Earlier quoted context omitted.
All this talk of China invading Taiwan and attacking other countries in SE Asia is bonkers. Their economy would be cut off from the rest of the world in an instant. Their commercial fishing fleets would probably be driven back to port. It would take a matter of days until they had massive internal protests. Hungry people topple governments in hours.
Yes it is bonkers, indeed! Yet, it is EXACTLY what Xi repeatedly said in his new-term-inauguration speech The dictator of China has effectively declared, as publicly as possible, and very specifically, that he intends to invade Taiwan if it does not willingly abandon it's democracy and come under China's rule He obviously thinks he can get away with doing so without consequences, including those you suggest. Yet, lea…
Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown
531–540 of 734 posts
Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown
#532To 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.
The company that makes the machines that TSMC use to make chips is Dutch if I remember correctly. So if Taiwan gets invaded it is a disaster but not an absolute disaster as presumably USA/other countries could order some machines from said company and start afresh. Supply would be constrained for a long period of time and there would be a massive economic hit but it wouldn’t necessarily have to lead to WW3. If Russia is anything to go by, presumably there will be indicators in the months before as to when an attack is going to happen which means TSMC staff could be evacuated to other countries to get things up and running. I think I also read somewhere that USA was already in the process of setting up more chip fabrication on US soil in conjunction with TSMC, I think maybe in Texas if I remember right?
I think I also read that the entire foundry would be rigged to blow in the case of invasion. Between controlled demolitions such as these by Taiwan and whatever China has to fire at them to successfully win, there would be very little of value left standing on the island by the end of it. It would take them decades to redevelop it. Very hollow victory for China.
Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown
#533Earlier quoted context omitted.
The fact remains that if US policies were implemented in China, it would mean the tacit acceptance of killing 4-5 million people.
a) we don't know exactly what would happen if China implemented US policies. So that's not a fact, thats a hypothesis. b) China lies all the time. That's a fact. May be 5 million died from covid there. who knows. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_misinformation_by_Chi...
It's actually 50 million dead, not 5 million. And some experts even say, that possibly up to 200 million Chinese have died from covid so far. All those repeated lockdowns and city-wide mass tests are just being done for the 'lolz'.
P.S. I wore my tin-foil hat while posting the above. It's pretty similar to the one you're wearing.
Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown
#534> Toshiya Hari of Goldman Sachs, a bank,
Never thought I'd see an Economist article explaining that GS are a bank hahaha
Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown
#535Earlier 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…
> 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 would be starting World War III. It would be akin to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, with the main difference being, we have thousands of nukes and China does not. This course of action is so profoundly stupid that I cannot imagine China taking it.
Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown
#536Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown
#537Earlier quoted context omitted.
We honestly should nationalize intel, raytheon, boeing, and lockheed martin. Probably others too. It makes no sense to develop our sensitive technology and reserve some resources solely to feed the parasite that is the profit margin.
Why wouldn't the government just start up it's own Intel-alike?
Because intel would lobby against it and snuff it
Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown
#538Earlier quoted context omitted.
We honestly should nationalize intel, raytheon, boeing, and lockheed martin. Probably others too. It makes no sense to develop our sensitive technology and reserve some resources solely to feed the parasite that is the profit margin.
You mean like they did in communist countries and had a huge success at killing their economies?
I was thinking more along the lines of when the us government centrally planned the economy and won a world war as a result.
Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown
#539So, 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…
When it comes to audio, it didn't help that AKM had a factory go up in flames[1], completely destroying most of it. It seems they've managed to shift production of some popular ADCs and DACs to other manufacturers[2] recently.
As for other chips, part of it is the toilet paper effect. From what I've heard, companies are buying 5x or 10x what they normally buy, just to be sure they got parts for production. Since the situation is still bad, I'm guessing people are still doing it.
Especially ICs are made in batches, so once it runs dry the manufacturer can't just print out another 10k units, they got other stuff lined up. I see for STM32s a lot of stock is expected at the end of this year or first half of next year, which lines up with what their CEO said that things will start stabilizing at the start of next year.
I'm just a hobbyist who knows a few EEs though, so might be wrong. But this is my impression.
[1]: https://www.audioholics.com/news/fire-destroys-akm-audio-chi...
[2]: https://www.strata-gee.com/akm-responds-to-strata-gee-reques...
Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown
#540Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
That's a big if there. There's no guarantee that the US intervenes, especially depending on who the president happens to be at the time.