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

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

#181

Post by barkingcat » Thu, Apr 01, 2021, 5:58 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…

One thing to remember is that the current CEO Tim Cook started in the supply chain management side of the company...

And did that job for Steve Jobs during the growth of the iphone.

It would be expected that Apple would have extended insight into supply chain and capacity, seeing as the head of the company was/is the one who did that job.

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

#182

Post by skybrian » Thu, Apr 01, 2021, 6:04 PM UTC

baybal2 wrote: post #88

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…

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…

Ouch.

It seems like the way to reduce risk would be interchangeable parts from multiple suppliers?

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

#183

Post by swalsh » Thu, Apr 01, 2021, 6:16 PM UTC

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #177

swalsh wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It's a small development board (similar to Arduino but based on the STM32F103C8T6) It's often blue so people often call it the "blue pill"

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

#184

Post by oivey » Thu, Apr 01, 2021, 6:22 PM UTC

packetlost wrote: post #133

oivey wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That’s quantum tunneling, right? That’s one of the quantum effects I was referencing.

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

#185

Post by commandar » Thu, Apr 01, 2021, 6:27 PM UTC

barkingcat wrote: post #181

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…

One thing to remember is that the current CEO Tim Cook started in the supply chain management side of the company... And did that job for Steve Jobs during the growth of the iphone. It would be expected that Apple would have extended insight into supply chain and capacity, seeing as the head of the company was/is the one who did that job.

I'm constantly surprised by how many people seem to forget that Tim Cook got to where he is on the basis of being a supply chain logistics whiz.

If there's anything I expect Apple to excel at, almost without question, under his leadership, it's supply chain management.

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

#186

Post by FpUser » Thu, Apr 01, 2021, 6:29 PM UTC

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…

>"Personally? Sitting about 40km from a priority US target, I'd support the US risking a strike to guarantee Taiwan's freedom."

Personally I'd support the US never letting people with this kind of thinking anywhere near decision making. Let them play stocks.

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

#187

Post by baybal2 » Thu, Apr 01, 2021, 6:35 PM UTC

atq2119 wrote: post #172

baybal2 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Because SRAM was already squeezed to the max generations ago.

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

#188

Post by tommilukkarinen » Thu, Apr 01, 2021, 6:37 PM UTC

commandar wrote: post #185

barkingcat wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing to remember is that the current CEO Tim Cook started in the supply chain management side of the company... And did that job for Steve Jobs during the growth of the iphone. It would be expected that Apple would have extended insight into supply chain and capacity, seeing as the head of the company was/is the one who did that job.

I'm constantly surprised by how many people seem to forget that Tim Cook got to where he is on the basis of being a supply chain logistics whiz. If there's anything I expect Apple to excel at, almost without question, under his leadership, it's supply chain management.

The comment reminds me of Nokia end times. Everyone said they mastered logistics.

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

#189

Post by FpUser » Thu, Apr 01, 2021, 6:38 PM UTC

Der_Einzige wrote: post #143

dalyons wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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

How generous of you. Hopefully you'll be in one of those cities at the moment.

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

#190

Post by ethbr0 » Thu, Apr 01, 2021, 6:38 PM UTC

comte7092 wrote: post #161

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…

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 iss…

Taiwan has been Dutch, Han, Qing, Japanese, and ROC. Any appeal to history is nine^H^H^H^Hten dashes of propaganda.

> it’s official government policy on both sides of the straight that there’s “one China”

That's an oversimplification. The KMT / Pan-Blue believe there's "one China" in the sense that they believe the PRC is an illegitimate government, currently occupying mainland Chinese territory that belongs to the ROC.

The DPP / Pan-Green believe there are two Chinas, with Taiwan as an independent entity from the mainland PRC. Their current official position is that this state of affairs already exists, and therefore there is no need to make any declarations or changes from the status quo.

So in summary, about one half of Taiwanese political power considers the communist government as illegitimate, and the other half considers Taiwan independent. Which I would guess is fairly different from what the PRC defines "one China" as.