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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

#261

Post by skohan »

mountainb wrote: post #135
dkersten wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> more ML processing I would argue that most ML processing by most "big data" companies also has marginal negative output for each additional GPU. Certainly anything to do with social media or adtech and a lot of analytics in general is a net negative for the world, while consuming electricity and processing hardware.

Right, the ML processing is competitive in nature, just like the crypto mining is. Much of it also rests on illegal activity that just hasn't been discovered yet, whether overtly illegal (like botnets sloshing around ad money under fraudulent pretenses) or just mild to moderately illegal, like prima facie unauthorized database usage or use of scraped data. There are also uses of data that are illegal if it comes from…

You can't seriously be conflating all the money laundering and ransomware attacks enabled by crypto with a tiny bit of crime which happens at the margins of ML (like it might in any industry) can you?

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

#262

Post by skohan »

dkersten wrote: post #105
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> more ML processing I would argue that most ML processing by most "big data" companies also has marginal negative output for each additional GPU. Certainly anything to do with social media or adtech and a lot of analytics in general is a net negative for the world, while consuming electricity and processing hardware.

That's a value judgement, which is different than the case with POW which structurally devalues the output of each additional GPU.

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

#264

Post by bingohbangoh »

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…

What about the environmental practices of banking?

What about the cost of building all those buildings?

What about the cost of AC?

What about the cost of mining all those precious materials?

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

#265

Post by topspin »

laputan_machine wrote: post #24

My PC is 11 years old this year. I've been waiting to upgrade it for 2 years but held off because GPU prices are utterly ridiculous. I don't know who can afford these inflated prices, I was hoping things would settle but it doesn't appear to be the case.

"I was hoping things would settle but it doesn't appear to be the case."

I've come to the conclusion that it's not going to 'settle' for a long time. Not until competition arrives from new foundries (several years out, although they _are_ being planned and built) and competition from Intel and their GPU platform appears and eventually becomes competitive. So your wait will be a couple years longer.

Proof Of Stake with Ethereum won't change anything. There are many other POW block chains around and people invested in GPUs farming will migrate, find profit and continue indulging their livelihoods. COVID isn't going away and isn't really causing any of this to begin with; it's just the go-to excuse for every complaint.

The real problem is obvious to me; the manufacturers, particularly those in Western countries, have been on a 20 year long lemming-like off-shoring race to Taiwan and S. Korea foundries and now there is a foundry oligopoly and competition no longer exists. Prices go up. Big surprise. And it won't return to 'normal' anytime soon.

With that in mind I bit the bullet ordered up all the parts for my new machine two weeks ago; $3k with a 3070 TI GPU. About a week after my order the the exact same GPU appeared in stock from the exact same reseller with a $200 price hike. The prices aren't going down. They're going up.

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

#266

Post by magicalhippo »

vbezhenar wrote: post #206
tyingq wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Indeed. They even have some they guarantee to make for at least 20 years.

https://www.st.com/content/st_com/en/about/quality-and-relia...

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

#267

Post by f32jhnjk33jj »

neb_b wrote: post #242
colinmhayes wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> fast and cheap ???

Bitcoin onchain payments are still faster and cheaper than using something like Western Union. The lightning network is even faster and cheaper than that. https://twitter.com/jackmallers/status/1428429890957848591 (tweet text, also includes a video and some more info) "With @Bitnob_official's Lightning Network integration, we now have free, instant, non-reversible remittances of any size to and from the United States…

I don't know a single person who uses bitcoins or a single store that accepts them... and it's very risky for companies due to it's extreme volatility (the price may increase/decrease by hundreds percent within days or weeks)

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

#268

Post by unsui »

bingohbangoh wrote: post #264
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…

What about the environmental practices of banking? What about the cost of building all those buildings? What about the cost of AC? What about the cost of mining all those precious materials?

the whataboutism is strong with this one...

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

#269

Post by MangoCoffee »

a3n wrote: post #230
MangoCoffee wrote: post #130

> The company has said it will make $100 billion in capital investments over three years through 2023. >At the same time, "it will be very costly to manufacture in the U.S. and Japan," a member of the TSMC executive team said. The company is building a cutting-edge semiconductor facility in the U.S. state of Arizona and is considering opening its first Japanese chip plant in Kumamoto. TSMC heed the call of US to buil…

Chip making uses "a lot of water." (Parts of) Arizona is experiencing water shortage, particularly aquifer draw down. I wonder what the effect of chip making in Arizona will be in Arizona, relative to other water use. Parts of Arizona by law don't meter aquifer use, which disincentivizes current ag users to conserve, and has incentivized corporate ag to relocate there. (From memory, and I may have botched that memory…

"Counterintuitively, the famously thirsty industry can even improve the local water supply due to a focus on reclamation and purification—Intel has funded 15 water restoration projects in the Grand Canyon State with a goal of restoring 937 million gallons per year, and it expects to reach net positive water use once the projects are completed."

Here's arstechnica's article regarding fab in AZ

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/06/why-do-chip-makers-k...

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

#270

Post by emn13 »

raisedbyninjas wrote: post #129
formerly_proven wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Advocates will defend this by saying most energy usage is renewable. Even if true (iirc there is a lot of doubt whether it is, see Iran), it's still moronic, because consuming renewable energy for shits and giggles obviously means that other energy demands are being met with your usual energy mix instead of that renewable energy that went into shits and giggles as assumed. In terms of net emissions it simply doesn'…

Proof of work cryptos are a pox on society. That said they are some of the most location neutral energy consumers. This allows mining farms to be located adjacent to hydro dams or wind farms to get the cheapest energy and use energy that would otherwise be lost in transmission. 1TW is around 20% of global energy production. This is enough of a factor to impact manufacturing of renewable energy equipment. It allows th…

The incentives to use renewables are there... where the costs of fossil sources are high, and where the energy consuming process will be reliably profitable long enough to pay for all those renewable energy sources.

That last bit makes me doubt this would push renewables - who trusts that mining will remain profitable for years or even a decade? In other words, it may well incentivize energy sources with low down-payment costs.

Also: all those GPUs are expensive; is a miner really going to slow down mining significantly just because it's dark or no longer windy? Or will they prefer constant power, given the fact that GPU's will become obsolete much more quickly than the power source, and thus there's pressure to recoup that investment as quickly as possible, I'd guess... thus incentivizing baseload power, not unreliable but cheap power - conceivably, anyhow?

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