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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.
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The car industry got their demand planning wrong, so they lied to their vendors that they wouldn't need that inventory. They then turned around and went "hey actually screw that we want the inventory after all", making their previous promise that they wouldn't buy it a lie.
I would not characterize that as a lie, which typically involves an intent to deceive. Rather, the only people with intent to deceive might be the chip vendors. They either sold chip capacity that the automakers still had the legal rights to, or they reneged on sales to non automakers to resume supplying to automakers.
Why would you build chips you know you can't sell?
Also, people talk about how big of an impact car manufacturing is to the economy and while that is true, they aren't chip manufacturers biggest customers. Apple spends more per year on semiconductors than the ENTIRE auto industry. To top that off the automotive ICs aren't high margin stuff, so if I was a fab or chip vendor, I would be focused on higher margin stuff.
The blame for this is SOLELY on the auto manufacturers.
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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…
If they have so much cash and margin, why don't they keep more inventory instead of all these supply chain black magic?
You could think of it as avoiding bufferbloat in the physical domain.
1. can we afford to just build fab without consideration of profit? what you going to do when you can't turn a profit with all the fabs in the US? 2. TSMC and the rest of the foundry industry are exposed to the highly cyclical nature of the semiconductor industry. we are seeing the high demands for chip because of covid and car vendors' f'ck up. what you going to do with all the fabs build in the US when you are hit…
Some choice quotes from Mark Liu, chairman of TSMC this week agreeing with you: * "It's economically unrealistic for all the countries to build additional chip production capacity," * “Uncertainties led to double booking, but actual capacity is larger than demand,” How quickly those concerns are resolved “really depends on future U.S.-China negotiations.” * each country developing its own domestic semiconductor indus…
I do think that its going to become a race to the bottom for wafer/ic costs, but that is actually a really good thing. I think there are going to be more companies that are developing in house technology and more focus on things like FPGA and edge-based compute. If TSMC, GlobalFoundries, UMC and Intel are smart, they will focus on pivoting towards the software/simulation side of things, IP cores and flexible logic like FPGA type of solutions. Ideally they would want every big company developing their own CPUs, edge devices, etc. and have them optimized for their process nodes.
I suspect this won't be the last major fab push, especially since people are seeing how fragile the supply chain is.
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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…
It was less fragile when there were famines all the time?
I don't understand how people can repeat this rhetoric when it seems obvious to me that however fragile it is, it's less so than in all of history. Even if things rapidly get much, much worse, it wouldn't change my opinion.
How do you think we would determine which is the correct perspective?
Selfishly... 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…
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…
That's an oversimplification. As lead times increase, overbooking increases and that gives rise to further extension of lead time. Delays also become more prevalent at high utilization because there's no capacity in reserve. It's very difficult to predict where demand will go in a year of totally abnormal market behavior and unpredictable helicopter money.
In other words, fabless chipmakers are asked to do the impossible and some of them, predictably, failed to accomplish that task. Imagine asking AMD in April of 2020 to predict how many PS5s will sell during Christmas.
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My first reaction to this plan is that it’s for the birds. The government would be better off just building a fab themselves. The raw materials aren’t that hard to get hold of; integrating consumer electronics into military systems would likely take just as long, if not longer (with all sorts of other negative effects on quality and security). I guess the analogy is with scrap metal drives in WWII, but this situation…
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.
To sustain AI and other applications that require cutting-edge tech, the best strategy would be to either stockpile chips (not really feasible since the tech is deprecating) or to build spare capacity, along with the necessary supply chain.
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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.
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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.
I normally don't update unless I need to, but they advertised so many fixes that I felt compelled. It's reproducible, I can lock it up immediately upon starting Prime95, and it'll occasionally crash running CBR20. I would hope over time, probably take a year or two, they'll get this sorted out.. but I may just order an i9-10850K and a Z490, and be done with this. I run bone stock UEFI BIOS settings, no PBO or other overclocking.
I run a small business off this machine, and it has to be reliable, performance doesn't matter if you have stability issues.