Supply shortages are the excuse du jour, but so long as TSMC has the kingmaking node I expect it to become expensive. Very expensive. Expensive enough to move margin from the king their node made right back to TSMC.
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TSMC hikes chip prices up to 20% amid supply shortage
101–110 of 620 posts
Re: TSMC hikes chip prices up to 20% amid supply shortage
#102Supply shortage is another way of saying demand excess. I don’t see much evidence that TSMC ever really slowed production, at least for their most advanced processes that are in high demand. This is yet another way we’re all forced to pay the price for cryptocurrency. As long as GPUs are profitable for mining, they will be purchased and put to work. The saddest part is that each additional GPU added to the mining net…
GPUs are a marginal factor in this. The main factors are several impacts from Covid-19, US trade restrictions on SMIC chip exports from China (a big supplier of low and mid-range chips which this is actually all about), and the Taiwan drought. The Covid-19 impact itself is multi-pronged. Many chip plants closed or reduced output due to the lockdowns, but also the silicon used in chip production is the same material u…
Taiwan drought has been over for awhile now.
Re: TSMC hikes chip prices up to 20% amid supply shortage
#103Supply shortage is another way of saying demand excess. I don’t see much evidence that TSMC ever really slowed production, at least for their most advanced processes that are in high demand. This is yet another way we’re all forced to pay the price for cryptocurrency. As long as GPUs are profitable for mining, they will be purchased and put to work. The saddest part is that each additional GPU added to the mining net…
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…
Transaction fees will always make it economical to mine. They currently make up a small fraction of the block reward, but within a decade or two (5 block subsidy halvings), we can expect them to dominate.
Btw, not all cryptocurrencies are deflationary [1].
[1] https://john-tromp.medium.com/a-case-for-using-soft-total-su...
Re: TSMC hikes chip prices up to 20% amid supply shortage
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
Datacenters are not deploying consumer GPUs.
But datacenter CPU/GPUs take the same wafers, machines, and factory time slots as consumer GPUs. Which that is the price increase this article is about.
Ok - I wasn’t replying to the article - I was replying to a comment about crypto-induced price increases of consumer gear being blamed on datacenters, which just isn’t true. It’s not that OEM prices are going up, it’s that retail prices are. Nvidia might sell a consumer GPU which is immediately resold on the retail market at 100% markup.
This is driven by crypto, not DL.
Re: TSMC hikes chip prices up to 20% amid supply shortage
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
I love how crypto has become easy-to-blame, when in fact datacenter after datacenter is being stuffed to the brim with chips for ML workloads. It's important to recognize when consumers are being squeezed by multiple market forces.
The issue is that crypto mining is the only system designed to have negative marginal utility for each GPU consumed. It literally pays people to take energy and GPUs away from the open market for zero incremental gain to the network. The difference is that each additional iPhone or ML accelerator or cloud server CPU provides incrementally more utility. More ML accelerators means more ML processing. Proof-of-work mini…
> more ML processing
I would argue that most ML processing by most "big data" companies also has marginal negative output for each additional GPU. Certainly anything to do with social media or adtech and a lot of analytics in general is a net negative for the world, while consuming electricity and processing hardware.
Re: TSMC hikes chip prices up to 20% amid supply shortage
#106Is TSMC based out of Taiwan? Do they have fabrication plants anywhere else? What company will pick up the demand if/when China takes control of Taiwan?
T in :TSMC: stands for Taiwan.
Re: TSMC hikes chip prices up to 20% amid supply shortage
#107Goodbye dreams of owning an Nvidia GPU in 2022 - I ain't paying cutthroat prices on ebay/amazon. Guess we're buying Intel! Sidenote: Intel manufacturers their own stuff, and so is Apple right? Their new cool chips are all in-house or are they through TSMC?
The upcoming Intel Arc discrete GPUs are indeed manufactured by TSMC
Re: TSMC hikes chip prices up to 20% amid supply shortage
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
The toilet paper shortage is kind of a bad example, because it was caused by a very real and sudden shift in demand from the very seperate commercial and personal toilet paper manufacturing markets.
Is there a source for this?
All over the place. From April 2020:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2020/04/08/coronavirus-...
Re: TSMC hikes chip prices up to 20% amid supply shortage
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honest question: is it possible to make a cryptocurrency that does not rely on some real-world scarce resource (e.g. chips, electricity, drive space)? This seems to be a cornerstone of what makes any crypto valuable in the first place (scarcity), and as long as that scarcity has real-world consequences, it seems like it would have the same result. Chia claimed to "Save the world from proof-of-work wastage", but it wo…
The underlying problem is that you need to prevent sybil attacks, i.e. group X creates many peers in the network and so gets much more voting power than they "ought to" have. The only known way to do so is through attaching a real-world cost to ~votes. The way PoW does so is through equating votes and hashrate, so votes cost real money because hashrate requires real hardware. PoS works in mysterious ways, but the bas…
> so votes cost real money
So it doesn't actually fix the problem, it just means only the richest have any real power, just like the financial industries outside of crypto.
Re: TSMC hikes chip prices up to 20% amid supply shortage
#110Bitfinex (which has been outlawed in the USA) keeps printing Tether to prop up the price of Bitcoin, graphics cards are snatched up as soon as they are manufactured, and they're using an Argentina-sized amount of power to keep the whole thing going. Yes, it works, but no one on earth will ever use these Bitcoins to buy two pizzas ever again. What's the end-game, at this point? As many bagholders as possible?