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TSMC hikes chip prices up to 20% amid supply shortage

asia.nikkei.com

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Re: TSMC hikes chip prices up to 20% amid supply shortage

#51

Post by zpeti »

officialchicken wrote: post #47
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #32

Supply shortage is another way of saying demand excess. I don’t see much evidence that TSMC ever really slowed production, at least for their most advanced processes that are in high demand. This is yet another way we’re all forced to pay the price for cryptocurrency. As long as GPUs are profitable for mining, they will be purchased and put to work. The saddest part is that each additional GPU added to the mining net…

I love how crypto has become easy-to-blame, when in fact datacenter after datacenter is being stuffed to the brim with chips for ML workloads. It's important to recognize when consumers are being squeezed by multiple market forces.

Not just ML, with everything moving to cloud services, while consumers still use phones plus laptops, the number of chips used per person more and more.

Re: TSMC hikes chip prices up to 20% amid supply shortage

#52

Post by Leader2light »

officialchicken wrote: post #47
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #32

Supply shortage is another way of saying demand excess. I don’t see much evidence that TSMC ever really slowed production, at least for their most advanced processes that are in high demand. This is yet another way we’re all forced to pay the price for cryptocurrency. As long as GPUs are profitable for mining, they will be purchased and put to work. The saddest part is that each additional GPU added to the mining net…

I love how crypto has become easy-to-blame, when in fact datacenter after datacenter is being stuffed to the brim with chips for ML workloads. It's important to recognize when consumers are being squeezed by multiple market forces.

It's being blamed because cryptocurrency is pointless trash.

How can governments print money with a entire new currency in existence outside their control. They can't, the system would collapse upon which we all depend.

Thankfully cryptocurrency simply does not function as a currency and is a tool to get rich in normal currency.

Re: TSMC hikes chip prices up to 20% amid supply shortage

#53

Post by skohan »

baybal2 wrote: post #37
jjoonathan wrote: post #4

Supply shortages are the excuse du jour, but so long as TSMC has the kingmaking node I expect it to become expensive. Very expensive. Expensive enough to move margin from the king their node made right back to TSMC.

Silicon OPEC. I flouted the idea 10 years ago, and people were laughing.

It's a different case. TSMC isn't colluding with Samsung to limit the supply of silicon, they're simply succeeding where others have failed.

Re: TSMC hikes chip prices up to 20% amid supply shortage

#54

Post by qeternity »

officialchicken wrote: post #47
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #32

Supply shortage is another way of saying demand excess. I don’t see much evidence that TSMC ever really slowed production, at least for their most advanced processes that are in high demand. This is yet another way we’re all forced to pay the price for cryptocurrency. As long as GPUs are profitable for mining, they will be purchased and put to work. The saddest part is that each additional GPU added to the mining net…

I love how crypto has become easy-to-blame, when in fact datacenter after datacenter is being stuffed to the brim with chips for ML workloads. It's important to recognize when consumers are being squeezed by multiple market forces.

Datacenters are not deploying consumer GPUs.

Re: TSMC hikes chip prices up to 20% amid supply shortage

#55

Post by cletus »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #32

Supply shortage is another way of saying demand excess. I don’t see much evidence that TSMC ever really slowed production, at least for their most advanced processes that are in high demand. This is yet another way we’re all forced to pay the price for cryptocurrency. As long as GPUs are profitable for mining, they will be purchased and put to work. The saddest part is that each additional GPU added to the mining net…

I agree with this but it's even worse than that.

Estimates on Bitcoin energy usage put it at over 1TW now. I believe it was comparable to the energy consumption of Argentina.

Advocates will defend this by saying most energy usage is renewable. This conjures the image of someone with a bunch of solar panels but the reality is that it's primarily hydro power because that's the cheapest. Thing is, in regions with cheap hydro power, the miners can use so much power they end up making power more expensive for everyone.

I'd be more OK with this if crypto in fact solved a problem for most people. We should start by stopping calling them "currencies". They're not. They're assets. They lack all the useful properties of a currency (eg being massively deflationary)

The only thing cryptos really do is allow a temporary medium of exchange for traditional currencies. Some uses of this are entirely legitimate (eg escaping capital controls in certain currencies). Some are not (ie all the illegal usages).

I really wonder what happens to Bitcoin (or any PoW coin) when it no longer becomes economical to mine new coins. Does all the computing power just move on to the next coin? If so, won't this make the network vulnerable to attack? What is the incentive for people to contribute computing power without the prospect of economical new coins?

Re: TSMC hikes chip prices up to 20% amid supply shortage

#57

Post by bserge »

laputan_machine wrote: post #36
temp8964 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not just purchase a used one on eBay?

My current GPU is a used 980, it's mostly ok but it makes noises when doing certain tasks for some reason (like scrolling a browser window), I'm really not sure what causes it but it's put me off buying second hand cards, if it fails there's not much you can do to fix it

Noises? As in fan noises or GPU/VRM/component noises?

If it's the former, repaste it and grease the fan, if it's the latter, it's normal (except when caused by overheating, in which case repaste/grease).

Re: TSMC hikes chip prices up to 20% amid supply shortage

#59

Post by skohan »

qeternity wrote: post #54
officialchicken wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love how crypto has become easy-to-blame, when in fact datacenter after datacenter is being stuffed to the brim with chips for ML workloads. It's important to recognize when consumers are being squeezed by multiple market forces.

Datacenters are not deploying consumer GPUs.

It's still mediated by the same bottlenecks right? NVidia would be able to produce more consumer GPU's if they weren't competing for capacity at TSMC and Samsung

Re: TSMC hikes chip prices up to 20% amid supply shortage

#60

Post by PragmaticPulp »

officialchicken wrote: post #47
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #32

Supply shortage is another way of saying demand excess. I don’t see much evidence that TSMC ever really slowed production, at least for their most advanced processes that are in high demand. This is yet another way we’re all forced to pay the price for cryptocurrency. As long as GPUs are profitable for mining, they will be purchased and put to work. The saddest part is that each additional GPU added to the mining net…

I love how crypto has become easy-to-blame, when in fact datacenter after datacenter is being stuffed to the brim with chips for ML workloads. It's important to recognize when consumers are being squeezed by multiple market forces.

The issue is that crypto mining is the only system designed to have negative marginal utility for each GPU consumed. It literally pays people to take energy and GPUs away from the open market for zero incremental gain to the network.

The difference is that each additional iPhone or ML accelerator or cloud server CPU provides incrementally more utility. More ML accelerators means more ML processing.

Proof-of-work mining is the only system designed to get less efficient with each additional unit of compute power. Add another GPU to the mining network and the network will automatically become less efficient. More GPUs doesn’t mean more transactions, but the system pays people to essentially burn these GPUs.

That’s the complaint. Not that chips are being used, but that the marginal output of each additional GPU is negative.

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