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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

#611

Post by webmobdev »

clipradiowallet wrote: post #249
webmobdev wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One thing I heard is that the drought (worst one in 50 years in Taiwan) has really affected them ... This is the one aspect of manufactuing of chips that many are actually ignorant about - it needs huge amounts of pure water. This is the main reason why India doesn't yet have any fab, despite having the human resource for it and investors and government showing great interest to setup one. Two or three decades back…

What happens to the water the plants use? Is it polluted and unusable, or just tied up temporarily and can be released [safely] back into wherever it was diverted from?

Yes, it is polluted and even toxic.

> The manufacturing of semiconductors generates wastewater that contains heavy metals and toxic solvents. Due to the hazardous nature of these liquids, semiconductor companies historically have incurred clean-up costs related to groundwater contamination of up to USD 100 million ... Some companies are proactively meeting these challenges and mitigating related risks by reducing their reliance on chemicals and pro-actively improving the treatment of water before discharge. STMicroelectronics, for example, recycled and reused 45% of the total water it withdrew in 2015 and it partnered with Micron Technology to install on-site fluoride waste treatment facilities.

Source: https://www.sustainalytics.com/esg-research/resource/investo...

The report also gives concrete numbers: Intel fabs consumed 9 billion gallons (around 3.4 trillion liters) of water in 2015.

Apparently a fab roughly consumes around 20,000 tons (around 1.98 million liters) of water per day:

> The chipmaking industry is water-intensive. According to nonprofit China Water Risk (CWR), an average semiconductor factory consumes roughly 20,000 tons of water a day, equivalent to the daily water use of a city of 58,000. Yet despite its high water consumption, the chip industry—in Taiwan, at least—is not normally a noticeable drain on communal resources.

Source: https://fortune.com/2021/06/12/chip-shortage-taiwan-drought-...

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

#612

Post by webmobdev »

naruvimama wrote: post #420
webmobdev wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One thing I heard is that the drought (worst one in 50 years in Taiwan) has really affected them ... This is the one aspect of manufactuing of chips that many are actually ignorant about - it needs huge amounts of pure water. This is the main reason why India doesn't yet have any fab, despite having the human resource for it and investors and government showing great interest to setup one. Two or three decades back…

This is a very false premise. Water is no reason to not have a fab, just like Japan builds semiconductor & nuclear plants in a seismically active zone. So does Israel in a dessert. India receives way more rain than it requires even in the drier parts, the problem with soil degradation and deforestation that came with unchecked "modern" agriculture. The productivity & economic benefits from a FAB and semiconductor eco…

> The productivity & economic benefits from a FAB and semiconductor ecosystem in India will far outweigh any negative, putting a plant close to a nuclear plant and a massive desalination plant to ensure both power, water as well as security will do the job.

Diversion of water resources to fabs (they require around 2 million liters a day; Intel fabs consumed 9 billion gallons / 3.4 trillion liters in 2015) can gravely affect our food security as 60% of our cultivable land are in "drought prone" areas. Moreover, the water released from the fabs is toxic and can heavily pollute our environment even after they are treated and stringent standards are complied with (and expecting that is a joke in India).

Your suggestion of using a nuclear plant and a desalination plant might seem practical, but it ignores the fact that the byproduct of desalination plants are huge quantities of various salts. And dumping them causes pollution (if you dump them back in the sea, it can create dead zones for kms around as most aquatic life cannot survive in such a "salty" concentrated environment).

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

#614

Post by quantumBerry »

stouset wrote: post #610
quantumBerry wrote: post #609

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I said Bitcoin's survival was not predicated on centralized mining facility. You seem to be agreeing with me, because your scenario is one of a 51% attack predicated on a large centralized mining facility. You are overlooking the number of actors capable of pulling off illegal mining, and the difficulty in coordinating all of them. You are acknowledging even under clamp downs, mining will continue. If you think about…

You're playing semantics. Bitcoin's survival is predicated upon the distributed, cooperating members of the network being willing and able to spend more cycles than any one bad actor. Prohibition of mining centralized mining tautologically reduces the number of cycles the network is able to cooperatively dedicate toward mining. Whatever the hash rate otherwise would be without a prohibition, once you prohibit and dra…

>Bitcoin's survival is predicated upon the distributed, cooperating members of the network being willing and able to spend more cycles than any one bad actor.

Which is an entirely different statement than saying bitcoin's survival is predicated on centralized mining. It's not.

If centralized mining operations can continue, centralized mining operations could have a 51% attack.

Thank you captain obvious, ultimate king of semantics.

Your entire argument is one of bitcoin's demise via 51% attack being predicated on centralized mining. I don't think you understand that claiming a 51% attack is predicated on scaled-up operations is an entirely different statement than arguing against bitcoin's survival not being predicated on centralized mining.

You imagine a scenario of majority hashrate bad actors, all cooperating, can pull off centralized mining, and that their hashrate exceeds the entire hashrate of the decentralized less upscaled nodes as well as the more centralized good actors. That is a possible, but unlikely scenario that has always existed since the beginning of bitcoin for the reasons I previously stated before. It simply hasn't happened, there is currently a roughly $1T bet that it won't happen in the near term, and there is a valid argument to be made that when centralized mining becomes more restricted that the likelihood of successful 51% attack goes down and not up.

>people can pull off scaled-down mining operations even if illegal, but this reduces the effective hashrate

Probably, but not necessarily so. If I shutdown my up-scaled operation and send my miners to 100 of my friends to use discretely in their homes with similar uptime, tell me what difference does it make to the total hashrate? The only real effect is it makes it even harder to coordinate a 51% attack.

>My statement is "people can pull off scaled-down mining operations even if illegal, but this reduces the effective hashrate; further, other people can pull off scaled-up mining operations in the short term".

It sounds very easy to say "just get 51% of the world hashrate" (you seem unaware of what a feat this is) when in fact worldwide many actors would simply mine to the extent they can get away with it, probably including large centralized operations, and prisoner's dilemma and lack of worldwide coordination of bad actors would quite likely prevent such a 51% attack. I also don't think you can make the presumption the decentralized, down-scaled nodes will be a minority of the total hashrate if up-scaled mining becomes difficult (of course, it is possible, no in is denying that a 51% attack has always been a means of attacking bitcoin).

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

#615

Post by naruvimama »

webmobdev wrote: post #612
naruvimama wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very false premise. Water is no reason to not have a fab, just like Japan builds semiconductor & nuclear plants in a seismically active zone. So does Israel in a dessert. India receives way more rain than it requires even in the drier parts, the problem with soil degradation and deforestation that came with unchecked "modern" agriculture. The productivity & economic benefits from a FAB and semiconductor eco…

> The productivity & economic benefits from a FAB and semiconductor ecosystem in India will far outweigh any negative, putting a plant close to a nuclear plant and a massive desalination plant to ensure both power, water as well as security will do the job. Diversion of water resources to fabs (they require around 2 million liters a day; Intel fabs consumed 9 billion gallons / 3.4 trillion liters in 2015) can gravely…

The run off from agriculture and tanners is several orders of magnitude greater.

If you factor the over all benefit to the pollution and resource consumption, a fab is several orders of magnitude better, why else would everyone else scramble to get one built.

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

#616

Post by yholio »

tromp wrote: post #437
yholio wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ethereum is deflationary by both definitions, the market value increases while the rate of disbursement decreases with time.

Regarding supply behaviour, you're confusing deflationary with disinflationary (yearly inflation rate going down toward 0).

You are ignoring the large amounts of coin that are taken out of circulation by software and hardware bugs, owner death or amnesia, intentional destruction by transfer to unspendable addresses. For bitcoin, by credible estimates we are already talking about millions of coins.

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

#617

Post by Salgat »

louloulou wrote: post #430
Salgat wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People need to remember that using up the available renewable energy on crypto just means there's less available for other consumers to use. The idea is to reduce electrical demand which makes it easier to shift towards 100% renewable. Adding all that electrical demand just keeps around non-renewable energy longer since few countries are able to go 100% renewable on their current demand.

I doesn't, at all. Energy production and energy distribution are entirely different things. There is enough unused (i.e. wasted) hydro power in Quebec to power the entire Bitcoin network. If energy is produced too far from where it is demanded such that transmission is prohibitively expensive, there is no downside to having highly mobile miners to make use of it. In fact the extra revenue generated can be used to sub…

Here's a writeup on how that's a misleading statement, and how the best use of that hydro power for offsetting carbon would be for it to be used to offset neighboring province's much worse coal-based power.

https://www.nrcm.org/news/hydro-quebec-offers-misleading-cla...

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

#618

Post by phone8675309 »

kulahan wrote: post #246
phone8675309 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mining usually does not "burn out" a GPU. Most miners cool their cards adequately and undervolt them. If a GPU is somehow damaged from mining then it’s typically observable - it either does not work or it artifacts quickly, making it easy to detect and avoid.

Even if they do that, they’re still running it 24/7/365 for possibly years at a time. Wouldn’t that be some serious wear and tear? Genuine question - I have no clue.

Most of the wear and tear on a GPU is going to come from temperature changes due to the workload changing, or, for the fans, the card spinning the fans at start up, ramping up and ramping down due to a change in load, or halting the fans at shutdown.

It's very possible that an undervolted, well-ventilated card, run with a steady workload 24/7/365 for three years would have _less_ wear and tear than a card used for gaming and then shut down every night for three years.

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

#619

Post by webmobdev »

naruvimama wrote: post #615
webmobdev wrote: post #612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The productivity & economic benefits from a FAB and semiconductor ecosystem in India will far outweigh any negative, putting a plant close to a nuclear plant and a massive desalination plant to ensure both power, water as well as security will do the job. Diversion of water resources to fabs (they require around 2 million liters a day; Intel fabs consumed 9 billion gallons / 3.4 trillion liters in 2015) can gravely…

The run off from agriculture and tanners is several orders of magnitude greater. If you factor the over all benefit to the pollution and resource consumption, a fab is several orders of magnitude better, why else would everyone else scramble to get one built.

A fab at the expense of food security is not a good deal. When you can't feed your people, you are at the mercy of other nations, and that greatly harms national security. India used to once have frequent famines, and had to beg food from other countries. Today it can feed its billion+ population because it is the world leader in producing fruits, vegetables, grains, diary produce etc. A starving population doesn't care about CPU chips.

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

#620

Post by quantumBerry »

baxuz wrote: post #308
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'm gonna voice a rather unpopular opinion. The only thing crypto is good for: - earning money by spinning up GPU fans - playing the crypto stock market - money laundering - buying weapons - buying drugs - buying humans I'm glad that the EU is at least trying to put an end to this: https://www.euronews.com/next/2021/07/21/eu-will-make-bitcoi...

-money transfer and storage for the structurally unbanked.

Anonymous crypto wallets cannot be banned and to "taint" any bitcoin that has passed through anonymous wallets would mean every single bitcoin would be tainted. It would be like trying to ban euros used for drug trade; if it were done all euros would seize to circulate.

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