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TSMC hikes chip prices up to 20% amid supply shortage

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Re: TSMC hikes chip prices up to 20% amid supply shortage

#291

Post by 908B64B197 »

cletus wrote: post #55
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #32

Supply 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…

> but the reality is that it's primarily hydro power because that's the cheapest. Thing is, in regions with cheap hydro power, the miners can use so much power they end up making power more expensive for everyone.

Err that depends.

The thing with dams is that the water can never rise above a certain level, else the structural stability of the dam is compromised. So often they have to run the dam with turbines disconnected to lower the water level since there's nobody on the receiving end.

That's also why some blocks of hydro power are very cheap (and time sensitive).

Re: TSMC hikes chip prices up to 20% amid supply shortage

#292

Post by sofixa »

sneak wrote: post #203
sofixa wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or is cloud gaming the future of gaming? GeForce Now and Stadia work fairly well and are price competitive with a modern powerful GPU.

Stadia doesn’t work “fairly well”. It’s also low-res (still) compared to a local GPU, which may be okay for some but certainly isn’t sufficient for serious gamers.

> Stadia doesn’t work “fairly well

Yes it does? What issues do you have with it? It just works.

> It’s also low-res (still) compared to a local GPU

1080p for free or (upscaled) 4K for 10€/month is fairly decent, and on the latest games is better than most integrated or older GPUs.

> serious gamers

What percentage of the gamers' market is "serious gamers"? For the people that "must have" 8K low latency etc sure, cloud gaming isn't the best option. But IMHO they're the minority and vastly more people are "casual gamers" that are more than fine with playing 1080p/upscaled 4K for peanuts for multiple years ( how much does a RTX 3080 cost, and how many years of Stadia can we buy with the same amount of money?)

Re: TSMC hikes chip prices up to 20% amid supply shortage

#293

Post by imtringued »

jeffe wrote: post #271
skohan wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's much, much less efficient if you measure the utility of the banking system vs. the utility of cryptocurrency.

Okay, so if we're using energy consumption per unit 'utility' as a metric, how much energy should bitcoin consume to be in line with its utility?

I was going to do a very fancy calculation but 136 TWh would be perfectly ok if Bitcoin did at at least 5k transactions per second with a transaction fee of $0.10.

Re: TSMC hikes chip prices up to 20% amid supply shortage

#294

Post by AnimalMuppet »

vmception wrote: post #250
formerly_proven wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your first paragraph is about rejected energy, then there's not a lot to say here except that rejected energy doesn't mean what you think it does. If not, then I don't know what it is supposed to be about. No one builds power plants in places where there is no demand for power. Electric power can be carried over pretty large distances though with very low losses, so having say a few hundred km between a hydro-dam…

> (and from what we're able to tell, it is not, instead we see coal and natural gas plants being ramped up to power bitcoin farms) like I said, advocate against those specific mining sites. those made headlines in your world, while others did not. A lot of captured energy mining occurs at remote flare gas sites, where those sites are in the business of pumping oil and flaring off byproducts and not in the business of…

OK, but those exact same places could power servers instead of miners, taking a load off of wherever the servers are currently hosted.

Re: TSMC hikes chip prices up to 20% amid supply shortage

#295

Post by xxs »

_huayra_ wrote: post #289
akircher wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Work” doesn’t have to be wasteful. It could be based on the number of pieces of litter that were collected, the number of meals to the homeless that were served. It’s just easier to measure when work is something wasteful.

Let's hope someone comes up with a coin staked on the removal of CO2 from the atmosphere!

how would you prove that it has happened?

Re: TSMC hikes chip prices up to 20% amid supply shortage

#296

Post by TearsInTheRain »

iyn wrote: post #272
11thEarlOfMar wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Concur. We are currently paying a chip broker $6.30 for an Infineon chip we typically buy by the 100,000s for $0.47. Cuz without them, our customers cannot sell their $10,000,000 product.

Out of curiosity, what's the $10,000,000 product?

Sounds military

Re: TSMC hikes chip prices up to 20% amid supply shortage

#297

Post by imtringued »

zitterbewegung wrote: post #152
cletus wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Actually Bitcoin and a lot of other coins have a coin limit (to prevent hyperinflation) and once the limit is set than the miners would make money on the transaction fee.

You can have hyperinflation in a currency with limited supply. Lots of cryptocurrencies went to zero.

Re: TSMC hikes chip prices up to 20% amid supply shortage

#298

Post by AnthonyMouse »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #32

Supply 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…

> This is yet another way we’re all forced to pay the price for cryptocurrency.

Bitcoin has existed for more than a decade. This is yet another way we're all forced to pay the price for COVID-19.

When everybody started working from home, companies whose employees had desktops had to buy them all laptops. People with old home computers bought newer ones once they started using them 14 hours a day instead of two. Demand went up.

A bunch of car manufacturers thought the pandemic was going to crush demand for cars, so they canceled all their chip contracts. Then it didn't and they bid up the price of chips trying to source all the ones they canceled the contracts on.

The primary cost of Bitcoin mining is the electricity, not the hardware. If there is more demand for hardware, the world can build more fabs. Assuming we're given some advance notice, which this year we haven't had because COVID-19.

And the reason the electricity consumption is bad is that we don't have a carbon tax, so people are burning coal to mine Bitcoin, which is Very Bad. But it's also Very Bad that people are burning coal to power electric heaters or elevators or anything else, because the problem is burning coal.

If people were mining Bitcoin by building wind turbines, nobody would care. It might even improve the world by increasing the economies of scale for renewable energy production.

Re: TSMC hikes chip prices up to 20% amid supply shortage

#299

Post by xxs »

rjbwork wrote: post #193
JackC wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Decentralized currencies rely on proof of economic waste. It's possible to imagine forms of economic waste that have different externalities, e.g. different environmental impacts. But we don't have evidence yet (that I know of?) that introducing one decentralized currency reduces waste in another one -- if you did introduce a new currency that wasted economic value in a new way, there's no evidence that crypto as a w…

>In this model crypto is like ... an emergent antipattern of networked civilization, where the network starts to waste every economic resource that it can "see" and provably waste. Exactly. As I've said to a number of people I've discussed crypto with, I'm happy to advocate for making PoW systems illegal. They'll happily gobble up a Dyson sphere of energy and a solar system of hardware in service of running a payment…

Isn't PoS just limiting the amount of work done based on the share of the total 'wealth'?

Re: TSMC hikes chip prices up to 20% amid supply shortage

#300

Post by andrewmcwatters »

njovin wrote: post #288

Forgive the naive question but why doesn't the US government fund several foundries in the US immediately? $20B over 3 years is a drop in the bucket compared to a lot of military spending and these chip shortages surely have downstream impact on the defense industry, no? At this point I'd be much happier subsidizing chip manufacturing than most of the other ways this country spends money overseas.

They are currently doing this with Intel afaik
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