Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you don't mind answering, what type of chips?
24 volt digital output drivers. We're also getting crushed on Xilinx FPGAs, certain Cypress CPUs, AD MUXes, Relay switches... It's something new every week.
[deleted]
TSMC hikes chip prices up to 20% amid supply shortage
591–600 of 620 posts
Re: TSMC hikes chip prices up to 20% amid supply shortage
#592Earlier quoted context omitted.
Their margin is approaching 40%. They're basically printing money at this point. It's hilarious how a manufacturer can be so profitable nowadays.
"service economy" was always a meme being sold to the gullible masses, manufacturing capacity is the only thing that matters for an economy. Manufacturing has always printed the money It amazes me how the US allowed itself to be nearly deindustrialized after manufacturing effectively won them WWII and global dominance. Now the US can't even make ventilators or face masks
We still manufacture our most important product; the American Dream.
Seriously though, 3M would like a word.
Re: TSMC hikes chip prices up to 20% amid supply shortage
#593Earlier quoted context omitted.
The underlying problem is that you need to prevent sybil attacks, i.e. group X creates many peers in the network and so gets much more voting power than they "ought to" have. The only known way to do so is through attaching a real-world cost to ~votes. The way PoW does so is through equating votes and hashrate, so votes cost real money because hashrate requires real hardware. PoS works in mysterious ways, but the bas…
The real question is how do you create a pool of voters who is 'representative' of the users. One way is you could look to some historic list of people (like for example, everyone who had a US passport issued in 1992), and say they are the voters. An evil actor subverting more than half of those people would be very hard.
That's essentially what the Ethereum PoS transition is supposed to look like, isn't it? Take a snapshot of the PoW chain, boom, here are all your initial tokens/coinz eligible for staking to get votes.
Re: TSMC hikes chip prices up to 20% amid supply shortage
#594Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh yeah, I've told my manager it's only a matter of time until we get burned. So far we have had decent luck with Heisener and Win-Source but prices keep climbing.
Well.. we were just looking at Heisener for a Cypress chip, but can't decide whether to pull the trigger. Have you placed an order and received the product from them?
Yes, we successfully purchased a small quantity of Kinetis microcontrollers which were supposedly tested prior to shipping, those are going into assemblies right now so we'll see if they actually work.
Heisener is just a middleman so every transaction is different unfortunately.
Re: TSMC hikes chip prices up to 20% amid supply shortage
#595Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bootstrapping the second time is much easier
Venor Vinge's The Children of the Sky is hard sci-fi touches on this issue of how to bootstrap a civilization to the point where the technology necessary to restore a highly advanced spaceship becomes available. Humanity will need this skill if we are ever able to venture out of our solar system.
I've played enough survival games to know that all you need to do is fashion a pickaxe out of stone and wood, use it to mine some metal, build a forge, and everything just snowballs from there
Re: TSMC hikes chip prices up to 20% amid supply shortage
#596Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, but a lot of the pro-cryptocurrency people say (or used to, at least) that cryptocurrencies will liberate us from the existing power structures. But it doesn't really, because the people with pre-existing power can just as easily buy their way into power over cryptocurrencies too.
How could a rich existing power exert control over who and how someone uses bitcoin? There is no mechanism by which such control could be exerted. The worst you can do is monitor traffic and try to correlate wallets and transactions to known identities and products similar to attacks on Tor, then use good old regular meat space violence. Privacy oriented coins like Monitor make this even harder, to literally impossib…
> Technically you don't even need miners
Well, yes, of course you're right, but there's a world of difference between "technically" and what the reality is for most people.
Between what the EU seem to be doing and the prevalence of centralized exchanges, it seems like what you're describing is happening. But my point was really just that you could still buy yourself into a position of control, either by controlling the hashing power or otherwise. Nothing changes that.
Note I'm not anti-cryptocurrency, I'm just wary that much of the hype is unfounded. Maybe in theory based on correct things, but the reality isn't so clean. Personally, I'm hoping a privacy-oriented DeFi coin will take off. There are a few contenders in this space to watch.
Re: TSMC hikes chip prices up to 20% amid supply shortage
#597Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do those other countries matter here? We’re talking about the US, the worlds joint number one superpower.
Its obvious that isn’t important to me, right? This sentiment crosses party lines. We uniquely have the resources to be the most developed nation, domestically, but subsidize other countries’ defense instead and they subsidize other advances in their own country that we domestically deem too expensive. So how about we get this semiconductor geopolitical nightmare out of the way and use our massive domestic resources…
> We uniquely have the resources to be the most developed nation, domestically, but subsidize other countries’ defense instead
...and in return, the rest of the world plays ball when we want to advance our interests. The basis of foreign policy is I'll scratch your back if you'll scratch mine. Our protection of Taiwan shows other countries that we will put ourselves on the line for our allies. It practically forces us to go to war if China invades because we'll lose access to our all-important semiconductors.
Key word forces. If we lose our dependency on the semiconductors we're no longer forced to go to war. Which means China can try to invade and might succeed if we deem it unnecessary to protect Taiwan because "fuck you, we got ours." By keeping ourselves in this vulnerable position there's an implicit trust and understanding that we will be there for them.
> There are consequences, not the US’ problem.
Funnily enough this is the attitude of many citizens under protection of US hegemony. I think you will receive more varied responses from the Ukrainians and Taiwanese.
Re: TSMC hikes chip prices up to 20% amid supply shortage
#598Earlier quoted context omitted.
Their margin is approaching 40%. They're basically printing money at this point. It's hilarious how a manufacturer can be so profitable nowadays.
"service economy" was always a meme being sold to the gullible masses, manufacturing capacity is the only thing that matters for an economy. Manufacturing has always printed the money It amazes me how the US allowed itself to be nearly deindustrialized after manufacturing effectively won them WWII and global dominance. Now the US can't even make ventilators or face masks
Not really man. NVIDIA buys chips from foundries and marks them up 5x or more.
Re: TSMC hikes chip prices up to 20% amid supply shortage
#599Earlier quoted context omitted.
Their margin is approaching 40%. They're basically printing money at this point. It's hilarious how a manufacturer can be so profitable nowadays.
Genuine question because I’m unfamiliar with the market. Why aren’t competitors undercutting these big players? 40% is ridiculous
In the short term? Because building a fab takes time and money, I would expect.
Re: TSMC hikes chip prices up to 20% amid supply shortage
#600Supply shortage is another way of saying demand excess. I don’t see much evidence that TSMC ever really slowed production, at least for their most advanced processes that are in high demand. This is yet another way we’re all forced to pay the price for cryptocurrency. As long as GPUs are profitable for mining, they will be purchased and put to work. The saddest part is that each additional GPU added to the mining net…
I agree with this but it's even worse than that. Estimates on Bitcoin energy usage put it at over 1TW now. I believe it was comparable to the energy consumption of Argentina. Advocates will defend this by saying most energy usage is renewable. This conjures the image of someone with a bunch of solar panels but the reality is that it's primarily hydro power because that's the cheapest. Thing is, in regions with cheap…
> escaping capital controls in certain currencies). Some are not (ie all the illegal usages).
I don't really understand how these are different, given that escaping capital controls is by definition illegal (otherwise you could just use the normal banking system).