads you to the estimate of a dozen? Very few modern warheads have multiple-megaton yields, it's less efficient than many small-yield warheads.

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

#166

Post by pjc50 »

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.

I'm quite happy at Cirrus doing tools, but I'm aware that they are an outlier who put effort into staff happiness.

In many other places software is an afterthought to the hardware, and it shows.

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

#167

Post by dcolkitt »

incrudible wrote: post #157
dcolkitt wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Has any major organization started or entered the semiconductor fab space in the past year? From speaking with industry analysts, my understanding is we could spin up additional capacity. The issue is that most everyone fears the shortage will be over after the Covid supply chain disruptions, and therefore any new investments will not recoup their necessarily long payback periods.

This is a very different calculus than a WW2 type scenario. Fully mobilized, the government would almost certainly pay up for microchip capacity today, regardless of the long-term payback residual.

If there was evidence of deep-pocketed firms trying and failing to get into semiconductor fab in 2020, I'd change my opinion. Like if Google or Amazon were trying to open their own fab plants, but were failing, then I might suspect that a WW2 fully mobilized war effort would run into difficulties. But as far as I can tell, the issue is that nobody wants to jump into the fab business, regardless of the temporarily higher profits over the next 2-4 quarters.

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

#168

Post by jjk166 »

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…

It's not a question of knowing how to build industrial capacity, it is actually building that capacity. Before you can build a fab, you need to build all the machines that go into a fab, and before that all the machines for building those machines, and so on and so forth. 9 women can't make a baby in a month, at some point you come across steps that just take time.

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

#169

Post by vkou »

tempfs wrote: post #165

I am wondering if this concentration of capacity in Taiwan with China looming over it is really such a great idea.

It's been a great idea for Taiwan, and it's been a great idea for price sensitive consumers, who don't give two figs about where in the globalized marketplace their products come from.

Whether it's been a great idea for someone who isn't a price sensitive consumer doesn't matter - markets don't optimize the world for the comfort of ideologues. You can't sell ideology.

If China were to successfully annex Taiwan, there would be two likely outcomes.

1. China would be difficult to sanction, because in a world with chip shortages, we can't drop our reliance on TSMC fabs. (See, also, Russia selling oil and gas to the EU, despite sanctions on it. Given the option to take the moral high ground, and using Russian natgas to not freeze to death in the winter, Germans are taking the latter, while the Department of State gnashes it's teeth.)

2. Or, as some posters on HN gleefully speculate, the TSMC fabs will be destroyed, either by TSMC, or by the United States. I'm sure that will be quite cathartic for all of thirty minutes, until we all realize that we're in for a multi-year chip shortage that makes today's problems look like nothing. Hope everyone's looking forward to half the supply, and quadruple the prices.

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