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Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

economist.com

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Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#281

Post by soperj »

rmah wrote: post #199
VictorPath wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Taiwan's sovereign airspace Well, only 13 countries recognize Taiwan as a sovereign country - such as the 10,000 people of the 21 square kilometer island Naura. Also, Taiwan occupies Kinmen Island in the bay of Xiamen's harbor on the PRC mainland. The island is in the Xiamen harbor and is 10 km from the city of Xiamen. So any PRC planes flying around Xiamen are "violating Taiwan's sovereign airspace" (which almost…

It's complicated. Even Taiwan doesn't recognize Taiwan (Republic of China) as a sovereign nation, separate and distinct from the Peoples Republic of China. There are Taiwanese political groups that do want that but they haven't gotten their way so far. Either way, you probably meant that 13 nations have full and formal diplomatic relationships with Taiwan. Which, btw does not include the US, Japan or any EU nations.

It's not really that complicated. After WW2 the Communists drove the Republic of China govt out of mainland China. So mainland China is controlled by the communists and Taiwan by the remnants of the Republic of China government. Republic of China government still claims to be the rightful government of all of China (Taiwan included), same with the Communist government.

Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#282

Post by whimsicalism »

gadflyinyoureye wrote: post #257
d_graeme wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Tbh its constantly surprising why Americans view the CCPs zero-covid policy as a failure. Even the most pessimistic reports (based on actual facts, not tabloid-driven wishful thinking) acknowledges that China has avoided at least 2 million+ deaths through their zero covid policy. Is the right to life no longer a human right? Or have a lot of us so internalized anti-China propaganda that we're no longer able…

Could the same deaths have been prevented by deploying better policies? Remember that millions of people we forcibly locked in their homes. They faced food shortages. They have their lives ruined because they couldn’t make a living. All of this because the CCP wants zero Covid rather than a rational policy of limiting the most at risk to the disease and allowing the population to get natural immunity from getting sic…

I do not think 4 million people+ died due to lockdowns in China.

Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#283

Post by computerfriend »

gdy wrote: post #228
computerfriend wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet, they were caught off guard.

No, they weren't.

It really seems that much of the EU thought Putin was bluffing right up until the end of February. EU leaders proudly saying they had personal assurances Russia wouldn't invade again. There was incredible amounts of inaction. Only a handful of countries were shipping weapons, mostly non-EU.

Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#284

Post by Aperocky »

moffkalast wrote: post #18
habibur wrote: post #13

Wondering if that means Raspberry Pi will be available again. Still no sign of stability in supply.

https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/production-and-supply-chain... That's from April, but in short there's a huge order backlog that they're still working through apparently, despite producing half a million units per month. With the lockdown gap in production and the Pi 4s getting increasingly integrated into various 3rd party products I suppose that's no surprise. It's quite apparent that there's little demand for the…

Half a million units per month? That is IT?

No wonder there's no supply.

Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#285

Post by [deleted] »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #204
nscalf wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does it do little to diversify these fabs? The current situation is that if China invades Taiwan, the entire Western world is compelled to engage militarily over Taiwan's high end chip fabs. It cannot be overstated how much we depend on that, if TSMC operates in other countries, we don't HAVE to engage in WW3.

A fab in Ohio, Oregon, or Arizona 10,000 km from China is safe from threats like cruise missiles that the proposed fab 1000 km from China in Japan or South Korea would not be. It's not so much that cruise missiles used on civilian targets in South Korea or Japan would not be a reason to start WW3, more that it would be less tempting.

[deleted]

Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#286

Post by paxys »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #236

We've reached or are approaching "peak tech". The other day we were discussing Pablo Azar, "Computer Saturation and the Productivity Slowdown" (Federal Reserve Bank of New York Liberty Street Economics, October 6, 2022) [1] Simply reinventing systems and deliberately obsoleting stuff to create fake demand is over. The metaverse isn't hoing to happen. People are fatigued with tech. We're entering a different era in wh…

There is no such thing as "peak tech". There are simply alternating periods of faster and slower growth, and we are currently in the latter.

Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#287

Post by terminalcommand »

kuschku wrote: post #85
sylware wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"spare capacity" ? what do you mean ? Taiwan and South Korea are enough to supply the world demand? Well, it is still hard to get your hands on top-notch chips at a reasonable price whatever the news is saying...

You need certain machines for EUV. There's only one manufacturer (ASML) for those, and they're at capacity. And even if they wanted to scale up, there's only one manufacturer (Zeiss) for the EUV mirrors required for those machines, and all their capacity for the next years is already bought as well.

Why can't ASML scale up? I don't understand this. I think because they are a monopoly they can work slower, they don't need the extra profits.

Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#288

Post by theptip »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #204
nscalf wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does it do little to diversify these fabs? The current situation is that if China invades Taiwan, the entire Western world is compelled to engage militarily over Taiwan's high end chip fabs. It cannot be overstated how much we depend on that, if TSMC operates in other countries, we don't HAVE to engage in WW3.

A fab in Ohio, Oregon, or Arizona 10,000 km from China is safe from threats like cruise missiles that the proposed fab 1000 km from China in Japan or South Korea would not be. It's not so much that cruise missiles used on civilian targets in South Korea or Japan would not be a reason to start WW3, more that it would be less tempting.

I'm confused by this take. Who is threatening Japan with cruise missiles? Certainly not China or Russia. North Korea, perhaps.

The primary reason that we're concerned about semiconductor fab concentration in Taiwan is that China has consistently stated that it is going to invade Taiwan at some point (and that could be 2049 or in a few years for all we know). This is completely outside of any hypothetical scenarios of who lobs cruise missiles at who during WW3.

You can make the point that relying on semiconductor manufacturing outside of your country/coalition is a bad idea for military self-sufficiency, and I would agree, but that's a much more diffuse risk than the very specific scenario that is driving the CHIPS act and concern about fab concentration in Taiwan.

Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#289

Post by bee_rider »

iancmceachern wrote: post #221

It's the people, the talent, the knowledge that drives any industry like this. The US government, US, we, gave Intel and some other companies a huge sum of money to stay awesome. Then they announce huge layoffs to get rid of a lot of thr talent, people, heart of their business. So, wouldn't we have been better off as a society of we had just offered thT CHIPs money as a startup find and asked a bunch or people from I…

The knowledge and talent is definitely very important (I mean in the long term everything in technology is knowledge and talent) but there are also the extremely expensive semiconductor fabs to be considered.

The CHIPs bill was pretty broad. It might make sense to subsidize a pure-foundry company as an ongoing issue (in particular, isolate these big investments from the boom-bust semiconductor trends). Or somehow try to come up with subsidies that go to Intel to the extent to which they act as a pure foundry, but that will be pretty tricky to work out I guess.

An ecosystem of open fabs seems to be a prerequisite of those small plucky startup chip design teams. Of course they can order from TSMC but then they have to wait however many weeks to test out each prototype...

Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#290

Post by Wowfunhappy »

gambiting wrote: post #36
machinekob wrote: post #15

tl:dr Global recession => lower chip demand for consumers China ban => lower demand from CCP nvidia RTX 4090 still out of stock in most places :| I'm pretty sure datacenter and military chip usage will grow in next few years even if recession hit consumer market even harder then past year then US chipmakers will get fat checks just 2be prepared for China retaliation (probably feels good to be Intel in chip war time).

>>nvidia RTX 4090 still out of stock in most places :| I mean, I just don't think they made that many in the first place. Overclockers UK(one of the biggest online electronics stores in the UK) was very upfront with how many units they are getting from manufacturers, and they got like ~500 cards total for launch. That's nothing. So of course it's out of stock, even if only a very limited group of enthusiasts is actua…

500?! I have to wonder why nVidia even bothered launching the cards.
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