Lead time for new Intel NIC orders is quoted around 52 weeks • Hacker News Board

Re: Lead time for new Intel NIC orders is quoted around 52 weeks

#141

Post by Guest42 » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 4:57 PM UTC

aidenn0 wrote: post #108

mrtksn wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep seeing that argument every single time and keep wondering, isn’t there reason to implement JIT? Something like cost benefits outweigh the resilience risks? It’s not like people start dying on the streets, simply things are getting expensive and hard to get during disturbances. Are there calculations demonstrating that JIT the risks of optimization are more harmful than helpful in the long run?

I don't think anybody actually did the math on this though. It's more like "I get a fat bonus if I decrease inventory without a significant effect to sales over the next 3 quarters" so as long as the near-term risk is worth it, it gets done. [edit] There's also the "If I don't implement JIT, I'll get replaced with someone who will" effect in a lot of cases too.

That’s the impression I get, not so much JIT but rather limiting supply budgets as much as possible. A lot of companies tout Toyota as the pinnacle of manufacturing without realizing that they are not Toyota and there was more to Toyota’s success than JIT.

Re: Lead time for new Intel NIC orders is quoted around 52 weeks

#142

Post by detaro » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 4:57 PM UTC

nimbius wrote: post #140

somewhat related, but can anyone tell me why PCEngines specifically use Intel nics in their ALIX systems? surely realtek and other players have caught up to them by now for the performance envelope of the board.

Driver support and stability.

Re: Lead time for new Intel NIC orders is quoted around 52 weeks

#143

Post by jacob019 » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 5:00 PM UTC

jeffbee wrote: post #35

What was the old lead time? I guess it was less than a year but the article doesn’t mention it.

I bought one last year. They had hundreds in stock of several models. It shipped in a day or two.

Re: Lead time for new Intel NIC orders is quoted around 52 weeks

#144

Post by 8008135 » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 5:03 PM UTC

bingohbangoh wrote: post #70

eljimmy wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's true - China's numbers, unsurprisingly, really don't give light to how badly they were impacted. I remember reading about how they were building brand new hospitals to cope. Literally building a brand new hospital. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/31/pictures-china-builds-two-ho... Looking back on that, it's interesting to think about how that should have been a major warning sign of things to come for the rest of t…

We had the Navy hospital boat and transformed the Javitz center (where Comic Con happens) to be hospitals. Both went virtually unused. [In NYC]

Better to have it and not need it?

Re: Lead time for new Intel NIC orders is quoted around 52 weeks

#145

Post by Aissen » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 5:04 PM UTC

stagger87 wrote: post #86

Aissen wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, you design for what you can order instead of ordering what's in your design.

Parts are going from in-stock to multi-year lead times within a single design iteration. uC's/passives/FPGAs/etc.

Yeah, this situation is quite frustrating.

Re: Lead time for new Intel NIC orders is quoted around 52 weeks

#146

Post by dannyw » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 5:06 PM UTC

nimbius wrote: post #140

somewhat related, but can anyone tell me why PCEngines specifically use Intel nics in their ALIX systems? surely realtek and other players have caught up to them by now for the performance envelope of the board.

Try using a realtek NIC on a BSD system and see how many days before your networking softlocks.

Also some distros just don't include the drivers. I had to build the realtek 2.5gbe drivers from source, on an unnetworked system, last month! Latest ubuntu distro.

Re: Lead time for new Intel NIC orders is quoted around 52 weeks

#147

Post by aseipp » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 5:07 PM UTC

lbriner wrote: post #124

rwmj wrote: post #112

Work laptop was quoted today as delivery in "up to" 24 weeks (with well-informed people saying it might well take that long). And I cannot find anyone with Raspberry Pi CM3+ compute modules with delivery before April 2022.

Honest question: How can everyone be short of chips? I understand that e.g. car makers reduced their orders and their capacity was given to other manufacturers so they are kind of screwed but surely since the overall capacity got increased (albeit by a relatively small amount) then some manufacturers should have stuff. As far as I can see, pretty much everyone who uses electronics seems to be not just "a bit short" b…

In the abstract, it's sort of like asking "How can there still be traffic jams on road XYZ, when there's an open lane that was added recently?" The problem isn't the number of lanes, it's that fundamentally that mode of traffic (mass individiual transit) has capacity limitations, which when exceeded cause it to go into a "bad" state, after which recovery is difficult and arduous. Furthermore, just because you stop letting cars on the specific road doesn't mean the jam resolves instantly; you actually have to significantly reduce pressure over time before that can happen. And that jam causes cars to overflow into other roads, causing other problems. Just removing the "trigger" (too many oncoming cars) that caused the problem is not enough to recover from either the initial problems, or the side effects.

People here are using all kinds of networking/hardware analogies and while generally I'm loathe to use those (they often reek of "All I have is a hammer"-syndrome), you do see these problems a lot in such designs. A good example is when something like a database goes down due to having too much load. Recovering from this failure often isn't just a matter of going from "too much load" to "enough load to handle", you actually have to shed significantly more load than that to recover the system, because that initial failure might cause a cascade of failures that prevents that. This often manifests as a kind of ritual where a system admin pulls a big number of levers in the engine room all labeled "Do Not Touch" in just the right order to shed load and reboot things correctly. Real world supply chains are doing the same thing, but their actions are priced in and done months in advance. Logistics is a hell of a thing.

I realize this is not a concrete answer about electronic supply chains (someone else can handle that) but rather a more abstract classification, but I think the general idea applies here.

Re: Lead time for new Intel NIC orders is quoted around 52 weeks

#148

Post by dannyw » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 5:08 PM UTC

slg wrote: post #117

scardycat wrote: post #91

Just in time manufacturing contributes a lot to this shortage. We rely so much on integrated supply chain logistics, the pandemic clearly brought in to focus the "optimizations" of JIT manufacturing. The lack of local supply pools as buffer is so short sighted.

I don't know much about how supply chains function so I am wondering how is just in time manufacturing still to blame when the chip shortage has been ongoing for over a year? Wouldn't everyone have burned through their inventory at this point?

It takes two years to ramp up more fab capacity.

Re: Lead time for new Intel NIC orders is quoted around 52 weeks

#149

Post by r00fus » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 5:11 PM UTC

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #16

brink wrote: post #2

Whatever your opinion is about the lockdowns, there is one thing everyone should be able to agree on; they destabilize just about everything. I'm worried about people going hungry or not being able to heat their home this winter from the ripple effects.

Blaming lockdowns isn’t the full story. Demand for electronics is way, way up. Everything from people being bored at home to extra stimulus dollars has put extra demand on everything electronic. The effect is amplified as companies are panic-buying every part they might possibly need for the next few years.

> The effect is amplified as companies are panic-buying every part they might possibly need for the next few years.

I wonder how much commodities speculation are screwing up the availability...

Re: Lead time for new Intel NIC orders is quoted around 52 weeks

#150

Post by slg » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 5:11 PM UTC

captainmuon wrote: post #132

slg wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know much about how supply chains function so I am wondering how is just in time manufacturing still to blame when the chip shortage has been ongoing for over a year? Wouldn't everyone have burned through their inventory at this point?

The idea is not that they should have had a stock for multiple years of demand. Rather, if you have a warehouse and are able to build a bit of stock, you can ramp up much faster. The actual closings due to lockdown were only a couple of weeks in most industries. What really hurt imho was that orders were cancelled, production capability was scaled back, but demand came back faster than expected.

It makes sense why it would ease the initial shock from shutdowns, but how would it help with the cancelled orders and scaled back production? It seems like it would just stretch out the shock over a longer period of time. Would that actually stop the disruptions because it seems like they would eventually burn through all the inventory eventually because of that?