71–80 of 101 posts
Not that I would want this of course, but I'd also want free bubble gum and the gum companies... they're there to make money. Why not chip makers? I don't see auctioning systems popping up, I see people in in queues for a GPU, "out of stock" pages, and purchase quantity limits being imposed.
Really interesting: > With the exception of the current RTX 3000 (Samsung), all market launches of the year 2020 rely on the 7-nm chips from TSMC. ARM-SoC manufacturers such as Qualcomm also use 7 nm and have only recently moved capacity from Samsung to TSMC. TSMC is currently pretty much alone in the market with this technology and the production lines are therefore working at full capacity. A sudden increase in pro…
This isn't quite accurate; ABF is used to make the chip package for high-thermal transfer, high-speed flip chip packages:
https://www.ajinomoto.com/innovation/action/buildupfilm
It doesn't seem to have a role in any specific manufacturing node; it's just essential to the best way of packaging high-end chips.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Scalpers aren't powerful enough to create an artificial scarcity. Of course they are. Back in ye olde days when GPU mining for bitcoin was still possible (basically, FPGAs were not widespread and ASICs not even on the horizon), the amount of people who bought out all usable GPUs and resold them on ebay was massive . It was almost impossible to get anything for months unless you were willing to pay many multiples th…
> In concert and other event tickets it's even worse. Some tickets have been known to sell at 20x markups, Rammstein concerts or Wacken tickets are usually outsold in a matter of hours and end up on ebay the day after. That's because there's built-in scarcity by virtue of physical limitations of a venue. If your stadium only holds 15,000 people, but your city has 11 million or more like, say, the Dallas-Fort Worth me…
At the risk of asking a stupid question: why have queues instead of raising prices until demand gets nearer to the level of supply? Not that I would want this of course, but I'd also want free bubble gum and the gum companies... they're there to make money. Why not chip makers? I don't see auctioning systems popping up, I see people in in queues for a GPU, "out of stock" pages, and purchase quantity limits being impo…
They could change out of that cycle now that it's actually scarce... but most of these chip manufacturers are too big to be flexible like that.
At the risk of asking a stupid question: why have queues instead of raising prices until demand gets nearer to the level of supply? Not that I would want this of course, but I'd also want free bubble gum and the gum companies... they're there to make money. Why not chip makers? I don't see auctioning systems popping up, I see people in in queues for a GPU, "out of stock" pages, and purchase quantity limits being impo…
It's the manufactured scarcity which helps them make money most of the time. They have to create hype and desire and exclusivity... and repeat it indefinitely. They could change out of that cycle now that it's actually scarce... but most of these chip manufacturers are too big to be flexible like that.
That would be the same also with absurd prices right? (See brand clothing, brand phones, brand mice, etc.) It's not as if production increases when prices increase.
I did find this piece:
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/covid-19-causes-maj...
> Incidentally, the price per kilo for air transport has doubled worldwide and Europe is increasingly resorting to the new Silk Road, which China has pushed very hard: conventional road and rail transport, the prices of which have even tripled in the meantime! Especially bulky peripherals, such as PC screens, are also suffering greatly: according to a well-known brand, prices rose by 15 or 25% in France, for example.…
I mean, if you believe the FED then you have to just dismiss this as inflation. But I think it's a lot more complicated. 1. Basket of goods doesn't include investment goods. Economists have some fancy schmancy reason for it (basically you get your money back when you sell), but I don't buy it. increasing monetary mass dilutes the purchasing power of the dollar. No one would argue that inflation doesn't increases the…
The reason the basket of goods is focussed on consumer goods is because the price level of concern (where it is used, there are many other price indexes used for other purposes) is the cost of living, not cost of investing. Hence, the Consumer Price Index, the main inflation index monetary policy is concerned with. (There are also broad and industry-specific Producer Price Indexes, which are used for other purposes.)
The cost of investing wouldn't be measured by asset prices, but interest rates (inverted: low interest rates are a high cost of buying future money directly, which also drives up the cost of speculative instruments which may be redeemable for money in the future.) And, yes, the cost of investing is deliberately high currently, there is no secret or conspiracy about that. It's the overt policy.
> Price of housing (not included in the cpi)
Cost of housing is included in the CPI (both actual and imputed rent are part of the calculation.) It's a major component of the overall CPI. [0]
[0] https://arbor.com/blog/how-does-rent-factor-into-the-consume....
Well maybe stop making them obsolete? Just make software that can either last longer, or can run on slower hardware. I have been complaining about wirth s law for years now, and the environment requires the industry to adapt. You cannot add features and features and get each user a new chip every 2 year.
I would argue most of the "IP" is really just forced API incompatibilities so that most software only works on their devices and anything that isn't is irrelevant to reverse engineering but it doesn't matter, there's surprisingly little money to be made manufacturing things that work well and shocking amount to be made shoving things that barely work down everyone's throats.
It's a real problem. There's a worldwide shortage of high-end fab capacity. That's not an easy business to enter. TSMC is spending US$20 billion on their newest fab. They started in 2018, and they expect to get parts out in volume in 2021 or 2022. If you want to duplicate TSMC, you'd need a huge amount of money. TSMC is valued at around US$500 billion. Anyone not already a major fab operator would probably fail. They…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I built a new machine back in August and the PSU was the hardest part. I tend to only buy Seasonic power supplies, but there just weren't any in stock anywhere. I ended up finding an Asus power supply on B&H and it served me well, but I really hate deviating from my approved vendor list. (So far it has treated me well. It's a 1200W unit and I can pull 1000W from it without any problems at all. The same cannot be said…
Yeah, I'm now happy to have switched my decade-old 400W Corsair to a (perhaps oversized) 750W one just before Covid hit. It didn't solve my RAM issues (memtest just hangs with 2×8 Go, and the PC randomly reboots with 4x8 Go), and so overclocking is still out, but at least I don't have to worry about my PSU anymore...
I haven't heard of a lot of problems with power supplies causing bad memory; usually the memory itself is just bad. RMA that stuff and re-roll.