The semiconductor bust – still coming?
asianometry.substack.com
The semiconductor bust – still coming?
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Re: The semiconductor bust – still coming?
#2"""
[... ] and people seemed to have enjoyed it.
And by "enjoyed it", I mean that they screamed at me in the comments that I had no idea what I was talking about. Which is par for the course here.
"""
Ouch.
Re: The semiconductor bust – still coming?
#3""" [... ] and people seemed to have enjoyed it. And by "enjoyed it", I mean that they screamed at me in the comments that I had no idea what I was talking about. Which is par for the course here. """ Ouch.
Asianometry's humor tends to be of the dry sort so don't take it too literally haha
Re: The semiconductor bust – still coming?
#4https://www.youtube.com/c/Asianometry lots of cool videos on his channel about chips - i've definitely learned a lot watching these.
Re: The semiconductor bust – still coming?
#5I have no expertise in this, and can't even claim to have followed the entire article or video. But the PS5 has been out of stock ever since its release in Nov 2020. That is an astonishing fact to me. I can't think of anything like this in my lifetime. The flagship product of a multinational corporation has been sold out for 18 months. Empty shelves where a product should be.
It's just one isolated data point, but it's hard for me to understand how we could be seeing a coming bust when we are still in the midst of such a shortage.
Re: The semiconductor bust – still coming?
#6I have no expertise in this, and can't even claim to have followed the entire article or video. But the PS5 has been out of stock ever since its release in Nov 2020. That is an astonishing fact to me. I can't think of anything like this in my lifetime. The flagship product of a multinational corporation has been sold out for 18 months. Empty shelves where a product should be. It's just one isolated data point, but it…
Switches and raspberries got really hard to find for a while too
Re: The semiconductor bust – still coming?
#7Cloud computing growth is in no way going to decelerate anytime soon. We have not reached peak cloud.
Re: The semiconductor bust – still coming?
#8Hard to listen to someone talk about semiconductor/IC supply without mentioning China's cornering and hording of the semiconductor/IC market.
There are bottlenecks in all electronic assemblies. Processors, crystals, specialized chips, etc. Things you just can't substitute. China identified many bottlenecks and strategically bought the entire supply. For thousands of items.
Hundreds of billions of dollars worth of electronic components. Then they marked them all up 100x and are now selling them back to us.
Supposedly they are just "Chinese brokers", but the scale is far too large not to be government sponsored.
Here's an example: MKL27Z128VFT4 NXP Kinetis ARM Cortex M0+ Microcontroller. You haven't been able to buy these for over a year now. And it will be another year before you can buy any. They used to go for $2.50.
Brokers have 215,000 pieces in stock[0]. Mostly in China. (The US brokers have tied themselves into the Chinese broker inventory.) Average price now: $100 each.
[0] https://www.netcomponents.com/results.htm?flts=1&t=f&sm=&r=1...
Re: The semiconductor bust – still coming?
#9Hard to listen to someone talk about semiconductor/IC supply without mentioning China's cornering and hording of the semiconductor/IC market. There are bottlenecks in all electronic assemblies. Processors, crystals, specialized chips, etc. Things you just can't substitute. China identified many bottlenecks and strategically bought the entire supply. For thousands of items. Hundreds of billions of dollars worth of ele…
I'm not trying to advocate a pro-China stance here, but is there any business that is done in China that isn't in part sponsored by the government? One book I read even told the story of a grey market manufacturing operation that had to go legit not because of a government "bust" but because the local figurehead wanted the output of the factory included in his productivity figures.
Re: The semiconductor bust – still coming?
#10I have no expertise in this, and can't even claim to have followed the entire article or video. But the PS5 has been out of stock ever since its release in Nov 2020. That is an astonishing fact to me. I can't think of anything like this in my lifetime. The flagship product of a multinational corporation has been sold out for 18 months. Empty shelves where a product should be. It's just one isolated data point, but it…
Switches and raspberries got really hard to find for a while too
Raspberry Pis are still widely out of stock. And not just Pis! The car industry has been facing chip shortages, Fujifilm's flagship digital cameras and lenses are still impossible to find and have been for years since the chip shortage started... Two years after Nvidia released their flagship GPUs they're finally able to be purchased, but they're only six months away from releasing the next generation, which will also likely be sold out immediately. No one has been able to use TSMC's latest fab tech other than Apple, because just Apple's demand for chips maxed out their entire production capacity. This is the largest chip shortage in my lifetime certainly, and possibly since the invention of the semiconductor.
Predicting an oversupply any time soon when chips in the leading, middle, and trailing edges are in an unprecedented shortage is like predicting that someday California will have too much housing. I mean, on a long enough timescale, maybe... But that's well into the "being too early is the same as being wrong" territory.