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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

#71

Post by telotortium »

trough wrote: post #68
mikrl wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Let me know when companies actually start pulling out of Saxony (not blog posts from randos - most people don't care as much about politics as the people who wrote those blog posts do).

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

#72

Post by SilverBirch »

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #56
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.

Increasing supply is not an issue if there is demand. As long as building more fabs brings more profit(even if at smaller margin), I can't see any reason why they won't be building it. It's economics 101. Also as moore's law is coming to end, the number of fabs has no way to go but up. Also I don't think manufacturing cost is the biggest of issue, because the margins are significantly higher than consumer GPUs which…

The problem is the bull whip effect. Yes there’s loads of demand now, but are we really saying that the AI boom is a permanent uptick in demand for silicon, or is it more likely that the hype dies down? By the time capacity comes online demand may well gave peaked and dropped. Suddenly these massive sunk cost fabs will be taking any business they can to amortise the costs.

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

#73

Post by sillysaurusx »

trough wrote: post #68
mikrl wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Translation: there are a lot of talented Asians, and we’re worried they won’t want to live there. Is that accurate?

It seems like most of the US has this problem. And yet rural IT always seems to find a way. I’m in Lake Saint Louis with gigabit symmetric fiber, which is a dream. We were backwater for awhile, but post COVID a lot of talent can be sourced remotely, at least for software.

Is a fab really so regional? I could imagine them having a team in Taiwan who they work with remotely. But I know very little about fab plants, and it sounds like you have a better idea of their engineering and IT requirements.

I used to work at Groq, a hardware company, and we were fully remote. So I’ve seen this work in practice. (It’s a tossup whether Groq will succeed, but that’s a separate conversation.)

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

#74

Post by ghaff »

ls612 wrote: post #39
babypuncher wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't consumer GPU shipments the lowest they've been in over a decade?

Yes but it’s hard to disentangle the effect of the crypto crisis ending last year, the pandemic boom in consumer hardware sales coming to a close, and the pricing of Ada from one another. So many GPUs were sold to miners and made their way to the secondary market that gamers have lots and lots of options that aren’t new sales.

Maybe. But the traditional gaming market doesn't have a lot of growth and I have to believe the high-end may be a dedicated niche but it's a niche.

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

#75

Post by sangnoir »

siva7 wrote: post #65
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.

This would be extremely foolish, considering the rate of ML research. There is no evidence that LLMs & supersized models are the end-state of ML research. In 3 years time, there might be completely new SoA technique that doesn't demand high memory bandwidth, which will completely flip the economics of pricey high-end cards.

It's good they are selling shovels while there's a gold rush, but discarding the rest of your business to focus on a specific shovel that's currently popular may not end well.

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

#76

Post by sho_hn »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #73
trough wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Translation: there are a lot of talented Asians, and we’re worried they won’t want to live there. Is that accurate? It seems like most of the US has this problem. And yet rural IT always seems to find a way. I’m in Lake Saint Louis with gigabit symmetric fiber, which is a dream. We were backwater for awhile, but post COVID a lot of talent can be sourced remotely, at least for software. Is a fab really so regional? I…

> It seems like most of the US has this problem.

The US still benefits from latent good marketing/rep in the 80s/90s, and projection of military power in decades past. For example, until relatively recently (the Trump era and especially how it ended disillusioned many), South Koreans still looked to the US as their model of the developed world. If you'd send your children anywhere to get educated or marry, it would be there. Inner benchmarks were done against the US. The rose-tinted glasses were enough to convince many to move without checking too carefully what the place they'd be moving to would actually be like.

This is changing, and more recently more attention is being paid to Europe, partially because the national conversation has shifted more toward quality of life, birthrate problems, aging population, etc. and there's more interest in social systems, healthcare, family planning support and so on.

Still, Koreans have a lot of memes about this or that place in Europe being racist in this or that way (and of course, quite lot of it is true), so it remains a big impediment.

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

#77

Post by Miraste »

sangnoir wrote: post #70
Miraste wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

There isn't one, that's what's so annoying. There are a lot of Pi-likes, but nothing with the same level of support and enthusiasm the Pi used to have. The community has just withered.

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

#78

Post by lofaszvanitt »

samtho wrote: post #26
lofaszvanitt wrote: post #4

Time to open source the chip making industry... ... ... This whole fabrication thing is a biiig chokepoint.

Semiconductor manufacturing requires a lot of capital expense just to open the doors, it also requires a staff of all levels to keep the machinery working and multiple suppliers for raw materials that require multi-thousand dollar minimum orders. The process these facilities implement are fairly well understood, it’s just cost prohibitive. If you’re trying to draw parallels between this is and, say 3D printing, you w…

Yeah, we know this way. It's as convoluted and deliberately complex as building a nuclear plant.

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

#79

Post by mschuster91 »

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.

Because discrimination is a common cause that makes people leave, most notably in Eastern Germany [1].

[1] https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/fachkraeftemangel-bloss-ni...

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

#80

Post by mschuster91 »

ARandomerDude wrote: post #64
mikrl wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Far left ones don't go and shout "Ausländer raus" while marching in the thousands, which was a common occurrence during the high days of the weekly "Pegida" nazi marches in Dresden. Nor do they randomly beat up random people (not to mention protesters) that are just standing around [1].

[1] https://www.zeit.de/gesellschaft/zeitgeschehen/2018-10/recht...

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