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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

#481

Post by syshum »

minikites wrote: post #184
ren_engineer wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"service economy" was always a meme being sold to the gullible masses, manufacturing capacity is the only thing that matters for an economy. Manufacturing has always printed the money It amazes me how the US allowed itself to be nearly deindustrialized after manufacturing effectively won them WWII and global dominance. Now the US can't even make ventilators or face masks

Capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction. The relentless drive to shave fractions of a cent off costs in the short term creates the conditions you describe in the long term. In other words, it's like being penny wise and pound foolish on a global scale.

Fake News... that is not capitalism, that is a by product of decades and decades of tex based incentives that push people in to market index funds, mutual funds and other institutional investment where it is all managed funds

These managed funds are driven by quarterly earnings people expect to see...

This intern drives public companies to focus on quarterly earnings

Privately held companies almost never look at quarterly earnings, they look at a 5 year picture... It is mainly public companies majority owned institutional investors (401k's, pensions, etc) that focus on quarterly earnings

So once again what people blame capitalism for, is in reality government putting their hands on the scales and tipping the market in ways that have unintended consequences

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

#482

Post by topspin »

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…

Update: that GPU is about $250 more now than what I paid on 8/6.

The worst part of all of this is now my PC is this precious asset. Used to be a GPU could die and "meh, whatever... could have used an update anyhow." Now I feel the need to pay for a 'protection' plan.

The good part of just paying the cost is now I'm no longer involved in 'newegg shuffle' nonsense or participating in 24/7 Live Stock Watcher videos on YouTube[1]. How messed up is that?

[1] 24/7 Live stock alert https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfyJ5XBchoQ

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

#483

Post by gowld »

HenryKissinger wrote: post #345
11thEarlOfMar wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As parent indicated, they are machines that make chips.

How were the chip-making machines made before there were chip-making machines? Can't chip-making machines be made without chips? Yes. The very first one, at least, was made like that.

Software analogy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrapping_(compilers)

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

#484

Post by rat87 »

ren_engineer wrote: post #172
pcurve wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their margin is approaching 40%. They're basically printing money at this point. It's hilarious how a manufacturer can be so profitable nowadays.

"service economy" was always a meme being sold to the gullible masses, manufacturing capacity is the only thing that matters for an economy. Manufacturing has always printed the money It amazes me how the US allowed itself to be nearly deindustrialized after manufacturing effectively won them WWII and global dominance. Now the US can't even make ventilators or face masks

"Manufacturing economy" was a meme sold to gullible nostalgic masses

Work is work, money is money. There's nothing fundamentally more important about manufacturing then other types of jobs. The US still has tons of manufacturing but unsurprisingly its on the backs of much fewer jobs, many of which require more education and specialization then manufacturing economy of old used to supply

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

#485

Post by [deleted] »

minikites wrote: post #444
ethbr0 wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because ordinary workers, producing many units, is a business with low margins. And in modern developed economies, those margins are insufficient to support a decent salary.

So what happens when every economy becomes developed? What happens when we can't rely on the existence of low wage workers?

[deleted]

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

#486

Post by mywittyname »

markus_zhang wrote: post #254
ren_engineer wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"service economy" was always a meme being sold to the gullible masses, manufacturing capacity is the only thing that matters for an economy. Manufacturing has always printed the money It amazes me how the US allowed itself to be nearly deindustrialized after manufacturing effectively won them WWII and global dominance. Now the US can't even make ventilators or face masks

US is smart enough to retain the cream of the manufacturers. I think some smaller western countries are really in the danger of a complete de-industrialization.

It's not for lack of trying. It's hard to compete on the global stage and it takes more than wishful thinking to maintain a competitive edge in a world full of people trying to top you.

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

#487

Post by viscanti »

ren_engineer wrote: post #372
monocularvision wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US Manufacturing is still going. In fact, we manufacture more than ever. Folks conflate manufacturing with manufacturing _jobs_. Our manufacturing is more efficient then ever which is why you constantly hear this false refrain that US manufacturing is down or gone.

people always point to this dumb metric, "we're producing more than ever" compared to ourselves, while ignoring that the number in comparison to the rest of the world has dropped massively. Our share of global manufacturing is tiny compared to what it used to be

> Our share of global manufacturing is tiny compared to what it used to be

You mean compared to a time when most developed countries' production capacity was significantly limited because they had been bombed out in WW2 and developing countries were a long way away from being competitive?

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

#488

Post by hathawsh »

Kirby64 wrote: post #432
hathawsh wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's starting to change. Sam Zeloof is inspiring. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7E8-0Ou69hwScPW1_fQApA

What he's making is basically caveman technology compared to actual cutting-edge nodes. No offense to his accomplishments, but the modern fabs like TSMC are so advanced you cannot just make the things they make without billions of capital investment. It just is not possible. Unfortunately, many of the chips in short supply are on pretty small nodes, so you need extremely specialized equipment limited to a few of the…

No disagreement here. It's just good to see someone trying. :-)

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

#489

Post by kragen »

_jal wrote: post #213
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'…

The renewable energy nonsense is just that - bullshit to distract. Knocking a single coal mine offline in China famously cut bitcoin mining activity by a third earlier this year. https://fortune.com/2021/04/20/bitcoin-mining-coal-china-env... Now, the claim could still theoretically be true, but I really want to see some hard numbers with sources from the next person trying to defend that claim.

Subsidized energy can be cheap or even free, and it's hard to compete with free. For-profit Bitcoin miners are in an intense competition to find the cheapest energy. Anyone who can steal their energy or get someone else to pay for it via subsidies will win there, but only until the free lunch ends. Energy free lunches are ending all over the world now; nobody wants to build a coal plant in order to give away the energy to bitcoin miners so they can retire in Switzerland.

And that's why the Chinese authorities kicked out all the bitcoin miners a couple months after that, dropping the bitcoin hashrate by more than half. It's on its way back up, but it hasn't fully recovered.

https://www.blockchain.com/charts/hash-rate

By contrast, especially in tropical regions, you can build a solar or wind power plant to mine bitcoin profitably without finding someone else to fob the bill off on. In much of the world, solar energy is now less than half the cost of fossil-fuel energy, though not in cloudy polar regions like Germany, the Netherlands, or the UK. There's a new record-low PPA price every few months, and it's always solar; https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/04/08/saudi-arabias-second-... this April seems to be the latest, at US$0.0104/kWh, which is about a quarter of what coal energy usually costs.

That's why the Navajo Generating Station has been demolished, Peabody Coal has gone bankrupt and may do so again, and for the first time in human history, outside of PRC, more coal generating capacity was shut down than was built last year. This year that'll probably be true worldwide. Coal (and nuclear, and oil) just can't compete economically with solar anymore, even in temperate regions. And, consequently, neither can Bitcoin miners who are paying the cost of using coal. Fortunately for them, shipping their server racks to a more profitable region is a lot cheaper than doing the same with a steel mill.

Hopefully this gives you a clearer picture of the whole political-economic environment in which Bitcoin mining is happening than just a few hard numbers, which are of course fundamental.

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

#490

Post by 1123581321 »

ericd wrote: post #478
zsmi wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ASML is trying to increase the world's capacity by ramping up their production of EUV machines to 50 per year. [1] The ASML CEO stated it's probably not possible for the world to produce more than that. These machines are ~$150 million ea and building one is insanely complicated. [2] [1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/15428/asml-ramps-up-euv-scann... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJIO7aRXUCg

So they don’t have the potential to make more than $7.5B in revenue per year? With a market cap of $338B? Something doesn’t add up there.

Their max is about double that (other kinds of systems, and service.) That’s about a p/e of 60 which is too high but what this market has done to many stocks. There is some expectation of growth, too, of course. ASML will keep pushing their capabilities and if trends continue, they should eventually be selling individual machines worth an order of magnitude more.
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