Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

501–510 of 734 posts

Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#501

Post by Comevius »

akuma73 wrote: post #311
Comevius wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's more or less irrelevant, AMD is one of the many fabless companies like Qualcomm or MediaTek. Intel makes it's own chips, and now wants to make chips for other companies as well. They may end up making AMD processors one day.

Isn’t that a huge conflict of interest? It’s hard to see how AMD would get capacity ahead of Intel CPUs.

Samsung makes a lot of money manufacturing displays and cameras for Apple. They are working on an under-display sensor too that's going to replace the notch in the future.

Intel used to make a processor with AMD graphics and 4GB HBM2 (Core i7-8809G).

Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#502

Post by tooltalk »

mschuster91 wrote: post #20
tooltalk wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the foundry business is now a two-horse race between Samsung and TSMC. Intel, many believe won't make it. The US gov't knows it too -- that's why Trump arm-twisted TSMC to open new plants in Arizona. Samsung was making Apple's A's in Austin, Texas some time ago, but Apple ditched Samsung's US manufacturing in favor of their China/Taiwan-first offshore outsourcing strategy.

> Samsung was making Apple's A's in Austin, Texas some time ago, but Apple ditched Samsung's US manufacturing in favor of their China/Taiwan-first offshore outsourcing strategy. Apple runs an Asia-first strategy these days, they are divesting from China at top speed (whether that's due to sanction threats, the risk of operating in dictatorships, raising wages in China or a combination of that is up for debate). It do…

>> ... they are divesting from China at top speed...

I'm not entirely convinced that that's what Apple is doing.

The Information reported[1] last year that Apple made ginormouse investments ($270+B) in China's domestic tech industry to train their workforce and foster China's tech manufacturing. That was 6-7 years ago. It was also revealed very recently that Apple was still trying mighty hard to source more materials and chip suppliers from China's domestic tech industry (eg, YMTC) in spite of the on-going US sanctions on MIC chips -- in this particular case with YMTC, Apple finally gave up only after the Biden admin expanded export control on YMTC last week[2].

I don't think Apple is deterred by Xi's dictatorship, China's geopolitical threats to Taiwan/the South Sea conflict with other SEA countries, or the Uigher (and other ethnic minoority groups) human rights concerns, despite their virtue signaling here in the US. Sure, I think the justification for Biden's foreign/trade policies is up for debates, but what is quite clear is that Apple hasn't really changed its China/Taiwan-first business practices.

1. https://www.theinformation.com/articles/facing-hostile-chine...

2. https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Tech/Semiconductors/Apple-f...

Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#503

Post by canadianfella »

blaser-waffle wrote: post #395
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…

> Who is threatening Japan with cruise missiles? Certainly not China or Russia. North Korea, perhaps. China has said that they believe that, in the event of hostilities over Taiwan, they will be obligated to strike US forces everywhere in the region -- and the US Navy still has a strong presence in Japan. Also S. Korea and the Philippines. This means potentially launching missiles at these countries too, and the Chin…

No post body was provided.

Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#504

Post by MikePlacid »

MikePlacid wrote: post #354
nathas wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pr…

> I was absolutely confused regarding what kind of “tubes” this guy talks about.

In Russian these are called “lamps”, not “tubes”.

Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#505

Post by hunglee2 »

kragen wrote: post #484
hunglee2 wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chang is the leader Taiwan really needs, unfortunately he is unable to moderate Tsai. TSMC will eventually be a loser in the story that is currently being written

Yeah, I can't imagine he was happy with TSMC having to cancel all its sales to Huawei. But that wasn't really Tsai's fault; nobody is able to moderate the US, and the sanctions weren't a Taiwanese policy. I was thinking reunification was really the only path to saving TSMC, but if Chang agreed, he probably would've declined the invitation to the photo op; and obviously he knows more than I do about the issues. Instea…

hmmm....not sure I agree here.

Tsai is not entirely a creature of the US, and has indirectly - perhaps initially, inadvertently - manipulated the US by pushing for an unendorsed independence, forcing the US to deal with a situation they hadn't before considered - a 'two china' outcome.

However, now that US does sees this outcome, it cannot unsee it and is thus driving hard to secure that outcome, no doubt as a stepping stone for the long term goal of regime change in PRC

As for Chang, I think status quo is his ideal outcome - de facto independence, TSMC servicing two of the biggest economies in the world, and therefore, the entire world. Not happening now though, sadly

Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#506

Post by kragen »

dumpsterlid wrote: post #231
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…

Yah great point, the US culturally seems to really struggle with the idea that the business is just an arbitrary conception, what is important is the workers . We really have a disturbing sense that arbitraries collections of capital and legalese are more important than humans with passions and skills and it honestly scares me.

Yeah, it's amazing the number of people who believe that corporations exist in the same objective sense that puppies do, rather than the social-consensus sense that D&D characters do.

Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#507

Post by hollerith »

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.

Building a fab in Japan instead Taiwan does quite a lot to mitigate geopolitical issues.

Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#508

Post by pweezy »

bluepizza wrote: post #379
slickrick216 wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is completely unrealistic. Japan is protected by the USA. Any attacks on Japanese territory would lead to nuclear annihilation of Beijing.

China is a nuclear power and neither the US nor China is interested in MAD. Any attacks on Japanese territory would probably lead to a hot war with the US, but almost certainly not nuclear annihilation.

Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#509

Post by muricula »

mFixman wrote: post #335

I know nothing about the chip-making process, and news about fabs and the chip industry confuse and scare me. Can anybody link me to a guide with the basics of these topics, like what exactly is a chip (is it a microcontroller? a part of a larger system?), or why the few giant fabs can't be replaced by a lot of smaller and cheaper ones?

There are two parts to making chips: architecture (design) and process (how it's manufactured). Intel does both but eg Apple only does design and outsources manufacturing to other companies.

There are lots of different chips ranging from slow, energy efficient, and cheap microcontrollers, to fast, energy hungry, and expensive high performance computing clusters. Intel makes the fast ones, and had the fastest chips from the late 1990s to the mid 2010s. Since then, a Taiwanese company has had the fastest chips which go into iPhones, Nvidia graphics cards, and AMD cpus.

Building a fab (manufacturing plant) to make the fastest chips which require features shorter than 7nm (billionths of a meter!) requires billions of dollars in up front investment. It's mass scale manufacturing at some of the lowest levels anything has ever been created at.

The US gov't is afraid that company which makes the fastest chips in Taiwan (which is not recognized as an independent country, but is effectively self governing, but China claims is theirs, it's complicated yes), could be under Chinese control some day. The Military Industrial Complex don't want the US tech sector or US defense tech to be beholden to China, and US companies (Intel) want government funding to build expensive factories. Thus the CHIPS act.

Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#510

Post by adriancr »

theptip wrote: post #453
blaser-waffle wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who is threatening Japan with cruise missiles? Certainly not China or Russia. North Korea, perhaps. China has said that they believe that, in the event of hostilities over Taiwan, they will be obligated to strike US forces everywhere in the region -- and the US Navy still has a strong presence in Japan. Also S. Korea and the Philippines. This means potentially launching missiles at these countries too, and the Chin…

> China has said that they believe that, in the event of hostilities over Taiwan, they will be obligated to strike US forces everywhere in the region Do you have a source for this? I haven't heard this stated before, but I'm not an expert here. Even taking this as true, I think it's a big leap to go from striking US military bases in Japan, to striking civilian infrastructure in those countries. It seems quite clear…

> China occupies Taiwan

They're not even remotely capable of doing that before US intervenes. Taiwan is a heavily fortified island with unfriendly geography and a massive high tech army.

Post reply on HN