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Apple will soon receive 'made in America' chips from TSMC's Arizona fab

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Re: Apple will soon receive 'made in America' chips from TSMC's Arizona fab

#441

Post by TeMPOraL »

7thaccount wrote: post #427
jamesfinlayson wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there are a lot of well paying jobs in power systems with good work life balance How much electrical engineering is there in these jobs? I knew a few electrical engineer at university (weirdly they outnumbered the software engineers 3 to 1) and some of them told me they could get work for a local power company, but it was mostly looking at spreadsheets and not really using anything that they'd learned.

It depends on what exactly you do as the industry is so vast. It is true (I'd wager this is true in most engineering fields) that very few actually use a lot of what you learned in school as it has all been put into fancy software packages. For example, my wife uses some kind of drafting software to design things like roads that she learned all the math to understand in college. It is the same in my industry where ye…

> I'll add that it is pretty common for engineers to have some kind of existential crisis once you graduate and you realize what you thought you'd be doing once you graduated (in my case crawling around Jefferies tubes and fixing the warp reactor) is totally different in the real world.

Thank you for saying this out loud. It took me years to recover from this, and I "recovered" mostly by giving up and accepting that, unlike fiction, real world doesn't have to make sense or offer interesting, fulfilling work.

Now I just dream that one of these days, I'll build a house, and I'll design it with a Jefferies tube, just to scratch my itch.

Re: Apple will soon receive 'made in America' chips from TSMC's Arizona fab

#442

Post by TeMPOraL »

sho_hn wrote: post #421
anothername12 wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, I spent more than a trivial amount of time wondering what an Einstein of Adtech looks like.

Is adtech the new pejorative for Facebook & co?

Adtech is a pejorative on its own.

Re: Apple will soon receive 'made in America' chips from TSMC's Arizona fab

#443

Post by grues-dinner »

School-Cotton wrote: post #282
CPLX wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are literally microchips. Tens of thousands of dollars of value in each gram. Shipping cost is fundamentally irrelevant, you can put $100MM worth on a direct flight and have room left over for your family and friends.

Your overall point is probably right, but "tens of thousands of dollars of value in each gram" seems like an exaggeration. How much does one CPU weigh?

Depends on the chip. A typical consumer processor is 100-200 mm². Wafers are about 1mm thick (actually a bit less, but close enough) and silicon has a density of 2300kg/m³. So it's 2.3mg/mm² of wafer area. The chip is then 0.23-0.46g. if it's high end and worth $1000, then the wafers are $2-4000 per gram. Probably the low end of that since the fancier chips are usually the physically bigger ones.

However, low-end processors will be worth radically less ($100 CPUs aren't 10x smaller) and things like top-end FPGAs will be worth substantially more. An Agilex 7 can be $40,000 and if it's got less then 4 grams (around 1700mm², or 41mm*41mm), the wafer is worth over $10k/gram. The entire chip is 56x56, and from the package drawing, the die appears to be around 30x30, so it exceeds the threshold.

This is assuming all the value of the retail price is the main wafer, which is also not true.

Thousands per gram, certainly seems possible, though I doubt it's even that on average across all chips, and considering that there is non-wafer content in the price. Tens of thousands is probably pushing it. However, it's certainly likely to be rather more than gold in terms of specific value ($100/g, ish). Harder to fence, though.

Re: Apple will soon receive 'made in America' chips from TSMC's Arizona fab

#444

Post by alecco »

throwaway-blaze wrote: post #196

They'll be flown from the US to Taiwan for packaging, at least until packaging services exist here. Then they'll be flown to China, Southeast Asia, India, or possibly Brazil for final assembly into an iPhone or computer, at least until lower cost assembly plants are built here or someplace cheaper like Mexico.

Your comment is correct but this was already stated in earlier comments. This is probably why you are being downvoted.

Re: Apple will soon receive 'made in America' chips from TSMC's Arizona fab

#445

Post by alecco »

blackeyeblitzar wrote: post #263

I like the idea of made in America and bringing manufacturing self sufficiency to the US. But I don’t like the idea of reducing dependency on Taiwan, which makes it so that the world may ignore their plight in face of increasing aggression from China. The CCP is an authoritarian dictatorial government that seeks illegitimate control over Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang, and other areas. They need to be stopped and…

Protecting Taiwan would mean WWIII. I hope the West and the Taiwanese figure this out ASAP and start moving as many people as possible out of there, and destroy all the fabs.

China is building more warships than the rest of the world combined. And NATO can't even recruit enough people to man their existing fleet.

But it seems the West is a victim of its own propaganda so there's no political will.

Re: Apple will soon receive 'made in America' chips from TSMC's Arizona fab

#446

Post by alecco »

hintymad wrote: post #208
hintymad wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe this is the discussion worth having. Taiwanese engineers competed to get into TSMC. Their management practically lived in the factory to solve production issues when needed. The local workers in the Arizona factory said the pay was pretty good per another comment. Yet somehow we thought that we were slaving the labors? What is the fundamental difference here? Personally, if I were a worker who could find just a…

And I'm not sure why this got downvoted. Not that it matters, but I'm very curious about why people were not happy with the questions. My fundamental belief is that if someone chose to accept an offer and then work hard, it's not slavery but free will. But well, I guess American culture is interesting in the regard. If I study STEM hard in school, I'll be a "teacher's pet" or a nerd who knows only "how to cram". On t…

The same people downvoting you are likely the same who think doing 996 on the startup lottery is a good idea.

Re: Apple will soon receive 'made in America' chips from TSMC's Arizona fab

#447

Post by grues-dinner »

DougMerritt wrote: post #370
School-Cotton wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But surely a wafer weighs more than a gram, no?

Yes. One source I just double checked says that a 300mm silicon wafer weighs 840 grams, which seems to be in the right range anyway.

I see that source too (universitywafer.com) which is sucked into the AI slop panel on Google.

A 300mm wafer at 0.775mm thickness that weighs that much would be a density of 15g/cm³: midway between lead (11) and gold (19). Silicon is only 2.3g/cm³.

A 300mm wafer should be much closer to 100g than 1kg. Another page (on the same website!) says 125g, which is pretty dead-on 2.3g/cm³.

Re: Apple will soon receive 'made in America' chips from TSMC's Arizona fab

#449

Post by rich_sasha »

datadrivenangel wrote: post #2

These chips are still sent to Taiwan for packing, so it's a good step but not a complete step.

What does "packaging" mean in this context? I'm a total n00b when it comes to chips.

What comes to my mind is wrapping a piece of electronics in some bubble wrap and cardboard, which doesn't sound that hard...

Re: Apple will soon receive 'made in America' chips from TSMC's Arizona fab

#450

Post by concordDance »

mjamesaustin wrote: post #324
concordDance wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ticks do not require the consent of the host to drink blood. Things like Google and Facebook cannot be parasitic, every dollar gained is a voluntary exchange with no threats. People choose to use Google and gain something from doing so.

Yep if the host agreed to die, then the market is a success. We've discovered the most efficient outcome – sucking the customer dry until they die! Thank you to the free market for delivering us this efficient result. Remember kids – thousands dying from lack of healthcare isn't a bug of the system, it's a feature. This has been determined as necessary, nay even beneficial, by market forces that can never be wrong.

Hackernews has finally declined to the level of reddit. :(
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