Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

TSMC hikes chip prices up to 20% amid supply shortage

asia.nikkei.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 620 posts

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

#281

Post by AtlasBarfed »

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…

If only we could send a self-replicating machine that builds raspberry pis and solar panels to the moon with an uplink.

Then the difficulty would jump and we'd need to send one to Jupiter.

Then to mercury to set up the dyson swarm.

Suddenly we are a Kardashev civ... but it's all for bitcoin mining for rich billionaire paranoia of centralized currency control by the US government, and the actual bitcoin production rate is constant since the difficulty rate on the coins exploded from galaxy-spanning miner fleets.

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

#282

Post by _xnmw »

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…

The real value is only in the USD and NGN. Using Bitcoin to move the value is only propped by hype-fueled insanity that doesn't need to exist. International banks could easily create an international money-transfer system that would be far more reliable and secure than any decentralized Ponzi scheme. An in fact, such systems do exist - for example I used to earn in USD and spend instantly in other countries using international Visa/Mastercards like Revolut or Wise.

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

#283

Post by noelherrick »

Gosh I wish Apple with their loads of cash and drive to have the highest performing chip would get big ole fabs on US and EU shores. The fact that a disputed country owns the best fabs is downright scary for the future of the world (add in that the disputing country is the next superpower).

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

#284

Post by dcow »

adamc wrote: post #218
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…

https://qz.com/2023032/how-much-energy-does-bitcoin-use/ Thanks for making me look at this. We should ban cryptocurrencies.

Not all crypto is proof of work based. People have and are inventing better systems that reduce energy costs and provide more utility. “crypto” does not deserve a unilateral ban.

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

#285

Post by pbourke »

topspin wrote: post #265
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 wit…

Apple’s move, a decade ago, to control their own silicon seems quite prescient.

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

#286

Post by jdprgm »

orliesaurus wrote: post #35

Goodbye dreams of owning an Nvidia GPU in 2022 - I ain't paying cutthroat prices on ebay/amazon. Guess we're buying Intel! Sidenote: Intel manufacturers their own stuff, and so is Apple right? Their new cool chips are all in-house or are they through TSMC?

Coming up on a year since product launch and people camping out at Best Buys around the country literally last night. It's unreal.

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

#287

Post by 11thEarlOfMar »

iyn wrote: post #272
11thEarlOfMar wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Concur. We are currently paying a chip broker $6.30 for an Infineon chip we typically buy by the 100,000s for $0.47. Cuz without them, our customers cannot sell their $10,000,000 product.

Out of curiosity, what's the $10,000,000 product?

As parent indicated, they are machines that make chips.

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

#288

Post by njovin »

Forgive the naive question but why doesn't the US government fund several foundries in the US immediately? $20B over 3 years is a drop in the bucket compared to a lot of military spending and these chip shortages surely have downstream impact on the defense industry, no?

At this point I'd be much happier subsidizing chip manufacturing than most of the other ways this country spends money overseas.

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

#289

Post by _huayra_ »

akircher wrote: post #82
_huayra_ wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question: is it possible to make a cryptocurrency that does not rely on some real-world scarce resource (e.g. chips, electricity, drive space)? This seems to be a cornerstone of what makes any crypto valuable in the first place (scarcity), and as long as that scarcity has real-world consequences, it seems like it would have the same result. Chia claimed to "Save the world from proof-of-work wastage", but it wo…

“Work” doesn’t have to be wasteful. It could be based on the number of pieces of litter that were collected, the number of meals to the homeless that were served. It’s just easier to measure when work is something wasteful.

Let's hope someone comes up with a coin staked on the removal of CO2 from the atmosphere!

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

#290

Post by imtringued »

mgraczyk wrote: post #280
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…

I agree that the externalities are still overwhelmingly negative, but one part you're missing is that cryptocurrencies act as a global reserve asset. Crypto is still tiny compared to other financial markets, but the existence of cryptocurrencies has probably reduced the volatility of other assets somewhat. In the future, this effect will likely be more pronounced. It's an asset class that has some degree of independe…

The only good quality of Bitcoin is that it is completely decoupled from the economy. A bursting Bitcoin bubble doesn't take the rest of the economy with it. However, that only holds if countries don't use it as legal tender.
Post reply on HN