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There is no way in hell all these expensive fabs will pay for themselves if chips are too cheap. So no one (especially not TSMC) will risk oversupply by building too many fabs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It wouldn't. HN lives in a SW bubble where Foss is the solution to everything , but fails to see that capital is the main barrier in the semi industry and, unlike their Node library, the secret sauce of cutting edge chips is a matter of national security at this point and will be kept as close to the chest as possible.
Actually if the IC design tools would be FOSS, the cost of new designs would decrease considerably, even up to two times. The cost of the subscriptions to the design tools provided by Cadence, Synopsis, Siemens (Mentor) and a few others is ridiculously high and it can contribute with many millions of $ to the design cost of a state-of-the-art chip. The design tools themselves have been improved extremely slowly and t…
There are FOSS IC design tools but nothing that can match Synopsis, Mentor and Cadence and the semi industry isn't gonna start dealing with FOSS jank and destroy their productivity and competitiveness just to save a few milion in licensing costs to those 3 companies, which are peanuts in the end.
They're like the John Deer of semi tools, expensive to own and run, but necessary to be competitive and get the most out of this field.
Plus, the proprietary stuff is still the standard-cell libraries of TSMC, Samsung, Glo-Fo etc. They will never open source this.
>and this perpetuates their monopoly and their ability of extracting huge amounts of money with minimal software development work,
Oh, you mean just like Microsoft, Google, Apple, etc?
Note that the shortage now is different than the past few years: it is not in fabricating any of the primary chips, it is entirely attributed to insufficient capacity in TSMC’s CoWoS packaging. This is only used for the highest-end accelerator products that use HBM (and a few other things that use full silicon interposers like Apple’s M-Ultras), they are scaling capacity, and there are increasing numbers of alternati…
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I'd bet $50 in 18 months "the crunch" will still be in full swing (and Raspberry Pi will still be "bringing huge volumes to the market any week now"). There is no way in hell all these expensive fabs will pay for themselves if chips are too cheap. So no one (especially not TSMC) will risk oversupply by building too many fabs.
I wonder how this will impact consumer gpus? If nvidia can print money making h100's you have to wonder if they will continue to invest on the retail side or if they'll funnel most of their efforts to server and let desktop parts languish.
They're selling consumer GPUs with huge margins too. The markup on the 40xx series is insane but they're still shipping a ton of units.
In Feb they artifically constrained 4090 volume to try and push 4080s no one wanted. The 4070 was dead on arrival and had production cut by April.
They've near stopped production now - theoretically because the AI stuff is so lucrative, but if they were really "shipping a ton of units" of the 40 series and didn't have excess inventory i doubt they'd have done that.
- https://www.dexerto.com/tech/nvidia-rtx-4070-production-repo... - https://www.dexerto.com/tech/nvidia-rtx-40-series-production...
Time to open source the chip making industry... ... ... This whole fabrication thing is a biiig chokepoint.
If you’re trying to draw parallels between this is and, say 3D printing, you will not find many similarities. PCB fabrication is also a a different beast but a lot of people think it’s as easy as finding a fab house that takes gerber files and creates a board for them.
If we want something that more closely resembles how we develop software, we probably will need to develop processes that enables us to flash FPGAs like MCUs, make them fully read only, and allow the customer to etch their own marking onto the chip. There facilities that produce ASICs like this already, but I can see something more standardized becoming more successful for general purpose. This does however require that we have a foundry create the original chips, the difference here is that they are producing the same standardized chip for everyone which would allow any foundry to make compatible alternatives.
I wonder how this will impact consumer gpus? If nvidia can print money making h100's you have to wonder if they will continue to invest on the retail side or if they'll funnel most of their efforts to server and let desktop parts languish.
If they were to give up their consumer gpu lead and let AMD overtake them that will lead to more AMD support in ML, enabling AMD to eventually compete in the server gpu space too.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
From 10 to 30 years. They need to clone ASML.
Very doubtful. They are already at 7nm. I'll bet 3 years. Using mostly stolen IP, because they aren't allowed to buy it.
Given that the nanometer rating is purely marketing/branding and doesn’t translate to actual sizes of anything nor translate between manufacturers, this really doesn’t mean anything.