TSMC's fabs get blown up and even after the cryptocurrency craze ends, we'll have a much more severe chip shortage than we do today. It would take several years for Samsung and Intel to build enough fab capacity to bring things back to normal, and a lot of chips would have to be redesigned to work at a different fab.
I agree. So given what just happened with supply chains due to the virus, do you think there is a realistic chance that other fabrication sites open up outside of Asia? Obviously not a solution to today’s issue but won’t companies want to diversify their sourcing for the future? And with the shortages of today isn’t it kind of the best time to do it?
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TSMC's fabs get blown up and even after the cryptocurrency craze ends, we'll have a much more severe chip shortage than we do today. It would take several years for Samsung and Intel to build enough fab capacity to bring things back to normal, and a lot of chips would have to be redesigned to work at a different fab.
I agree. So given what just happened with supply chains due to the virus, do you think there is a realistic chance that other fabrication sites open up outside of Asia? Obviously not a solution to today’s issue but won’t companies want to diversify their sourcing for the future? And with the shortages of today isn’t it kind of the best time to do it?
The problem is that it's hard to create a cutting-edge process node. Really hard. That's why Intel has had so much trouble with their 10 nm node. And why Samsung had so much trouble with 7 nm. And TSMC had so much trouble with 10 nm. And Global Foundries had so much trouble with 14 nm that they gave up and licensed Samsung's process instead. And both Samsung and TSMC had so much trouble with 20 nm.
It's why, in spite of the government of China throwing hundreds of billions of dollars at it over the course of decades, all of the foundries in China are still several years behind their foreign competitors. It doesn't just take money, but also takes employee expertise and experience, as well as some amount of luck for the choices you make years ahead of time to actually work.
For a given foundry to clone an existing process node at another fab site is a lot more doable. But by the time that other fab is ready, the process node is likely to be mostly obsolete in the sense that demand for it is diminishing. TSMC's 16 nm and 28 nm process nodes were good nodes and still work, but as a fraction of TSMC's revenue, they're less than half today of what they were at their peak. Gamers today don't want to buy a brand new GeForce GTX 680 (even with the GPU shortage!), so Nvidia stopped building them.
Both Samsung and TSMC are building fabs in the United States. I think TSMC's 5 nm fab in Arizona is due to open in 2024, though I might be off by a year. By the time it opens, the leading edge production will surely have moved on to a newer node. Apple was already selling parts built in that node last year.
While I don't know this for certain, I'd be shocked if the fabs that TSMC and Samsung are building in the US aren't heavily subsidized by the US government, as it wouldn't make financial sense to build them otherwise. The US government is very paranoid about their computer chips being tampered with, especially for military parts. (Actually, a lot of governments are paranoid about that, and for good reason.) IBM and AMD have both gotten rid of their fabs in recent years, and Intel might end up doing the same. And if China conquers Taiwan (or South Korea), the US government really, really doesn't want to rely on China to fabricate computer chips for future US military hardware.
For what it's worth, that's not a problem for NAND or DRAM, which are the other things that require insanely expensive fabs. Those are both made by Micron in the United States, and NAND is also made by Western Digital, albeit at a fab in Japan.
I doubt China would attempt to conquer Taiwan. Right now it's mostly posturing. Hong Kong was already China's with an agreement on when it would be absorbed into China. It's a different story with Taiwan. An invasion of Taiwan by the Communist Chinese Party would begin a war with the US. China and the US can't survive a war with each other right now without unrest usurping those in political power. I think the leadership in China is well aware of this.
TSMC's fabs get blown up and even after the cryptocurrency craze ends, we'll have a much more severe chip shortage than we do today. It would take several years for Samsung and Intel to build enough fab capacity to bring things back to normal, and a lot of chips would have to be redesigned to work at a different fab.
In a state of war I would imagine those plants would be one of the highest value targets just like a ball bearing factory. Take out the ball bearing factories and you can't manufacture anything like planes, tanks, drones etc. etc.
TSMC's fabs get blown up and even after the cryptocurrency craze ends, we'll have a much more severe chip shortage than we do today. It would take several years for Samsung and Intel to build enough fab capacity to bring things back to normal, and a lot of chips would have to be redesigned to work at a different fab.
In a state of war I would imagine those plants would be one of the highest value targets just like a ball bearing factory. Take out the ball bearing factories and you can't manufacture anything like planes, tanks, drones etc. etc.
Modern weapons are pretty useless without a chip.
You could argue that TSMC's fabs are the single most important strategic resource in the world. It's not just that they're the best at producing logic chips at the moment. They also have the highest volume, with about half of the worldwide revenue for it. UMC is also one of the largest foundries in the world for logic chips, and they're also in Taiwan, though they're no longer at the bleeding edge.
A ball bearing factory might have some short term value in a war. But a country can have a lot of ball bearing factories scattered all over the place, and it's not that hard to build more factories quickly if you need to.
With foundries, you can't build a new one that actually works without an enormous amount of expertise, no matter how much money you throw at it. Very few companies in the world have the expertise to do it, and it costs billions of dollars and several years to build a new one even if you have all of that expertise.
So no one wants to see China get a hold of TSMC intact. Well, except for China itself.
Of course, TSMC is hardly the only choke point in the production chain. If war were to break out in the Netherlands and ASML got blown up, then it wouldn't be possible for anyone in the world to buy new EUV lithography machines, and that would mean no new capacity on any of the new nodes that foundries want to move to (TSMC 5 nm, Samsung 5 nm, Intel 7 nm, etc.), anywhere in the world, until someone figured out how to replace what ASML built.
China does what its told. It has masters and they already own the foundries so they are no more going to destroy it than they would destroy their own critical assets in ww2. Unless it was an excuse to rebuild it somewhere else or some other strategic value.
China was built with purpose unless you can somehow figure out how all this was done in China in what 60 years? An impossible task without vast international support.
The Chinese didnt move the manufacturing base from the west to China..they received it.
TSMC's fabs get blown up and even after the cryptocurrency craze ends, we'll have a much more severe chip shortage than we do today. It would take several years for Samsung and Intel to build enough fab capacity to bring things back to normal, and a lot of chips would have to be redesigned to work at a different fab.
In a state of war I would imagine those plants would be one of the highest value targets just like a ball bearing factory. Take out the ball bearing factories and you can't manufacture anything like planes, tanks, drones etc. etc.
Modern weapons are pretty useless without a chip.
You could argue that TSMC's fabs are the single most important strategic resource in the world. It's not just that they're the best at producing logic chips at the moment. They also have the highest volume, with about half of the worldwide revenue for it. UMC is also one of the largest foundries in the world for logic chips, and they're also in Taiwan, though they're no longer at the bleeding edge.
A ball bearing factory might have some short term value in a war. But a country can have a lot of ball bearing factories scattered all over the place, and it's not that hard to build more factories quickly if you need to.
With foundries, you can't build a new one that actually works without an enormous amount of expertise, no matter how much money you throw at it. Very few companies in the world have the expertise to do it, and it costs billions of dollars and several years to build a new one even if you have all of that expertise.
So no one wants to see China get a hold of TSMC intact. Well, except for China itself.
Of course, TSMC is hardly the only choke point in the production chain. If war were to break out in the Netherlands and ASML got blown up, then it wouldn't be possible for anyone in the world to buy new EUV lithography machines, and that would mean no new capacity on any of the new nodes that foundries want to move to (TSMC 5 nm, Samsung 5 nm, Intel 7 nm, etc.), anywhere in the world, until someone figured out how to replace what ASML built.
Same thing to mass produce a ball bearing, it also requires a foundry. It takes about 2 days of processing (lapping) to manufacture a single ball, . It takes years to put a plant together. It may not be cutting edge anymore but it is no simple task. One of the most interesting movies I ever saw was "Balls of Fire" a 1970's movie of a ball bearing plant back in my trade school days. It was one of the only movies in trade school that wasn't made in the 1940's
Without chips your fighting a war like they did in the first 70 years of the 20th century. Without mass produced ball bearings your back into the 19th century.
Interestingly I have a couple machines with motors that spin a 10kg turbine to over 80,000 rpm. Instead of using ceramic bearings as they did in the recent past (metal bearings cant take it) they now use a zero contact magnetic field instead of bearings. I also have a machine where its x,y and z axis float on a magnetic field. From a dead stop it can accelerate to 3800 inches per minute, decelerate and stop dead and be within 0.0015" accuracy, and all within a couple feet. The average hair on your head measures around 0.004"
I was just hoping to get a 1650 or 1660 pro, or AMD equivalent, or whatever they are called. I'll be fine moving up to just 1440 for the next few years.
and just a fyi, Turkey is declaring war on cryptocurrencies so well see if the dominoes fall the summer. You might get your cards afterall.
So how does such a war work? They can't tell when people are mining them.
They just banned their use in purchase of goods and services.
Countries don't need to be able to track or ban miners. It's much simpler to ban exchange of the currency, at which point only criminals would use it. Though Turkey's ban doesn't extend that far, they still allow you to use cryptocurrency as investment, as long as you don't use it as an actual currency to buy or sell stuff.
and just a fyi, Turkey is declaring war on cryptocurrencies so well see if the dominoes fall the summer. You might get your cards afterall.
So how does such a war work? They can't tell when people are mining them.
They may not be able to tell if you've got just one GPU mining, but your electric utility can very much tell when you've got power consumption in the tens of kilowatts all day and all night.
and just a fyi, Turkey is declaring war on cryptocurrencies so well see if the dominoes fall the summer. You might get your cards afterall.
So how does such a war work? They can't tell when people are mining them.
They ban or regulate it and then get other governments to do the same. Dominoes. The insider gangsters have their money by then and your left holding the bag.
In this case I imagine this whole crypto thing will blow up after some "cyberpandemic" and the synthesis will be a world/government backed digital currency.
This thread on HN discusses the more widespread and pervasive issue of chip shortages. It isn't just cutting edge nodes that are affected and it isn't just blockchain miners causing the issue. They are a huge factor, but not the only one.
The comments in the thread with anecdotes from people in various industries highlights the problems in hardware production right now. There aren't any quick solutions to the issue, but the heavy reliance on TSMC is a key point in my opinion.
The car industry is hit extra hard because at the start of pandemic car sales tanked and they immediately decreased their chip orders to match. When the electronic shortage started to hit all that freed capacity was sold to others, and a bit later the car manufacturers were caught in a situation where car sales rebounded but they couldn't rebuy their usual chip capacity because the suppliers had moved on to work for others.
Then some time ago a fire hit Renesas' factory that was making a lot of chips especially for cars. It was a catastrophe for car manufacturers who were already struggling to buy enough chips. Now just about all car makers have to decrease their production because they can't get enough chips.
We have essentially hit a perfect storm of unfavorable conditions across multiple industries and applications driven hard by the crypto mining bubble. There doesn't seem to be a reliable end in sight for well over a year outside of external forces taking action.
What do you see changing this? Governments cracking down on power consumption and the introduction of taxes could pop the crypto bubble down to normalcy, but I'm not sure that alone will alleviate the issue.
I think certain governments are actually driving the Crypto bubble.
All time classic MY NEW FAVORITE POST! (Keep laying those bricks)
"I should point out that no other company has shipped out a beta on a disc before this." - Official Mortal Online Lead Community Moderator
Proudly wearing the Harbinger badge since Dec 23, 2017.
Coined the phrase "Role-Playing a Development Team" January 2018
"Oddly Slap is the main reason I stay in these forums." - Mystichaze April 9th 2018
NVidia just released their financial results. As part of that their CEO commented the GPU shortage: “I would expect that we will see a supply constrained environment for the vast majority of next year is my guess at the moment"
The GPU shortage has been easing up a bit lately. For example 3Dcenter.org's latest report was that in Germany NVidia's GPUs were available at 144% of their MSRP, where at their worst the price has been 304% of MSRP. But unfortunately it looks like the shortage is not going to end.
I did manage to get a 3080 and 3060Ti recently via EVGA queues for mine and my wife’s computers. But I also signed up on release day within a couple hours and it still took months.
Just saw a story where China returned 485,000 Radeon video cards they'd seized to the mining operation that was using them................ While these were older cards, the scale of use boggles....
If you are holding out for the perfect game, the only game you play will be the waiting one.
It'll be one year since RTX 3080 and 3090 launched next week, and Proshop still has about 300 unfulfilled launch day orders.
It's just some individual models that haven't been delivered, while most launch day orders were already delivered ages ago. But it must really suck for the unfortunate people who tried to get their GPU early by ordering it immediately as it went for sale and are still stuck waiting.
I have had an RTX 3090 for while, but I paid the Ebay markup of a couple hundred at the time. I can actually probably sell it for more than I bought it for. It's not a mind boggling experience above a Vega Frontier Edition. So I wouldn't feel left out.
So long as miners are buying everything that isn't that far above MSRP, increasing production of GPUs won't end the shortage. What will end it is if miners stop buying everything, or even start selling the GPUs that they've already bought.
Comments
All time classic MY NEW FAVORITE POST! (Keep laying those bricks)
"I should point out that no other company has shipped out a beta on a disc before this." - Official Mortal Online Lead Community Moderator
Proudly wearing the Harbinger badge since Dec 23, 2017.
Coined the phrase "Role-Playing a Development Team" January 2018
"Oddly Slap is the main reason I stay in these forums." - Mystichaze April 9th 2018
It's why, in spite of the government of China throwing hundreds of billions of dollars at it over the course of decades, all of the foundries in China are still several years behind their foreign competitors. It doesn't just take money, but also takes employee expertise and experience, as well as some amount of luck for the choices you make years ahead of time to actually work.
For a given foundry to clone an existing process node at another fab site is a lot more doable. But by the time that other fab is ready, the process node is likely to be mostly obsolete in the sense that demand for it is diminishing. TSMC's 16 nm and 28 nm process nodes were good nodes and still work, but as a fraction of TSMC's revenue, they're less than half today of what they were at their peak. Gamers today don't want to buy a brand new GeForce GTX 680 (even with the GPU shortage!), so Nvidia stopped building them.
Both Samsung and TSMC are building fabs in the United States. I think TSMC's 5 nm fab in Arizona is due to open in 2024, though I might be off by a year. By the time it opens, the leading edge production will surely have moved on to a newer node. Apple was already selling parts built in that node last year.
While I don't know this for certain, I'd be shocked if the fabs that TSMC and Samsung are building in the US aren't heavily subsidized by the US government, as it wouldn't make financial sense to build them otherwise. The US government is very paranoid about their computer chips being tampered with, especially for military parts. (Actually, a lot of governments are paranoid about that, and for good reason.) IBM and AMD have both gotten rid of their fabs in recent years, and Intel might end up doing the same. And if China conquers Taiwan (or South Korea), the US government really, really doesn't want to rely on China to fabricate computer chips for future US military hardware.
For what it's worth, that's not a problem for NAND or DRAM, which are the other things that require insanely expensive fabs. Those are both made by Micron in the United States, and NAND is also made by Western Digital, albeit at a fab in Japan.
China and the US can't survive a war with each other right now without unrest usurping those in political power. I think the leadership in China is well aware of this.
Modern weapons are pretty useless without a chip.
"Be water my friend" - Bruce Lee
A ball bearing factory might have some short term value in a war. But a country can have a lot of ball bearing factories scattered all over the place, and it's not that hard to build more factories quickly if you need to.
With foundries, you can't build a new one that actually works without an enormous amount of expertise, no matter how much money you throw at it. Very few companies in the world have the expertise to do it, and it costs billions of dollars and several years to build a new one even if you have all of that expertise.
So no one wants to see China get a hold of TSMC intact. Well, except for China itself.
Of course, TSMC is hardly the only choke point in the production chain. If war were to break out in the Netherlands and ASML got blown up, then it wouldn't be possible for anyone in the world to buy new EUV lithography machines, and that would mean no new capacity on any of the new nodes that foundries want to move to (TSMC 5 nm, Samsung 5 nm, Intel 7 nm, etc.), anywhere in the world, until someone figured out how to replace what ASML built.
China was built with purpose unless you can somehow figure out how all this was done in China in what 60 years? An impossible task without vast international support.
The Chinese didnt move the manufacturing base from the west to China..they received it.
business theatre
Without chips your fighting a war like they did in the first 70 years of the 20th century. Without mass produced ball bearings your back into the 19th century.
Interestingly I have a couple machines with motors that spin a 10kg turbine to over 80,000 rpm. Instead of using ceramic bearings as they did in the recent past (metal bearings cant take it) they now use a zero contact magnetic field instead of bearings. I also have a machine where its x,y and z axis float on a magnetic field. From a dead stop it can accelerate to 3800 inches per minute, decelerate and stop dead and be within 0.0015" accuracy, and all within a couple feet. The average hair on your head measures around 0.004"
"Be water my friend" - Bruce Lee
Countries don't need to be able to track or ban miners. It's much simpler to ban exchange of the currency, at which point only criminals would use it. Though Turkey's ban doesn't extend that far, they still allow you to use cryptocurrency as investment, as long as you don't use it as an actual currency to buy or sell stuff.
In this case I imagine this whole crypto thing will blow up after some "cyberpandemic" and the synthesis will be a world/government backed digital currency.
Then some time ago a fire hit Renesas' factory that was making a lot of chips especially for cars. It was a catastrophe for car manufacturers who were already struggling to buy enough chips. Now just about all car makers have to decrease their production because they can't get enough chips.
All time classic MY NEW FAVORITE POST! (Keep laying those bricks)
"I should point out that no other company has shipped out a beta on a disc before this." - Official Mortal Online Lead Community Moderator
Proudly wearing the Harbinger badge since Dec 23, 2017.
Coined the phrase "Role-Playing a Development Team" January 2018
"Oddly Slap is the main reason I stay in these forums." - Mystichaze April 9th 2018
“I would expect that we will see a supply constrained environment for the vast majority of next year is my guess at the moment"
The GPU shortage has been easing up a bit lately. For example 3Dcenter.org's latest report was that in Germany NVidia's GPUs were available at 144% of their MSRP, where at their worst the price has been 304% of MSRP. But unfortunately it looks like the shortage is not going to end.
Brenics ~ Just to point out I do believe Chris Roberts is going down as the man who cheated backers and took down crowdfunding for gaming.
If you are holding out for the perfect game, the only game you play will be the waiting one.
It's just some individual models that haven't been delivered, while most launch day orders were already delivered ages ago. But it must really suck for the unfortunate people who tried to get their GPU early by ordering it immediately as it went for sale and are still stuck waiting.
https://www.theregister.com/2022/01/06/gpu_shortages_relief/