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TSMC warns AI chip crunch will last another 18 months

theregister.com

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Re: TSMC warns AI chip crunch will last another 18 months

#61

Post by pests »

hef19898 wrote: post #10
wincy wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About as likely as open source nuke design.

Building one the WW2 designs isn't really that hard today, is it? Getting the fission material on the other hand... Just ask Doc Brown, because it is not the 80s anymore were you get Plutonium at pharmacies, ah those days!

It depends. Little boy would be easiest as the speherical detonation and materials science for the Fat Man implosion would still be difficult to design and machine. I also do not beleive the activator designs have ever been declassified.

Re: TSMC warns AI chip crunch will last another 18 months

#62

Post by hef19898 »

pests wrote: post #61
hef19898 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Building one the WW2 designs isn't really that hard today, is it? Getting the fission material on the other hand... Just ask Doc Brown, because it is not the 80s anymore were you get Plutonium at pharmacies, ah those days!

It depends. Little boy would be easiest as the speherical detonation and materials science for the Fat Man implosion would still be difficult to design and machine. I also do not beleive the activator designs have ever been declassified.

Doesn't have to be an exact copy so, but yes design might be tricky. I assume solvable so, at least in a primitive and workable way. Machining, to be honest, beside size of the parts themselves, is something you can do in some reasonably well equipped maker space. And for size, CNC machines are readily available on the used market. And those are light years ahead of anything the Manhatten project had. Or Apollo for that matter (excluding the Saturn V of course, but that is rocket science).

Re: TSMC warns AI chip crunch will last another 18 months

#63

Post by mikrl »

mschuster91 wrote: post #52
Roark66 wrote: post #21

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.

> So no one (especially not TSMC) will risk oversupply by building too many fabs. Everyone and their dog is investing like crazy. Intel and TSMC are both setting up fabs in Silicon Saxony (although the question remains on how productive these will be, given the issues with the far-right in Saxony), TSMC is also expanding capacity in Arizona, and Samsung is building one in Texas. There will be no oversupply, not for t…

>given the issues with the far-right in Saxony

What does that have to do with anything?

California has plenty of neonazis itself. The western world in general has no lack of far right extremists.

Re: TSMC warns AI chip crunch will last another 18 months

#64

Post by ARandomerDude »

mikrl wrote: post #63
mschuster91 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So no one (especially not TSMC) will risk oversupply by building too many fabs. Everyone and their dog is investing like crazy. Intel and TSMC are both setting up fabs in Silicon Saxony (although the question remains on how productive these will be, given the issues with the far-right in Saxony), TSMC is also expanding capacity in Arizona, and Samsung is building one in Texas. There will be no oversupply, not for t…

>given the issues with the far-right in Saxony What does that have to do with anything? California has plenty of neonazis itself. The western world in general has no lack of far right extremists.

Or far-left ones, for that matter.

Re: TSMC warns AI chip crunch will last another 18 months

#65

Post by siva7 »

wing-_-nuts wrote: post #14

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.

I expect nvidia to sell or close down their consumer division. Their whole business reality has changed in a few short months. Investors want undivided attention from the ceo to the new b2b cash cow.

Re: TSMC warns AI chip crunch will last another 18 months

#66

Post by marcosdumay »

the8472 wrote: post #59
shock-value wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs/transformers are a breakthrough on the level of convolutional neural networks — significant, and one that opens up lots of new interesting applications as well as invites lots more R&D — but like the neural net it’s not gonna fundamentally transform society or industry. (And as far as I can tell this current craze is entirely predicated on LLMs/transformers.)

Autonomous cars alone will be transformative. And LLMs are not in their end-state, we went from GPT-1 to 4 in 5 years over that timespan it gained lots of new capabilities. Extrapolate, don't just look at what they can do today. Atoms are more difficult than bits, so physical applications (e.g. in factories, robotics) will lag. I also expect specialist models like AlphaFold slowly finding their niches over time. > si…

I guess where both you and the GP are correct is that you can't make an autonomous car by applying transformers exclusively.

LLMs are "language I/O interfaces", and as such there isn't a lot of value they can create alone (even most of the currently proposed uses are bullshit). But it's quite likely that they'll be there on a lot of advanced technology helping it do what you meant.

Still even though both will be there in the transformative technology, and even though the technology may not even be useful without them, they are not central pieces on most of it.

Re: TSMC warns AI chip crunch will last another 18 months

#67

Post by adrian_b »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #47
adrian_b wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least Microsoft, Google, Apple etc. do not demand (yet) hundreds of thousands of $ per year for a single license.

>At least Microsoft, Google, Apple etc. do not demand (yet) hundreds of thousands of $ per year for a single license. Because they sell ads and monetize their users instead, which is a pipe of infinite money. Why does it matter to you how much they're charging? It's not communism. It's their honest labor and they're allowed to charge as much as they want for it, same how you're allowed to ask for as much money as you…

Like I have already said, there is no shortage of people who could write better EDA tools, but none of them can obtain the information needed to make them compatible with e.g. TSMC, despite the fact that one would think that it is in the interest of a foundry to provide the information that would be needed to enable the appearance of new customers.

However most foundries, like too many other businesses today, are not interested in new customers, unless they already are very big companies, which is one of the factors that has resulted in the extraordinary reduction in the number of companies that compete in every field, in comparison with the situation from a couple of decades ago.

Re: TSMC warns AI chip crunch will last another 18 months

#68

Post by trough »

mikrl wrote: post #63
mschuster91 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So no one (especially not TSMC) will risk oversupply by building too many fabs. Everyone and their dog is investing like crazy. Intel and TSMC are both setting up fabs in Silicon Saxony (although the question remains on how productive these will be, given the issues with the far-right in Saxony), TSMC is also expanding capacity in Arizona, and Samsung is building one in Texas. There will be no oversupply, not for t…

>given the issues with the far-right in Saxony What does that have to do with anything? California has plenty of neonazis itself. The western world in general has no lack of far right extremists.

There are some concerns that the internationally recognized image of Saxony as an extremely xenophobic region will deter international talent. The main problem isn’t staffing the plant with human assembly and packaging drones but having engineers and IT join permanently after production starts. Rural saxony is not a place where you want to live if even your last name isn’t deemed ‘white’ or ‘German’ enough. And after years of cultivating this image it started to work against the best interests of the more rural parts of the region: brain drain galore and no sane person seeking work in a future proof place to build a life would come.

Re: TSMC warns AI chip crunch will last another 18 months

#69

Post by [deleted] »

Aerroon wrote: post #58
nomel wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> allowing hobbyists to easily get started and contribute to the ecosystem I think many, maybe even most, would claim this is now best done on cloud services, like huggingface.co.

I think that's still a minority. Everyone has heard of cloud platforms giving people huge surprise bills and other such limitations. Another factor is availability and potential T&S concerns when you're doing something they don't want you to do. Stable Diffusion blew up when people are able to run it at home.

[deleted]

Re: TSMC warns AI chip crunch will last another 18 months

#70

Post by sangnoir »

Miraste wrote: post #50
pclmulqdq wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Raspberry Pi wouldn't have issues if not for the fact that they are explicitly an outlet for Broadcom's excess chips, and they have never paid full price for their CPUs. If they doubled the price of the boards, they would be able to get the parts.

Why don't they? The current market price is 3 or 4 times the MSRP and has been for years--the Raspberry Pi has lost its place as the affordable hobbyist board. I suppose it would be admitting defeat, but if they'd actually pay for parts and make new Pis again, I'm sure they could at least bring the market prices down.

> the Raspberry Pi has lost its place as the affordable hobbyist board

I keep hearing this - but I've seen no evidence of any successor board. Which board would you say is now the go-to board for hobbyists?

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