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

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

#171

Post by buran77 »

eloff wrote: post #125
lumost wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There aren't many companies that can compete with 100 billion dollar capex demands. While the loans are freely available, the development risk remains. TSMC has a proven track record pushing into the latest node - intel does not. Samsung has been a little bit behind for a while while keeping pace. Following this trend - 2nm will have something on the order of 200 billion in capex outlays. Given that being first to ma…

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 law of diminishing returns. Shrinking brings lower and lower benefits because the jumps may be hefty in relative values (10% smaller) but in absolute values (nm) they don't bring the same benefit as they did 15-20 years ago.

On the other hand, even in practical terms the older nodes are more than adequate for most customers these days simply because they are far closer to a modern node than the equivalent would have been 20 years ago (for the reason stated above).

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

#172

Post by atq2119 »

baybal2 wrote: post #126
addaon wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, SRAM bits per square mm seems like a perfectly fine metric for me. While I recognize that the memory-to-logic density varies, sometimes significantly, between processes, (a) SRAM cells are optimized to within an inch of their lives ("within a nm of their lives"?), including often being revised in minor process updates, so accurately reflect the capabilities of the process; (b) many chips, including the ones…

And it is exactly because SRAM gets so intensely optimised with each generation, I did not want to list it. SRAM density, and performance is not characteristic of how the rest of logic will perform no other logic component get squeezed so much.

Ironically, it seems random logic may have been scaling better than SRAM recently...

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

#173

Post by 908B64B197 »

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.

Creates an interesting dynamic where the dealership has to sell what's parked on it's lot right now.

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

#174

Post by ebruchez »

alberth wrote: post #93
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 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".

I found this article on the topic really informative:

https://read.nxtbook.com/ieee/spectrum/spectrum_na_august_20...

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

#175

Post by monocasa »

kingosticks wrote: post #54
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.

Aren't these BGAs? Safely removing and then also re-balling large non-socketed chips is tricky. Do they actually have machines for this? I understand that the re-work house we use do it by hand and also spend a chunk of time inspecting the chip once removed since it's very easily damaged. Maybe there are more automated places doing this on a mass scale, we don't do it very often which might explain the general poor r…

It's tricky to do on a one off case, but once you get the profiles down it's very automatable.

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

#176

Post by gumby »

somethingwitty1 wrote: post #159
gumby wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 compani…

It does look like apple's unit sales (of phones at least which are the lion's share of product) have been declining (conveniently they stopped reporting unit sales long ago) but I don't think that really applies here. Apple's share of the total semiconductor market is far from dominant.

What's really interesting is how well they couple demand to shipment. One is that they appear to have low levels of unsold inventory, both on the incoming (BOM) side and output (unsold manufactured output, such as phones), reflecting some incredible discipline. They also manage to insure themselves against supply shock (because such a tight tolerance for over purchase and overproduction makes your supply chain more brittle) by making big moves in their supply chain like financing their suppliers, doing manufacturing R&D on their suppliers' technology and then supplying that tech to the suppliers, taking big positions in commodity markets (e.g. famously in DRAM a few years ago) and other such things you can do when you have so much cash on the balance sheet.

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

#177

Post by JohnJamesRambo »

swalsh wrote: post #118
Xorlev wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I was looking yesterday, the STM32 chip used in the typically $5 blue pill now goes for $16 a piece.

What’s a $5 blue pill?

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

#178

Post by jjk166 »

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.

A 100kt nuclear warhead airburst will cause moderate damage to an area of 33.5km^2. Beijing has an area of 16800km^2, 501 times larger. China has 160 cities with over 1 million inhabitants. Even if they were all used against major population centers (which they wouldn't be) and all of them made it to their targets (which they wouldn't), thousands of nuclear warheads would still not be enough to destroy a large nation.

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

#179

Post by LouisContant »

BuckRogers wrote: post #137
swalsh wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What issues have you been having with your 5900x? I've been using mine without issue but for a short amount of time.

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

#180

Post by monocasa »

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.

Xboxes and PlayStations have cryptographic chains of trust going back to their on die boot ROM. You can't just pull it out and use it on another Xbox or PlayStation, much less use them for generic computation.

I think the Xbox One is the first console to have no unsigned code execution at all during it's lifetime.

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