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TSMC hikes chip prices up to 20% amid supply shortage

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

#201

Post by [deleted] »

cwizou wrote: post #147
xyzzy21 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A recent Typhoon (one of the half dozen that hammered China) refilled all their reservoirs about a month or so ago. The one thing that complicates economics is that it's not a linear equation like they teach in Macroeconomics. The equations are more or less "true" in a vague sense but each term is actually a differential equation term in both time and other quantities. If you are familiar with simple one variable ODE…

> A recent Typhoon (one of the half dozen that hammered China) refilled all their reservoirs about a month or so ago. Yes I should have phrased that better, sorry. The thing is, making one wafer of chips takes roughly 3 months, and everything else has even more terrible lead times. So there's a delay in the impact of events.

[deleted]

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

#202

Post by yholio »

yarky wrote: post #191
cletus wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> in regions with cheap hydro power, the miners can use so much power they end up making power more expensive for everyone. Not if there are laws to keep electricity price within a range. In places like Canada electricity is not necessarily traded in public for-profit markets, and must by law stay below inflation. I agree that in can be a problem in (most of?) the US. > I really wonder what happens to Bitcoin (or any…

If you force the energy price to a certain subsidized level, then bitcoin farms will buy it all, masquerading as homes and small businesses, until you will be forced to shut down some large industrial consumers, putting real people out of work and making everyone poorer.

There is simply no way to waste valuable energy that's somehow imune to social and ecological effects.

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

#203

Post by sneak »

sofixa wrote: post #67
vardump wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might be the start of the end of high-end PC gaming, unless prices get back to a more reasonable level. Consoles (and phones) are very competitive and cost significantly less. Or perhaps it just causes the games to have lower performance requirements. Is integrated graphics the future of PC gaming?

Or is cloud gaming the future of gaming? GeForce Now and Stadia work fairly well and are price competitive with a modern powerful GPU.

Stadia doesn’t work “fairly well”. It’s also low-res (still) compared to a local GPU, which may be okay for some but certainly isn’t sufficient for serious gamers.

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

#204

Post by jeffe »

cletus wrote: post #55
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…

Let's not commit the fallacy of comparing unrelated big numbers. How does the energy and time per usd transferred compare between btc and the traditional banking system?

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

#205

Post by fennecfoxen »

reportingsjr wrote: post #162
londons_explore wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Building a new factory is a 10+ year effort for a competitor. (They have to do the R&D to get on-par with performance, and physically build the factory). The shortage won't last that long. But in the meantime, anyone who owns a suitable factory can pretty much set the prices as high as they like. I'm really surprised the price hike is only 20%, rather than 10% per month for the next 3 years.

I imagine if things get too out of hand that governments will step in to limit prices. Maybe.

Which government? Taiwan, where it matters? This is a major part of their economy; they all win big. I bet they'd sooner surrender to China.

Some other government? This wouldn't have much impact on chips, except to make it a lot less likely anyone makes chips in that country ever again — which isn't to say no nation would do it; economic history is full of this sort of thing, particularly as nations start going the way of Venezuela.

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

#206

Post by vbezhenar »

tyingq wrote: post #34
vbezhenar wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that lumber storage is much more expensive compared to chips

Do you mean storing already made chips? I imagine that's (often) expensive from a depreciation perspective.

Cheap microcontrollers are not deprecated for a very long time. STM sells chips designed 10 years ago, AFAIK.

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

#207

Post by Snitch-Thursday »

Kye wrote: post #195
ConcernedCoder wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd be more OK with this if crypto in fact solved a problem for most people. see: https://foldingathome.org/

What does this have to do with cryptocurrencies/cryptoassets? It's almost a decade older than Bitcoin. The inspiration (SETI@Home) is even older.

I think parent is advocating doing folding@home over stuff like PoW crypto since the former advances science and the latter (handwaves vaguely) doesn't.

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

#208

Post by tippytippytango »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #60
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.

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 mini…

The network gets more efficient, but harder to attack. Each incremental spend on a miner incrementally increases the network security.

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

#209

Post by [deleted] »

cletus wrote: post #55
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…

[deleted]

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

#210

Post by parineum »

nightski wrote: post #173
bluGill wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crypto mining is a market rate good.

Nvidia already added in a hardware crypto mining block to it's latest models and they are still having massive supply issues. It's not about crypto even though everyone likes to make a big deal out of it to feel better.

They don't block all mining, just specific algorithms. It's easy enough to mine some other coin and convert to the one you want. In fact, that's often more profitable.
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