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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

#501

Post by kragen »

p_j_w wrote: post #228
raisedbyninjas wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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. Sure, but there doesn't seem to be to be any indication that this is what actually happens. Is there any evidence for that?

Yes, there is a great deal of evidence of Bitcoin farms being located adjacent to hydro dams. I'm not sure about wind farms.

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

#502

Post by spdionis »

quantumBerry wrote: post #407
skohan wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't you think it could be aggressively regulated against? I doubt it could be completely stopped, but demand could be sharply reduced if using and mining cryptocurrency carried sharp legal penalties.

It could, but governments have a hard enough time sharply reducing drug use, and that has something tangible to search for and find. Trying to find some bits in the ether or even worse guess whether someone is memorizing a seed phrase is nigh impossible to prove or extinguish. Mining will be carried out wherever someone could get away with it, which is basically any western country where it is legal and any 3rd world…

I'd assume some of these massive energy-hungry mining facilities would be fairly hard to hide.

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

#503

Post by tass »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #427
elif wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious why we don't find a similar backlash to people who put their energy into a hot tub or to cool a 5x sized home.. as these cases don't even purportedly support a valuable economic mechanism. For instance. I don't cool my home with AC. does it bother you that I mine bitcoin overnight when the grid has surplus energy?

People do complain about excessive comforts too. It's one of the main complains those less well off make about those more well off. That said, there's a couple of differences between hot tubs and AC, and crypto mining: - Creature comforts don't consume the energy equivalent of a small developed country. - In what they do consume, most of the use is around basic human needs; excessive use happens rarely. - Most import…

To add, this isn’t really “surplus” energy that’s being consumed.

There are fossil burning power plants running only to produce PoW, and unless mining operations shut down to allow a generator to operate at minimum load, they are forcing shared generators to run and dams to drain.

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

#505

Post by kragen »

tedunangst wrote: post #365
HenryKissinger wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nobody wants the chips made by the chipless chip making machines.

How many chips could a chipless chip making machine make if a chipless chip making machine could chip chipping chips?

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

#506

Post by milesvp »

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #466
tdeck wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's chips that I'm sourcing from obscure places in China just to get the part and paying whatever price they ask. When sourcing like this, how do you ensure that you're not getting factory seconds or counterfeit parts?

From my experience no one cares if they are as long as they more or less work. Source: I'm a software engineer who has had to fix so many issues due to unannounced component changes from suppliers. "Oh you just replaced the specific USB chip with something different that has a whole lot of errata (Bugs in chip logic that you have to work around in software) and didn't tell us? GREAT! THANKS!"

Oh man. I just did a board bring-up recently and didn't notice that the flash chip I was having trouble with was a previous version than the one we specified. I only just barely managed to get those boards working, and best as I can tell, it was the conductivity of the particular flux I was using to reflow the part that was nudging an NC connection to actually use it's internal pull-up. When the factory couldn't follow my steps, they finally realized that if they were going to substitute that chip, they'd need to add a 10k pullup resistor on a pin that had a use on that revision but not on the one we wanted. What's worse, is even if I'd noticed that the chip was older, looking at the datasheet for it that I had access to, nowhere did it mention a need for a pullup on that pin. Only the factory datasheet mentioned issues with the internal pullup and suggested using an external one.

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

#507

Post by yoavm »

rfd4sgmk8u wrote: post #408
yoavm wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't have to control what software is permitted to run: you can just ban changing USD to Bitcoin and vice versa. Stop the exchanges. Most people aren't mining their own coins anyway.

You can ban a lot of things in life. Theft. Drugs. Crime in general. You may not understand how the OTC market works in jurisdictions like China that do indeed ban cryptocurrency exchanges and prevent fiat cryptocurrency exchanges. A fist full of RMB can be swapped for USDT, which can be swapped for BTC from OTC brokers. What you are proposing can only be stopped by breaking computers, breaking arms/legs and breaking…

I never suggested that it will completely erase cryptocurrencies. I do think that it will help making it less popular, which would be great. I sure think that while making theft illegal didn't stop it, it reduced the number of theft cases.

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

#508

Post by kragen »

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

That's because the rest of the world is no longer a bombed-out postwar wasteland or its near-enslaved colonies as it was in 01945. "Producing more than ever" is what you needed last year when you couldn't get N95 masks or ventilators, not "producing more than the rest of the world". But something went wrong and the masks and ventilators were not forthcoming, something that looks an awful lot like an absolute decline in manufacturing abilities.

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

#509

Post by 11thEarlOfMar »

vdfs wrote: post #504
11thEarlOfMar wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One $10,000,000 machine uses about 1000 of these chips.

If you don't mind answering, what type of chips?

24 volt digital output drivers. We're also getting crushed on Xilinx FPGAs, certain Cypress CPUs, AD MUXes, Relay switches... It's something new every week.

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

#510

Post by jbay808 »

monocularvision wrote: post #350
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 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.

It seems to me that if you can make a product of a given quality very cheaply, that probably indicates that you're very good at making it.

The fact that I can't get competitive production quotes in the USA for most products, like electric motors, injection molded plastic parts, printed circuit boards, stamped metal parts, castings, etc, suggests that the US is also not particularly efficient at making those parts. There was a time when the cheapest place to go for such things in production volumes was actually the US.

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