This reminds me of a fun fact I learned many years ago, which is that there's a corollary to Moores Law: the same growth curve applies to the cost of building new fabs.
TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge
211–220 of 260 posts
Re: TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge
#212Re: TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
This is my understanding as well; one of the reasons why China has such a high percentage of that market isn't because no one else can, but rather that they don't want to. The environmental damage is often horrendous [1][2] so everyone that can outsources it. I believe there's also been a lot of work on reducing or replacing relience on those materials in quite a few areas, as I believe a parent comment mentioned.
[1] https://e360.yale.edu/features/china-wrestles-with-the-toxic...
[2] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20150402-the-worst-place-...
Re: TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge
#214Earlier 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?
Similar Microcontroller to others like the Teensy, Elite C, Proton C, Pro Micro, etc...
All of which have been used in custom keyboard builds but are capable of doing other things as well.
Re: TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge
#215Selfishly... 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 switched for the flexibility (only a few hardware players versus a seemingly endless list of software shops) but the pay bump has been nice.
Re: TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge
#2161. 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…
Apple is experiencing supply chain issues, and there is a shortage of laptop devices right now if you try to make bulk orders (>1000 units). I have no context on their phones.
Re: TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge
#217Maybe 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.
You can trivially run whatever code you wanted to if you seized the signing keys; I suspect that in such a "collect all the general-purpose computers for general-purpose computing things" that would be the first order of business.
Not that the government doesn't already have copies, of course.
Re: TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge
#218How much would it cost to start a design semiconductor business? On the low end of the budget.
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…
the software license number is off by a large factor for leading edge nodes. large!
Re: TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge
#219Earlier 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…
Just in time delivery has its downfalls when vendors have issues, but this is a known trade-off to that model. If a company keeps inventory on hand, then they have the worry of owning excess parts that they can never use and is a sink cost later. So these companies can lose money with either, it just depends on the circumstances that cause it. I'd be interested to learn more about the order cancellation you were sayi…
People forget why "just in time" was invented and why it became a religion...
I do not fault companies for not planning for a worldwide pandemic.
Re: TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are big differences. A close friend who's a hardware engineer shared with me her salary. With five years of experience and a MS, her salary is the same as a fresh-out-of-undergrad junior software engineer at the same company. That's $120k in the valley.
Huh, I'm surprised. As a software guy, I think the hardware engineer has a tougher job that requires more skill.
It is tougher, but how tough a job is has little to do with the pay.
It's all about supply/demand ratio, which is higher for hardware engineers. Hence they get paid less. There are simply far fewer HW jobs than SW ones. While there are more SW engineers, it doesn't make up for the delta in number of jobs available.
Even within the SW world, I've jumped around jobs of varying difficulty. The tougher jobs did not pay more.