Careful setting next year's quotas based on last year's shortages...
This isn't about next year though, this is about planning capacity for the next decade at least.
TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge
191–200 of 260 posts
Re: TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge
#192Earlier 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.
You only need those for the latest and greatest. A lot of options open up if the priority is any decently fast processor over the latest. Multi-CPU systems fell out of favor in the consumer space because single CPUs got so fast with these processes, but multiple CPUs with an older process is fine in this scenario.
...or just be content with a slower chip.
Re: TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge
#193Earlier 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." Personally I'd support the US never letting people with this kind of thinking anywhere near decision making. Let them play stocks.
All insistence in international politics has risk. If you can't tolerate risk, you'll get pushed around by those who are willing to.
Re: TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge
#194Earlier 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.
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.
I see that they have internet access in those institutions.
Re: TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge
#195Selfishly... 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…
3% raise a pretty typical for software engineers as well.
3% raise of 50k is much less than 3% of 150k though. GP could get a hella big pay bump and then much larger raises if he switched, even if on paper it’s still the same percentage.
Re: TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 civ…
The true argument should have been that it's more efficient (for everyone involved). Which would have invited the honest debate between the relative merits of resilience vs efficiency.
Re: TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I wasn't commenting on Apple as a whole; I'm actually not a huge fan of the company overall under Cook's leadership.
But supply chain management? They excel at that which doesn't surprise me given who the CEO is.
Re: TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 R…
This is the nuance I was calling for.
Yes, there are different definitions on both sides of the straight. And while the independence side has gained strength in recent years, the official stance has been that China and Taiwan are a part of one country, however defined, and, to my knowledge, no official government act of the ROC has been promulgated to the contrary.
As I stated in my original reply, independence isn’t a cut and dry issue. To assert that these claims are “dusty” historical claims in light of what you’ve written here is disingenuous.
Edit: I should add that there is only one government in Taiwan, the ROC. The stances of the individual political parties cannot be taken as synonymous with the stance of the ROC itself. To do so would be as ludicrous to say that there’s no right to an abortion in the United States, because 1 of the two major political parties opposes it. The most that can be said is that both abortion in the US and independence in Taiwan are controversial and delicate political issues within each respective jurisdiction.
Re: TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge
#199Earlier 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.
It's also a strength on the demand prediction side which is typically done by marketing not the manufacturing side of the business.
Yes, I know Cook came from Compaq for his supply chain chops, but there are amazing supply chain folks elsewhere in the industry. On this dimension Apple is in a class by itself. Perhaps that fixation does come from Cook, as supply chain wizards typically don't rise that high in the corporate chain.
Re: TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge
#200Selfishly... 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 also find it surprising that Hardware Engineers have a lower pay scale (Although I didn't hear very big differences like you said). Is there some kind of supply-demand behind this? Engineers for car-related things as well.
Anecdotally I think you could in theory get a title change to software engineer, while doing the same thing, to get more pay.