Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown • Hacker News Board

Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#351

Post by datavirtue » Tue, Oct 18, 2022, 6:05 PM UTC

colinmhayes wrote: post #240

chatterhead wrote: post #222

1) We need chip manufacturing to be nationalized in the USA - if it's that important to national security we don't need to leave it in the hands of private industry. 2) Taiwan is not China. We are going to break the rest of China up because Xi decided to consolidate power instead of steward the distributed power he inherited. 3) The USA isn't in trouble at all; we will expand our industries, inflate our currency and…

Nationalization is the innovation killer. Works in mature industries, but not something like semis which require big risks.

You can nationalize an entire sector and have the various companies (units?) compete with each other....still. Lack of imagination kills innovation.

Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#352

Post by lossolo » Tue, Oct 18, 2022, 6:06 PM UTC

cameldrv wrote: post #210

chaorace wrote: post #111

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.

International law is not a good example here because actually if you look at international law then Taiwan is part of China and formally it's considered as part of China by US, EU etc. Taiwan is not a state from perspective of international law so from this perspective it doesn't have sovereign airspace.

Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#353

Post by ajross » Tue, Oct 18, 2022, 6:06 PM UTC

nonrandomstring wrote: post #249

ajross wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is actually sort of a strawman. It relies on a definition for "tech" that's different from the English word "technology". You're talking about "peak {tech industry as defined by the last three decades of investment behavior}", and... OK, there's an argument there. But to argue that technology as a whole has stopped is... well, not irrefutable, but almost certainly wrong. And if it's right, wow, is that bleak. Co…

I hoped it was obvious that I chose the word "tech" to mean something less than a grandiose Francis Fukuyama style comment on "The End of Technology".

Yes, but you conflated the two to make your argument. Saying "peak tech is over" to mean "the VC-driven startup grider is out of gas" is fine! Saying that it's over because technology isn't making people's lives better is wrong, because that's what "technology" does, and it doesn't appear to be slowing down to me.

Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#354

Post by MikePlacid » Tue, Oct 18, 2022, 6:07 PM UTC

nathas wrote: post #74

valdiorn wrote: post #53

So, can someone explain to me why I can't get ANY chips for anything at all? Everything is out of stock that I use in my designs (Audio processing equipment). microprocessors, microcontrollers, ADCs, DACs, audio codecs, memory. Even bread and butter diodes were hard to source a few months ago. You name it, Mouser/Farnell/Digikey/the manufacturer doesn't have it. And if they do, it's priced at 500% MSRP. It may be "sw…

Check out the post by Schiit Audio's CEO (I think CEO?): https://www.head-fi.org/threads/schiit-happened-the-story-of... It looks like the audio sector was hit particularly hard by the war in Ukraine.

I was absolutely confused regarding what kind of “tubes” this guy talks about. But when I saw 6N1P and recognized it immediately. Not the exact name, but the numbering scheme - each owner of a Russian TV would learn a numbering scheme for “tubes” sooner or later.

It’s interesting that Russia became (or remained as) an almost single supplier of this “outdated” technology.

But still, these “tubes” are rather a niche product in the audio equipment market, no? We probably can’t get a good enough insight looking just at them.

Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#355

Post by Melatonic » Tue, Oct 18, 2022, 6:08 PM UTC

Seems like a dumb article - their whole argument is that we should NOT be building fabs in the US because demand has recently fallen and we MIGHT end up with too much supply?

Seems like a good thing to be honest. More supply means cheaper prices and even if demand is a bit lower there is no way it is going to keep going down. We have CPU's in damn near everything these days. The drop is probably mainly because of crypto mining falling of a cliff.

Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#356

Post by snovv_crash » Tue, Oct 18, 2022, 6:09 PM UTC

terminalcommand wrote: post #316

xxpor wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ASML is (now) a company everyone has heard of, but like GP hinted at with their Zeiss comment, their supply chain is crazy deep as well. Getting everything scaled up across companies and countries is far from trivial.

That's true, but this is one of the most important techs we have. From the recent news, I see that TSMC wants ASML to scale up as well. TSMC announced that it will cut its capital expenditure by 10% due to supply problems. This announcement tanked ASML's share price. My comment is that ASML is hitting their profit targets, they have backlog until 2024. If I were leading ASML or an employee of it, I wouldn't want to s…

Apparently ASML's internal processes are a mess, with everything consistently blocked by technical debt. I suspect this is the biggest blocker to their ability to scale their production faster.

Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#357

Post by digianarchist » Tue, Oct 18, 2022, 6:10 PM UTC

kragen wrote: post #298

kjkjadksj wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

The KMT have an awful track record as being horrifically authoritarian.

OP isn’t wrong though contemporary Taiwan is a model democracy in a region where there are few.

Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#358

Post by hayst4ck » Tue, Oct 18, 2022, 6:11 PM UTC

TillE wrote: post #349

hayst4ck wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They're different countries with entirely different relationships to the PRC.

"On entire other sides of the globe" is a pretty strong statement. Japan is a vassal state of the US and Taiwan's independence from China relies wholly on US support. Chinese citizens (at least the ones I questioned) have no love for Japanese. There are even talks of a Pacific NATO between Vietnam, Korea, Japan, and the Phillipines, with Taiwan being the clear Ukraine parallel. South Korea is probably politically like Germany (primarily self interested), Japan is probably politically like the UK (sees the bigger picture).

Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#359

Post by DeathArrow » Tue, Oct 18, 2022, 6:12 PM UTC

windexh8er wrote: post #51

mensetmanusman wrote: post #26

Highly recommend the economist’s podcast on Xi called ‘The Prince’ Xi became a Leninist and is trying to be the next Mao. He is a true believer that his glory and the glory of China can only happen by taking back Taiwan. TSMC is a huge reason for this conflict. The current US policy is trying to slow China’s technological might for that next war.

But China doesn't actually have a lot of technological prowess on their own. The USG might be trying to slow them down but they're not concerned about China militarily. I worked for a defense contractor back in the early 2000s when the USG was selling a lot of arms and systems to Taiwan. I got to see the bullying in person via the ASOC (part of the C4ISR platform) system we were installing. China would routinely fly…

>China can't build its own fab for these types of procs.

China can't build fabs for very small lithography processes yet. But 40 years ago they couldn't build almost anything. That changed. The fab situation will change, too.

Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#360

Post by kragen » Tue, Oct 18, 2022, 6:12 PM UTC

hunglee2 wrote: post #331

kragen wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

for sure, but most opinion from the west inflates TSMC as primary motivator, its a complicating factor yes, but the PRC has been on about taking Taiwan for the past 70 years, before semi-conductors were even invented. look at the top voted comment in this thread - the narrative is some sort of escalation from Xi Jinping when unification with Taiwan is boilerplate rhetoric which every leader since Deng says at Party C…

Agreed! I think there was maybe some real escalation around the time of Pelosi's visit (where Morris Chang was in attendance in her photo-op with Tsai), though, and it's hard not to see the moves in HK as threatening.