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Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock

tomshardware.com

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Re: Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock

#601

Post by naasking »

DoctorOetker wrote: post #477

> South Korea is among the most exposed countries, which, according to the Korea International Trade Association, imported 64.7% of its helium from Qatar in 2025. The country relies heavily on helium imports to cool silicon wafers during fabrication and is understood to have no viable substitute. I assume the helium is enclosed in a a chip's hermetically sealed package, if it were just for cooling wafers I don't unde…

I assume purity matters. It probably picks up a lot of contaminants during use, and chip manufacturing is pretty sensitive to contaminants.

Re: Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock

#602

Post by jcalvinowens »

hedora wrote: post #414
gruez wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>In surge prone areas What areas are surge prone?

The California bay area, at least all the sides of it I’ve lived on. We currently have a whole house battery, whole house surge protector, a second surge protector, and a UPS between the router/nas/etc and PG&E. It’s not good enough. At least the power stays on once the grid stops bouncing (or once I manage to log into the rebooting battery gateway computer to have it flip the “off grid” breaker, or go outside and fl…

I've lived all over the peninsula, your experience is not normal.

I had far more power outages during my late teenage years in suburban Dallas than I've ever had in the bay. That was due to a bad transformer in the neighborhood which took years to replace, but once it was replaced everything was perfect. The moral of the story being: if your power is bad, it's probably because some piece of mains infrastructure near you is broken.

I had a string of annoying outages in 2023-2024, but it was all due to main service upgrades on my street, can't really complain about that.

Re: Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock

#603

Post by manarth »

nickff wrote: post #590
manarth wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess the typical inflation basket doesn't include rental income , which the upper-quartile are rather more likely to have than the lower quartile. Wonder how that might impact figures if residual/passive income were included?

Consumer Price Inflation (CPI) is about spending on consumer goods, and not about wage or investment income.

Consumer Price Index (inflation/deflation being the change in CPI), but I get your point, thanks

Re: Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock

#604

Post by toss1 »

gruez wrote: post #357
toss1 wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Areas with lots of thunderstorms. Also more rural areas with long power lines with few taps off for customers — the long runs are both exposed to many nearby strikes and accept induction well, and the few customers are fewer power sinks to dissipate the spike. So, you're more likely to get hit, and hit harder.

Sounds like if you're in an urban area with buried lines, you don't have to worry?

No, just worry less about big lightning, but urban areas have many more sources of different types of spikes and line noise

Re: Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock

#605

Post by Joel_Mckay »

silversmith wrote: post #567
Joel_Mckay wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The SSD don't last forever, after about 3 to 4 years of daily use the drive/system should be replaced. At >5 years, one could hit retention issues and corruption losses. Good excuse to upgrade though, as a $1500 recovery bill would not be cool. Best regards =3

This advice brought to you by the "change your oil every three months" crowd.

I removed my anecdote and flash wear explanation, because of cranky folks like yourself.

The corrosion inhibitors in petrol engine oil get fully depleted within about a year with most brands. One may certainly sell the machine before you see acidified lubricant related problems, but the motor will not reach its full operational lifespan ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathtub_curve .)

I do agree that anyone with a CVT style transmission likely won't have to worry, as that entire section will probably need replaced before you see significant hydrodynamic bearing damage.

"Buy cheap, buy twice" as they say...

ymmv, best of luck. =3

Re: Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock

#606

Post by Joel_Mckay »

xandrius wrote: post #578
JSR_FDED wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s super annoying. I’m salivating over all the new announcements but my M1 16GB 1TB will likely last another 5 years.

As a side note, I absolutely cannot imagine being upset of having a machine lasting long. Sure it's nice the shiny new thing but has capitalism infiltrated people's mind that much? All my previous laptops died on me several times and became frankestein's monsters before I let them rest for a final time (to be often repurposed to other family/friends' machines).

With intermittent use one may get a lot more life out of the SSD than other users, but eventually flash will run out of spare-sectors and start to fail.

Most M1 systems I saw use on-board BGA110 NAND flash, and thus maintenance/upgrades on the SSD are difficult. Most users don't have a hot air rework station or x-ray inspection machines to do this modification correctly.

The MTBF statistics can move around a lot depending on the use-case, but eventually people will run out of luck ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_time_between_failures .)

Not sure why people get upset by this fact, as not all Apple hardware models were built to be disposable. =3

Re: Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock

#607

Post by PowerElectronix »

manarth wrote: post #576
PowerElectronix wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CPI is kept artificially down by claiming that items that increase a lot in value are sudendly "higher quality" so that their price is adjusted down to equalize for "quality". They will just take those items off the basket, put in different ones and claim that those are better quality so the actual price increase is in line with expectations.

I can understand a certain amount of switching in the basket - e.g. a washing machine or dishwasher was once a "luxury good" in a market such as USA, but is now (for the most part) an everyone-appliance. Interesting to consider the alternative case though, an "everyone basket item" becoming a "luxury good". Democracy, maybe? But I don't think they've put that in the CPI basket - yet! :-P

It's more like, refrigerators are now way more expensive, but because they are also more comlonly equipped with led fixtures and have more style (no joking here, they somehow are measuring style as a metric) then it's all good and they have actually just increased around 2% with respect yo the base model (that cost like a third in dollars back in 1995)

Re: Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock

#608

Post by ceejayoz »

phatfish wrote: post #359
yks wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With JD Vance things will go even worse

I thought Vance was the actual isolationist America first guy? Not Trump kind who's opinion changes based which authoritarian he last had a phone call with. In this specific case maybe Vance is least worst option.

Vance called Trump "America's Hitler", then ran as his VP.

He's a windsock.

Re: Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock

#609

Post by jmyeet »

randomNumber7 wrote: post #562
cowanon2222 wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes there isn't a good guy, just a bad guy and a worse guy.

Do you think the US is worse than Iran?

By any metric, yes, the US has killed more people and caused more harm than Iran by orders of magnitude.

Re: Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock

#610

Post by pas »

PowerElectronix wrote: post #607
manarth wrote: post #576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can understand a certain amount of switching in the basket - e.g. a washing machine or dishwasher was once a "luxury good" in a market such as USA, but is now (for the most part) an everyone-appliance. Interesting to consider the alternative case though, an "everyone basket item" becoming a "luxury good". Democracy, maybe? But I don't think they've put that in the CPI basket - yet! :-P

It's more like, refrigerators are now way more expensive, but because they are also more comlonly equipped with led fixtures and have more style (no joking here, they somehow are measuring style as a metric) then it's all good and they have actually just increased around 2% with respect yo the base model (that cost like a third in dollars back in 1995)

FYI everyone can check the model used for hedonic adjustment for fridges

style is important, because stylish things are more in demand (that's why they are considered stylish), and the abstract property of style by definition is a "value quality" that doesn't affect the temperature keeping properties, whereas things like are there drawers or shelves does (as cold air is kept better by drawers - but of course they are less convenient)

that said, the style here seems to be simply a catch-all term for the organization of the inside, and the access methods (eg. doors).

https://www.bls.gov/cpi/quality-adjustment/fridges.htm

... interestingly there's no parameter for noise or energy efficiency. (I was happy to pay a bit more for a really quiet one.)

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