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Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

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291–300 of 734 posts

Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#291
post #188

To be perfectly honest, this is still within a 1000km radius circle that encompasses Taiwan, South Korea and Japan. That covers the majority of next-generation fabs that aren't Intel. It's great to legally diversify these fabs, but it does very little to mitigate geopolitical issues that are brewing in and around the east china sea.

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.

Em... I doubt that semiconductor industry is the thing to lead us to WW3.

Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This kind of bluster is a mainstay of Chinese geopolitics. The law was intentionally written in an open-ended way so that the party always gets the final say on what "completely exhausted" should mean. It serves as a propaganda tool internally and a point of leverage externally -- the party never needs to actually act on the threat for it to serve a valuable purpose. With that being said, it's not that simple. Bluste…

> progressively violating more and more of Taiwan's sovereign airspace Just in terms of international law, the Chinese flights near Taiwan are provocative but don’t violate any laws. The U.S. and Russia still do this sort of thing all the time. An ADIZ is not sovereign airspace.

Launching so many missiles over a space of 36 hours that you entirely close airspace and waterways (and apparently over the island) is a little different from flying an airplane at the edge of controlled airspace.

https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20220805-chinese-missi...

That happened during the Pelosi trip in August, and the jingoists were angry it didn't go further. The likelihood of an effective air/sea embargo on Taiwan is more likely than an initial invasion.

Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what Intel put out in marketing materials, even at 14nm they had a very unreliable process with DUV. So, it might not be economical for the type of IC produced in these factories.

So it means that chinese SMIC announced '7nm' implies they have EUV working?

I am announcing 1nm chip rihht here right now! Trust me I wouldn't lie.

The nm measure is a marketing tool. Intel nm is 'larger' because they were measuring gates differently.

I only take nm claims as comparison of products of same company.

Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#294
post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Xi['s] ... isolationist policies ... have killed China's economy. The PRC's GDP was US$17.7 trillion nominal in 02021, the latest year for which we have numbers, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_China . That makes it the world's second largest economy by nominal dollar value (after the US) and the largest by PPP. That's not just individual countries, either; it overtook the economy of the EU in…

The games played with currency and private debt that fueled the massive export boom are not sustainable indefinitely. There are already signs it may be tipping, and the world raising interest rates to combat inflation will worsen the situation. Combine that with their exports to the US falling due to sanctions and a new interest in US manufacturing. And as their population and the population of their other trading pa…

I agree with many of these points. The future is unpredictable, whoever is on top today will not be on top forever, and the idea of being governed by the PRC is very unpopular in Taiwan. And nothing you have said supports our more ignorant interlocutor's point that Xi's policies have "killed China's economy".

Still, other points I disagree with.

PRC's exports to the US are not falling; they fell in 02019 due to sanctions and in 02020 due to covid, but they're already back above their 02018 level, which was the highest in history. See https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c5700.html. They probably will not fall within the next decade or two.

If US manufacturing becomes stronger, that will increase PRC exports to the US, not decrease them. (If the US doesn't have anything to trade for Chinese products, it will not get them, which may cause them to be sold to different customers or may cause their production to be reduced.)

I think increased interest rates abroad would tend to increase PRC's exports, not decrease them. As far as I know, PRC isn't borrowing money from abroad to finance expansion of production capacity; it's lending money abroad to finance consumption of its exports.

PRC's population is not shrinking, though it's barely growing and may start shrinking soon. Most of their trading partners have growing populations.

TSMC cannot be taken, even today; it can only be destroyed. Today, doing that would be counterproductive to PRC because so much of their domestic industry depends on TSMC, but the US has forced TSMC to impose sanctions on PRC's military. This is an existential threat to the PRC. If the sanctions continue, or are removed but could plausibly be reimposed, and TSMC remains strategically important, at some point PRC leadership will act to remove the military advantage this gives the US and its satellites over them, even if that means paving Taiwan with Trinitite. The alternative is to be unable to respond to military attacks from the US.

Reducing exports only improves your economy if the exports are stolen, for example in the Congo Free State or the Irish Potato Famine. Weaker forms of this are known as "Dutch disease" or "the resource curse". This is very much not the case in PRC. Historically, export-led industrialization has been by far the most important cause of economic growth. By contrast, your prescription of import-substitution industrialization has failed everywhere it was tried, including, for decades, in PRC.

Increased exports leads to increased specialization and increased capitalization, which increase productivity. Unless, again, we're talking about enslaved laborers who are not in a position to capture any value from their increased productivity, this increased productivity leads to increased earnings, which increases domestic consumption. This has been known for centuries and is agreed on by virtually all economists.

Your implications that Chinese people do not value education, and that lack of education causes low consumption in China, could hardly be more false. Chinese culture has prized education highly for thousands of years. It's one of the key distinguishing features of Chinese culture. Expensive private tutoring companies were a hot startup sector until the government crackdown.

Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#295
post #176
post #22

China already declared that it will use force in Taiwan if "possibilities for a peaceful reunification should be completely exhausted". From Chinese Anti-Secession Law: Article 8: In the event that the "Taiwan independence" secessionist forces should act under any name or by any means to cause the fact of Taiwan's secession from China, or that major incidents entailing Taiwan's secession from China should occur, or t…

Nah, fuck it. We're allowed to commit to war too. Xi Jingping is a tyrannical insane dictator and his successor will be worse. He needs to be stood up to, and no one is in a better position to do that than the US.

How about you send your own ass to war instead of others'

Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#296
post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, fuck it. We're allowed to commit to war too. Xi Jingping is a tyrannical insane dictator and his successor will be worse. He needs to be stood up to, and no one is in a better position to do that than the US.

Why Xi Jinping and not, say, MbS?

No post body was provided.

Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#297
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.

Em... I doubt that semiconductor industry is the thing to lead us to WW3.

If Taiwan is taken off the board for semiconductors, or if all semiconductors have to go through China, that means the entire US military (and all western militaries) are dependent on a geopolitical rival. To allow that would be nothing short of giving away the game.

Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#298
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chinese law should almost never be considered something that constrains the government, and especially not in grandiose cases like this. The government will do as it pleases, regardless of the law. That is more of a strong press release than a binding proposition. However, I am not arguing that China is not serious about retaking Taiwan. They are deathly serious.

They are not retaking Taiwan. They never had Taiwan. Taiwain is the last bastion of the democratic government of china.

Chiang democratic? Sheesh.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiang_Kai-shek#Mass_deaths_un...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_Republic_o...:

Following the ROC government's retreat to Taiwan on 7 December 1949, the Temporary Provisions together with martial law made the country an authoritarian one-party state despite the constitution. Democratization began in the 1980s. Martial law was lifted in 1987, and in 1991 the Temporary Provisions were repealed.

ROC has been democratic since the 01990s, but it was an authoritarian dictatorship that killed millions of its own people at the time the Communists drove it out of the mainland (only to exceed its atrocities with their own) and for decades afterwards.

Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Braindead from an American perspective, it is also likely those policies have averted upwards of 4 million deaths.

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…

> Is the right to life no longer a human right?

Ah yes, China, comes to the top of the list when I think of protectors of human life. One-child policies, welding people into their apartment buildings, corralling them into COSTCOs [1] like they're farm animals being loaded into a semi-truck. Such benevolence.

> Or have a lot of us so internalized anti-China propaganda that we're no longer able to think logically?

Nah, more likely you have been drinking the pro-China propaganda like a 7-11 Big Gulp.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Costco/comments/xgvlm6/video_of_peo...

Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Directly? No. By suicide and future complications due to having their life upended/destroyed yeah.

The CCP should have purchase novavax for the shot (they still should given China’s low jab rate) and allowed the majority of people to live their lives. Covid for the majority posses little risk.

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