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The global chip shortage is starting to have consequences

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Re: The global chip shortage is starting to have consequences

#321

Post by tpmx »

d136o wrote: post #310

I recommend this read about the origins of the semiconductor industry in Silicon Valley: They Would Be Gods [1]. Making a chip has been something that has been done completely methodically since their invention (I wonder if the less disciplined or less methodical and messy shops simply went out of business). Add decades of automation and scaling in every part of that process and we get to AMSL machines sold for hundr…

> Making a chip has been something that has been done completely methodically since their invention

The yield improvement process seems like it has a lot common with e.g. baking and intuition.

Re: The global chip shortage is starting to have consequences

#322

Post by ineedasername »

heisenbit wrote: post #243
mywittyname wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've been low for a while now too. As annoying as it is to have a $670 car payment each month, you really can't beat 0% interest on a $40k loan. Especially in a market where the average monthly return on $40k in stocks has been pretty substantial.

0% loan on the sticker price. The goal of coming in with cash is to get as far as possible below the sticker price.

One offer I was looking at recently was 0% OR $4k cash back off the MSRP. The interest rate on taking the cash back offer ended up working out to near exactly $4k. Though if you have good credit and went through a credit union you could probably get a much better rate.

Re: The global chip shortage is starting to have consequences

#323

Post by o-__-o »

pja wrote: post #239
o-__-o wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All modern cars have amazing new features. Air bags, reverse cameras, steering by wire, ABS, direct fuel injection, massively boosted turbocharged engines (on econoboxes!) and traction control as standard. My 7 year old car has all of the above and can park itself, has adaptive cruise control, and for $400 I added a 12” touch screen stereo. Compared to my last car, my current car outputs up to 20psi of boost compared…

I bought a perfectly ordinary second hand vehicle for £3k in 2003 (it had been built in 1999) which had ABS, air bags everywhere, direct fuel injection, turbo-charged engine & traction control. Modern cars are pretty amazing things: a lot of these features have been standard for twenty years at this point! (The vehicle I bought was much favoured by UK taxi drivers at the time, which shows you how very boring & practi…

Since 2003 that has only gotten better. My turbocharged engine gets 35mpg on the highway while putting out 240hp on demand. 2003 cars couldn’t do that. my 2000 A4 with mods put out 250hp and had some sort of vacuum leak every other week, meanwhile that’s normal for my 2014 car and adding meth injection puts me as 300hp with zero problems after 2 years of continuous use

Remember when cars of the 90s were so much better than cars of the 80s? Going over 100k mi/km in most cars wasn’t a concern anymore. Now a large majority of cars are going 200-300k without a sweat

Re: The global chip shortage is starting to have consequences

#324

Post by dehrmann »

justapassenger wrote: post #244
bredren wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since 14% of renters are behind on rent and evictions begin June 30, aren’t vehicle repossessions going to kick in July / August? Presumably, due in part to eviction protection, they have been able to divert all or a portion of their rent payments to keeping up with bad car loans for commute vehicles that often will not be needed. These folks need them for housing unfortunately. If repossessed cars start showing up t…

> Most new cars still suck / Do not offer meaningful new features. In terms of bells and whistles? Yeah, not that much. But in terms of safety tech, there has been a huge progress in last 10 years and it’s not slowing down. New cars are not only getting harder to crash, but in case of crash they’re getting better and better at protecting you. Safety is main reason why I update my cars every few years, even tho it’s p…

> Safety is main reason why I update my cars every few years

It's probably only only worth it after a redesign (every 6 years, or so), and I'd wait for the second model year in the new generation for them to work out the kinks. That said, the EV of added safety, especially coming from a car generation build before the small overlap frontal crash test was added in 2012, is pretty good.

Re: The global chip shortage is starting to have consequences

#325

Post by baybal2 »

pharke wrote: post #259
baybal2 wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The trouble is, this is a temporary shortage It isn't. Designs on 200mm were in dire shortage for half a decade, and Chinese foundries were making very decent money on decades old chips. For the last 3-4 years, 200mm-180nm had a 12 month+ backlog across the whole market.

I wonder if there's a good business in the mix of these ideas. If a lot of manufacturers actually are using over powered chips because they are a) more available and b) easier to program with newer tooling then one might be able to find a niche making cheaper/simpler/older style chips if they also provided modern tooling making it easier to program them for simple tasks like weighing things, blinking lights, playing…

No the challenge is exactly the opposite.

Tons of chips still made at >130nm, and 200mm equipment for simple reasons that companies don't make much money, or not having much volume in this stuff.

Re: The global chip shortage is starting to have consequences

#326

Post by drzaiusapelord »

smt88 wrote: post #146
devney wrote: post #11

For years I've been asking: Why does my toothbrush have to connect to bluetooth? Why does my refrigerator twitter? These were always useless mis-features and we can hope some of them can get pared down now with the shortage. Bring back old style dumb appliances!

Chips in cars are decades old and are useful for things like managing fuel injection, increasing fuel efficiency. "Dumb" cars have chips too.

and for all we know, if cars were still made with carbs and solenoids and old fashion-y tech, that manufacturing might be impacted by a pandemic as well. I don't think there's anything fundamental about chips that are causing this delay. A lot of it has to with cancelling orders and manufacturers winding down and then restarting a major supply chain takes time, especially if demand shuts down fast and then starts up again faster than expected.

Re: The global chip shortage is starting to have consequences

#327

Post by dehrmann »

infogulch wrote: post #236
dokem wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do pick up trucks cause more accidents? Is there data that supports this?

Or are modern pickup-pedestrian accidents more deadly than other classes of cars?

This will be a weird number because I rarely see pickups in urban centers with lots of pedestrians, but I see them all the time in rural places.

Re: The global chip shortage is starting to have consequences

#328

Post by baybal2 »

bluGill wrote: post #296
neltnerb wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get that this is a potential big problem, but I had to stop reading when the dog washing company blamed needing to respin a new board on a chip being out of stock due to this. I'm sorry, but if you aren't buying enough chips to build all the boards you want to build of a revision, this is just what happens, chip shortage or no. Stuff gets obsoleted all the time, it doesn't take a chip shortage. Blaming a black swan…

Chips shouldn't go obsolete so fast. Your local auto parts store has in stock parts for cars made 50 years ago. That include aftermarket parts made in the past few years. You cannot support right to repair if you support the idea that chips go obsolete.

It's actually a "feature." Automakers like to have easily sun-settable, hard to replace parts to quickly remove old cars off the market.

Now, they want to do it even quicker.

DRMed autoparts are a new craze. A tsunami of them is coming in 2021+ cars.

They all now want to do the the John Deere trick. They gave the industry a very bad example to follow.

Re: The global chip shortage is starting to have consequences

#329

Post by californical »

dahfizz wrote: post #188
seltzered_ wrote: post #170

Regarding cars: "Some carmakers are now leaving out high-end features as a result of the chip shortage, according to a Bloomberg report on Thursday. Nissan is reportedly leaving navigation systems out of cars that would normally have them, while Ram Trucks has stopped equipping its 1500 pickups with a standard “intelligent” rearview mirror that monitors for blind spots" I have an unpopular opinion, especially when we…

I definitely agree that car size inflation is a real problem. Cars are too big and getting bigger every year. That said, "good visibility" is not a replacement for safety tech. The sensors and cameras in a car are always going to be better at spotting danger than a human for things like blind spot monitoring and backup cameras. You sound a bit like the teachers that would drill mental math because "you won't always h…

I disagree about the safety tech.

There are some situations where it’s great, but those features make the driver feel a false sense of security. Let the people feel like they’re entirely responsible so they’re more careful.

For example, widening the roads in the suburbs used to seem like a great idea - more space, less accidents, right? But that’s untrue. Narrower streets with trees blocking visibility on the sides are actually safer because the driver is forced to be more aware [1] [2].

Another good example is road markings and street/stop signs. Surely, having street signs and lane markings is safer right? Well, this is early on, but at least on city streets, it appears that’s not true either. [3] [4]

Now, to your point, it does appear that automatic car safety systems do make cars safer right now [5]. But those types of things are pretty new, so I wonder how long it’ll be until they have the same fate as those other safety innovations of the past. Where taking them away will make driving safer because people feel personally responsible, so they drive slower.

[1] https://www.thecalifornian.com/story/news/2015/06/14/studies...

[2] https://www.cnu.org/publicsquare/narrow-streets-are-safest

[3] https://gizmodo.com/this-street-has-no-lanes-signals-or-sign...

[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/22/world/europe/a-path-to-ro...

[5] https://www.forbes.com/advisor/car-insurance/vehicle-safety-...

Re: The global chip shortage is starting to have consequences

#330

Post by noahtallen »

baybal2 wrote: post #235
throwaway3699 wrote: post #2

I've always wondered what it would be like to suddenly lose the ability to build higher technology like computer chips. Obviously this is just a shortage and not the same as manufacturing just vanishing, but the effects will be interesting to observe.

The industry has largely forgotten how to make stuff without chips. That's why I am telling people that a global chip shortage, if something happens to Taiwan, would bring the industry not back into fifties, but into the iron age. The further the tech ladder you go, the harder you fall if somebody takes out your engineering bay.

I don’t think that would happen. Firstly, the US government and army (like it or not) has an interest in not falling behind technologically. Additionally, Intel has most of its fabs in the US already. Samsung and TSMC are currently building fabs in the US too. Finally, the US still has a strong tech culture. So I think it would not take long with an increased demand (and higher salaries) for computer engineers to attract a lot of good talent.

I mean, I agree it wouldn’t be good. But back to the 50s? Or even the “Iron Age”? That seems awfully pessimistic.

Like, I get that Intel is not doing great, but it’s only like a handful of years bad, not decades bad

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