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TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge

asia.nikkei.com

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Re: TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would you put them in? Everyone wants the latest and greatest Playstation or Xbox with the fastest chips.

If latest chips were unavailable (war, civilisation collapse), we'd do just fine with existing chips for decades or maybe even centuries. With clever software, you can eek much more real world use out of hardware. For example, your PS3 is probably sitting with its CPU idle right now, when it could be doing useful computations for someone else who needs more computing power.

> existing chips for decades or maybe even centuries.

Chips experience solid-state diffusion, so I'd expect the expected survival probability of chips (ignoring any infant mortality effects) to go something like feature_size / sqrt( time ). If this is true, then I'd guess modern process nodes would have very low survival rates out at 100 years. Though, it's been over 20 years since I had any solid state chemistry, and most of my experience with diffusion modeling is in financial models, so take my wild guess with a grain of salt.

Re: TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge

#72
post #62
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe we should start pulling chips of trashed electronics. There must be hundreds of thousands decently fast chips going into our trash. This is already been happening for decades on industrial scale in countries doing eWaste recycling. Just a decade ago, you could've still find people selling refurbished chips in Shenzhen on every corner. Now it kinds of became a much more low profile enterprise. The US defence d…

My first reaction to this plan is that it’s for the birds. The government would be better off just building a fab themselves. The raw materials aren’t that hard to get hold of; integrating consumer electronics into military systems would likely take just as long, if not longer (with all sorts of other negative effects on quality and security). I guess the analogy is with scrap metal drives in WWII, but this situation…

They are building a fab, or at least they're having TSMC build a fab in Arizona.

Re: TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge

#73
post #47

1. TSMC were spending ~$30B per year on capital expenditure already. 2. Since leading edge node is forever increasing in cost, the next 3 years, i.e 3nm in 2022 and 2nm in 2024 are expected to be higher. ~$100B investment aligned with their initial plan / trend / target anyway. 3. So really the major news is stopping ( or to be precise, delaying ) price reduction. Which is unusual but understandable given the current…

Every single fabless semiconductor designer failed to predict demand because their customers lied to them. The car industry pulled a really dick move last year, and then pulled an even more dick move in the opposite direction, and now everyone is screwed. Back in early 2020 the car manufacturers decided that demand for cars would go down, and because they have a religious aversion to keeping any stock, cancelled lots of orders with their vendors, screwing said vendors over. Their vendors could not afford their fab slots because automotive is such a big part of their revenue, so they cancelled their fab slots. Those slots were happily sold on to entertainment and computing customers, who anticipated a jump in demand due to people staying home more. So far so normal.

However, the car industry got it badly wrong - people, afraid of public transit, started buying more cars rather than less. The car industry, being screwed due to their just-in-time religion of zero stock, was faced with their production lines stopping so they called up all their vendors, and asked for those orders back, and some more on top. The vendors then tried to get their fab slots back, and were told to come back next year. Some of them ended up buying other fabless IC designers out of their slots, causing the problem to spread. Others cancelled their existing orders to other customers, and auctioned off their existing inventory to increasingly desperate car manufacturers at a 6x to 8x premium. Anyone who was not prepared to pay that or didn't act fast enough was screwed. From that point on, a bunch of companies that depend on those lines of microcontrollers had to rapidly redesign their product to use another device, taking even more devices off the market with unplanned demand. The users of those devices then had to move to others, causing even more availability cascades. This is how two nasty moves by the car industry caused global market disruption in a number of industries that depend on electronics. This is not a normal "demand has increased, and industry can't keep up" event, it's elephants dancing and trampling everyone else underneath.

This is further aggravated by the top three automotive semiconductor suppliers (NXP, Renesas, Infineon) having their facilities destroyed in two unrelated disastrous events - a fire at Renesas' wafer processing plant, and Texas freezing over, destroying NXP's and Infineon's fabs through cleanroom contamination and process interruption. Those events took out months' worth of production, and destroyed product that had already been sold before manufacture. This would have been recoverable in a normal market, because distributor stock could hold a couple months, but in this case it was game over for non-automotive customers as all distributor stock was already gone by then.

I see this in my work every day now - customers coming to me for help with redesigning products to use a different microcontroller, or help with sourcing parts from unusual sources because their normal channels are gone. I've been in this industry a long time and never seen anything like this before. This is not a failure of supply chain analysis and projection on the part of the fabless semicon vendors. This is their biggest customers fucking their vendors over not once but twice by lying to them about their own demand.

Re: TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge

#74
post #73
post #47

1. TSMC were spending ~$30B per year on capital expenditure already. 2. Since leading edge node is forever increasing in cost, the next 3 years, i.e 3nm in 2022 and 2nm in 2024 are expected to be higher. ~$100B investment aligned with their initial plan / trend / target anyway. 3. So really the major news is stopping ( or to be precise, delaying ) price reduction. Which is unusual but understandable given the current…

Every single fabless semiconductor designer failed to predict demand because their customers lied to them. The car industry pulled a really dick move last year, and then pulled an even more dick move in the opposite direction, and now everyone is screwed. Back in early 2020 the car manufacturers decided that demand for cars would go down, and because they have a religious aversion to keeping any stock, cancelled lots…

if you wrote a book about it, i'd buy it.

Re: TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge

#75
post #62
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe we should start pulling chips of trashed electronics. There must be hundreds of thousands decently fast chips going into our trash. This is already been happening for decades on industrial scale in countries doing eWaste recycling. Just a decade ago, you could've still find people selling refurbished chips in Shenzhen on every corner. Now it kinds of became a much more low profile enterprise. The US defence d…

My first reaction to this plan is that it’s for the birds. The government would be better off just building a fab themselves. The raw materials aren’t that hard to get hold of; integrating consumer electronics into military systems would likely take just as long, if not longer (with all sorts of other negative effects on quality and security). I guess the analogy is with scrap metal drives in WWII, but this situation…

The only chance the USA has in a hot war for Taiwan is using nukes to which the PRC would respond in kind. That would be even worse for semiconductor availability than reunification. So let’s cool it with the macho idiocy and instead focus on diversifying the semiconductor supply chain to areas that aren’t inevitably going to fall back under Chinese control.

Re: TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge

#76
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can kinda see the value of getting a million PS3 cpus for in your new drone swarm or industry controllers. But how is gathering generic decades old hardware going to help? For Computation as a service its not that valuable or easy to install. And for reuse in 'new' devices it's even more questionable. All this stuff barely just works in this specific configuration.

I'm only doing a few things on machine with around 32GHz worth of processing power (# of processors * GHz) that I couldn't do on my 80486 running 33MHz with a few MB of RAM. Emacs starts up a little bit faster. Pages in Chrome are more interactive than in Lynx, Mosaic, or Netscape. My word processor fits more text. On the whole, that 1000x increase in performance mostly bought the ability to have most of the code tha…

> Youtube isn't sticking around

As an end user it would be manageable but dont forget that the whole world runs on servers and many Industries would collapse if computing power is gone

Re: TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge

#77
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doom doom money doom doom. Nonsense. Top 10 companies https://fxssi.com/top-10-most-valuable-companies-in-the-worl... Most of these are providing goods and services that 100s millions of people are getting value from, with the possible exception of Facebook :p As an aside I must admit I had never heard of Delta Electronics before at all; nearly 50 years old and 5th most valuable company. Out of the top 10 you do get…

Those companies, maybe with the exception of Facebook and Microsoft, are literally only possible because of paper money. Take out the paper they hold from their balance sheets and their size goes down in half. Take away their ability to own their markets by issuing debt bonds, which would mean competing with the revenue generated by their own products, and you kill them. Apple became the biggest company in the world…

Also note that as far as hardware production is concerned, Tesla is the only company on that list that actually manufacturers anything at scale in the US anymore.

Re: TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To build chips similar to what TSMC produces (i.e. some of the most cutting-edge fab tech in the world)? Hundreds of billions of dollars. Decades of experience. Growing silicon crystals and turning them into transistors barely bigger than a few dozen atoms is immensely difficult. And then turning that into a process you can repeat with precision and churn out at high yield is another enormous hurdle.

Serious question as someone totally naive on this. A few hundred billion dollars seems like an extremely good deal to lead this area of technology - why don't we see funding for this at a government level? I mean, we now have a 2 trillion dollar infrastructure plan. Is there an impediment I'm not aware of? Or maybe it's not as good of a deal as I think?

The US dominant ideology is private enterprise, not government enterprise. This is why the US does not even own its high-tech weapon manufacturers, preferring to have Boeing, Raytheon and Lockheed-Martin at one remove. Of course, they wouldn't exist without government money, but they're private companies with private shareholders.

So when you're talking a few hundred billion dollars for a US-first technological capability, the important question is who will get the money and how will they be held accountable for delivery? What, even, are they expected to deliver - no use if the plant is more expensive than TSMC so everyone chooses them anyway.

The history of these initiatives is not great: https://www.wyomingpublicmedia.org/post/foxconn-promised-130... (Republican)

https://fortune.com/2015/08/27/remember-solyndra-mistake/ (Democrat)

Re: TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge

#79
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern semiconductors were invented in America, literally why we call it Silicon Valley. We used to have the best fabs in the world but 80's and 90's corporate American business culture decided it was better to shut down all that manufacturing and move it overseas for more short-term profit. They're now coming to the hard realization that maybe that was a massive mistake.

The story is not anywhere near that straightforward for semiconduction fabrication. A huge portion of that fabrication, for example, just moved out of california to other places in the US. Also there's been a general consolodation of fabrication plants over time as more and more advanced nodes put the price of a plant up by orders of magnitudes. There just isn't enough money for the same number of fabs at the bleedin…

> There just isn't enough money for the same number of fabs at the bleeding edge.

There definitely is but it will come at the cost of share buy backs and keeping share price up which affects compensation of management. Failure to keep the share price up by investing in manufacturing in US will also invite predatory share holders to topple the management. The cult of "free" markets driving wealth growth at the top of the society seems to have trumped strategic common sense.

Re: TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge

#80
post #73
post #47

1. TSMC were spending ~$30B per year on capital expenditure already. 2. Since leading edge node is forever increasing in cost, the next 3 years, i.e 3nm in 2022 and 2nm in 2024 are expected to be higher. ~$100B investment aligned with their initial plan / trend / target anyway. 3. So really the major news is stopping ( or to be precise, delaying ) price reduction. Which is unusual but understandable given the current…

Every single fabless semiconductor designer failed to predict demand because their customers lied to them. The car industry pulled a really dick move last year, and then pulled an even more dick move in the opposite direction, and now everyone is screwed. Back in early 2020 the car manufacturers decided that demand for cars would go down, and because they have a religious aversion to keeping any stock, cancelled lots…

Just in time delivery has its downfalls when vendors have issues, but this is a known trade-off to that model. If a company keeps inventory on hand, then they have the worry of owning excess parts that they can never use and is a sink cost later. So these companies can lose money with either, it just depends on the circumstances that cause it.

I'd be interested to learn more about the order cancellation you were saying that fabs were doing to non car manufacturers. Shouldn't contracts prevent that sort of behavior (without proper compensation)? And if they did that, they are burning bridges that would make people less likely to do business with them in the future. Maybe the car chip business is enough money to warrant such moves, but seems potentially sort sighted depending on exactly all what you said happened.

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