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Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

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Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#81

So, 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…

I mean it's literally in TFA: "In late September Micron, an Idaho-based maker of memory chips, reported a 20% year-on-year fall in quarterly sales. A week later amd, a Californian chip designer, slashed its sales estimate for the third quarter by 16%. Within days Bloomberg reported that Intel plans to lay off thousands of staff, following a string of poor results" But most of the article is about how they're building…

Parent is talking about distributor stock and you are talking about sales.

If your comment was accurate it would seem like we should have had distributor stock coming online after the pandemic shortages as companies push to get their orders in the queue before capacity goes offline due to conflict.

I’m curious with parent — my guess is just that the humans behind the companies got used to the profits and not sitting on inventory, which was always risky.

Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But China doesn't actually have a lot of technological prowess on their own. The USG might be trying to slow them down but they're not concerned about China militarily. I worked for a defense contractor back in the early 2000s when the USG was selling a lot of arms and systems to Taiwan. I got to see the bullying in person via the ASOC (part of the C4ISR platform) system we were installing. China would routinely fly…

Chinese tech and power has come along way since your formative image of them took shape in the early 2000s

How? China doesn't possess the capability to build their own competitive chips. The chips they do manufacture do not require high precision. Everything I've read about China over the last few years has indicated it is, generally, unsustainable. From their disastrous fiscal policies of internal hyper-finance [0], their weakening navy [1], their aging population that's well on its way through decline [2] and the [3] continued climate issues that loom over China - it doesn't look all that great once you peel back the facade. China is in a big mess that started back then and continues to get worse under current leadership.

[0]https://www.csis.org/analysis/chinas-slow-motion-financial-c... [1] https://news.usni.org/2021/01/22/chinese-navy-faces-overseas... [2] https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3157385/c... [3] https://www.world-energy.org/article/20509.html

Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#83
post #69
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eben says to embrace the Pico and buy the rPi400 because it does not compete with orders from industrial customers (that spent bazillions on testing/certification of their rPi4/rPi3-derived products and therefore receive some priority above the poor huddled masses yearning to breath free air). If you aren't down with Pico yet, I recommend googling Limor Fried and searching her company's site. As far as Intel goes, th…

Lay off the shrooms for a bit.

Explain where you think he is wrong.

Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#84

Related: There is a massive TSMC factory being built in Japan right now. Take a look at the pictures, I've never seen this many cranes at one location: https://www.nhk.jp/static/assets/images/newblogposting/ts/7P... https://cdn-cw-english.cwg.tw/ckeditor/202205/ckeditor-628ae... It looks like a forest of cranes...

"The plant will produce 22-nanometer and 28-nanometer chips to address strong global demand for speciality chip technologies, they said" I'm curious why not the latest - 3nm, 5nm

To produce 3nm and 5nm, you need to order fabs from ASML who has an enormous backlog..

On the other hand, 22nm and 28nm are almost 10 year old technologies and they are still used in cars, so much so that the industry is begging car manufacturers to get to newer nodes [1].

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/19/chip_manufacturer_chi...

Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#85
post #78
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no spare capacity to build highest-end process fabs, and there is huge demand for capacity in 22/28nm too.

"spare capacity" ? what do you mean ? Taiwan and South Korea are enough to supply the world demand? Well, it is still hard to get your hands on top-notch chips at a reasonable price whatever the news is saying...

You need certain machines for EUV. There's only one manufacturer (ASML) for those, and they're at capacity. And even if they wanted to scale up, there's only one manufacturer (Zeiss) for the EUV mirrors required for those machines, and all their capacity for the next years is already bought as well.

Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#86
post #22

China already declared that it will use force in Taiwan if "possibilities for a peaceful reunification should be completely exhausted". From Chinese Anti-Secession Law: Article 8: In the event that the "Taiwan independence" secessionist forces should act under any name or by any means to cause the fact of Taiwan's secession from China, or that major incidents entailing Taiwan's secession from China should occur, or t…

China will invade Taiwan when the cost to do so is low enough and/or they are desperate. In other words, the probability of success is considerably higher today than it will be in the future (even if the probability of success today isn't great). Russia is a declining state relative to Ukraine & Europe, so Putin's odds of success in 2022 were considerably higher than they would be 10 years later. So if invading Ukrai…

Treating political and military leaders as rational entities is dangerous.

Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#87
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> can't be caught off guard by China as EU was caught off guard by Russia. There's always a bigger fish. The last time nations were obsessed with autarky, we got WW1, and soon after, WW2. Most countries (i.e. every country not suffering from a drastic case of the resource curse) have the nature that if they trade a lot with another country, either country would lose economic value if they invade the other, _even if_…

> The last time nations were obsessed with autarky, we got WW1 Were they? I thought WWI happened in the midst of first huge wave of globalization - to the point that no one thought war was possible, as it would mean collapse of international trade, and huge losses that come with it.

Many thought it was not only possible but inevitable: The Schlieffen plan, French revanchism, general military buildup across Europe, and of course Biskmark's 1888 comment:

"One day the great European War will come out of some damned foolish thing in the Balkans."

Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#88
post #13

Wondering if that means Raspberry Pi will be available again. Still no sign of stability in supply.

https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/production-and-supply-chain... That's from April, but in short there's a huge order backlog that they're still working through apparently, despite producing half a million units per month. With the lockdown gap in production and the Pi 4s getting increasingly integrated into various 3rd party products I suppose that's no surprise. It's quite apparent that there's little demand for the…

People are just not yet used to it. Eventually it will gain more popularity. PIOs are awesome.

Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Chips are tangible goods Many chips are not fungible , at least not for large-volume orders that incorporate stuff like customer specific mask ROMs or optimizations, and certainly for built-to-order stuff like Apple's SoCs. That means that let's say Apple can't just go and take a bunch of NVIDIA's chips and slap them into their products, and I'd even take a bet and say that manufacturers of NVIDIA cards can't easil…

Yes, that’s a good point. But it seems to me like that’s a matter of degree, right? Like, even stipulating that the chips themselves are not fungible across products and companies, they are fungible across time for the same or similar products. The price of your 2023 fridge, for example, could be lower because of excess supply of chips for 2022 models, no? And am I right in thinking that even if the chips themselves…

No. Chips don’t really expire, and suppliers often have to wean their customers off them by raising the prices regularly once they’re done acquiring design wins.

If the chips went on sale every year then companies would gamble on additional stock at discount, driving revenue down, and further disrupting the sales transitions into new IC designs.

Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#90
post #64
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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These people would rather be dead than under Russian rule. Why would 97% of them support continuing defense if not? And don't forget that when Russians still thought they're going to win, they brought in mobile crematoriums and started filtrating people and sending them off to Siberia if not torturing and murdering them. It was never a question of "no war and survive" VS "die in war" - but "no war, die anyways" VS "w…

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