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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

#321

Post by permo-w »

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.

China recently tested a hypersonic missile that circumnavigated the global and then marginally missed its target

Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#322

Post by kragen »

hunglee2 wrote: post #318
galangalalgol wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 think people overrate TSMC are the primary motivator for the PRC, who have basically maintained the same posture toward the 'renegade province' since 1949. This is unfinished business from a civil war which never officially ended.

I agree, but I think TSMC has also assumed a geopolitical importance it didn't have previously.

Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#323

Post by hayst4ck »

coryfklein wrote: post #200
tgtweak wrote: post #174

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.

Despite being close to China as the crow flies, the geopolitical difference between Japan and Taiwan means they could be on opposite sides of the globe.

Can you break that down? I am not sure I understand what you mean.

Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#324

Post by terminalcommand »

Negitivefrags wrote: post #309
terminalcommand wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Scaling up too much is a huge risk. Sure, people want a lot more EUV machines right now , but what if they don’t later? You can be left with a lot of expensive capital outlay that is going unused. The semi industry is known for being very boom/bust so it’s best not to scale up too quick lest it kill your company.

This is a convincing argument.

Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#325

Post by bobkazamakis »

paxys wrote: post #286
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.

Do you think these alternative cycles are always the same amplitude? or do you think maybe... we're at peak amplitude of that tech growth cycle that won't be seen again without another major breakthrough technology?

Or I guess we can just be pendantic. There are no such thing as alternating periods, all periods of time are exactly the same!

Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#326

Post by ragingroosevelt »

CoastalCoder wrote: post #230
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…

Targeted layoffs might be the best thing long-term. From my limited perspective of having recently worked at Intel, they had a lot of dead weight. There was a lot of talent, but it was also diluted by a lot of management and bureaucracy. I honestly don't know if layoffs are an effective solution to this, but IMHO they could definitely benefit from lower headcount and greater urgency.

This matches what I've heard about Intel from friends who have worked there. I had a firmware programmer friend who's job was literally to copy data from excel files to .h files and when he offered to automate the process was told that the manual transfer was the process he should follow. He described his role as dead weight.

Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#327

Post by [deleted] »

adeptima wrote: post #59
bouncycastle wrote: post #50

Related: There is a massive TSMC factory being built in Japan right now. Take a look at the pictures, I've never seen this many cranes at one location: https://www.nhk.jp/static/assets/images/newblogposting/ts/7P... https://cdn-cw-english.cwg.tw/ckeditor/202205/ckeditor-628ae... It looks like a forest of cranes...

"The plant will produce 22-nanometer and 28-nanometer chips to address strong global demand for speciality chip technologies, they said" I'm curious why not the latest - 3nm, 5nm

[deleted]

Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#328

Post by windexh8er »

mehlmao wrote: post #211
windexh8er wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Whenever this discussion pops up it reeks of racism. People from China aren't less intelligent than people in Germany or in the US so with time and more money they will with 100% certainty overcome any technological gap. Sure they are behind in some areas but pretending they can't make a pen is disingenuous. It's not disingenous and it's not racist as I've laid it out. Facts are facts. I've never discounted the fac…

AMD is Taiwan; they design chips but those are manufactured by TSMC. Intel is Israel.

AMD and Intel are both US based companies.

Again - I'm talking about R&D, chip design, intellectual property - in chips the US holds the majority of the major players. Yes, TSMC is manufacturing many of those chips today, but design and manufacturing are not the same thing.

It's appreciated when you read the entirety of the post before sharing information that's already been reviewed and incorrect information.

Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#329

Post by bendhoefs »

slickrick216 wrote: post #303
theptip wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If China attempts an invasion on Taiwan it is not unrealistic to suggest they’ll also take a swing at Japan and at least try to destroy the fabs there.

Why? If China decides to invade Taiwan surely they'll do everything they can to not give the rest of the world a reason to intervene.

They want Taiwan not a war with the entire west all at once.

Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#330

Post by MikePlacid »

vkou wrote: post #254
bee_rider wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Grocery self-checkout machines are great. There's even a system now where you can bring a little scanner with you and scan as you pick them out, that way you can bag them directly in your cart, saving the time of the final scan and the bagging (it was great during the peak of the pandemic, skip the cashier and waiting in the high-population line area). Robots answering support calls are annoying, but self-service web…

No, they aren't. There's not a single point in time when I have ever scanned my own groceries faster than the guy who does it 8 hours a day. They scream at me when they think I'm stealing (Any human being doing that would instantly be reprimanded by a manager), they have tiny platforms where I can't even fit my groceries and heaven forbid if I do something the machine doesn't like, an attendant needs to come unfuck i…

> I can't wait for the next grocery innovation of having the customers stock the shelves from the backroom before they can fill a sack with onions.

Think bolder. As a software engineer in the Soviet Union I had to spend about three weeks each year in the collective farm fields planting, tending and harvesting potatoes and cabbages. Since some of my American friends are very fond of socialism these days - these types of “improvement” look definitely a possibility.

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