[HN Gopher] The chip shortage keeps getting worse - why can't we...
___________________________________________________________________
The chip shortage keeps getting worse - why can't we just make
more?
Author : hhs
Score : 195 points
Date : 2021-09-03 05:42 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bloomberg.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bloomberg.com)
| SimeVidas wrote:
| Chip manufacturers: Everything is a mess, all we can make are
| these decade-old, super outdated chips.
|
| Nintendo: Perfect, give me all of them.
| drdd wrote:
| no surprise if apple chips advance and take over US market by
| 2024
| skohan wrote:
| they would need fabs to do anything about the shortage
| tus89 wrote:
| We are making more. Lots more. But we are buying even more than
| that.
|
| Its called demand > supply.
| amelius wrote:
| That's too simple. E.g. why aren't the prices increasing such
| that the buying stops?
| forty wrote:
| Maybe the buyers don't have suddenly more money to spend.
| pcurve wrote:
| Key takeaway
|
| "factories are more advanced and cost over $20 billion each."
|
| "Once you spend all that money building giant facilities, they
| become obsolete in five years or less. To avoid losing money,
| chipmakers must generate $3 billion in profit from each plan"
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| This winter will be interesting when furnaces break and there is
| no way to repair them.
| mindvirus wrote:
| This is an interesting article, but it doesn't answer why we have
| this shortage. Presumably without COVID, companies projected what
| demand would be for years out and could plan manufacturing
| capacities.
|
| What about COVID caused the shortage? Is it shipping speeds?
| Change in demand? Less efficiency down the supply chain due to
| health requirements? Trade changes?
| Bud wrote:
| You expected an actual useful explanation of a complex tech
| issue from Bloomberg?
|
| The next time Bloomberg manages that will be the first time.
|
| Completely, utterly useless for tech reporting of any kind.
| [deleted]
| varjag wrote:
| It wasn't COVID that caused the shortages, although it did
| exacerbate them. We've experienced first disruptions during
| previous administration trade wars with China around 2016-17.
| They never really went away since.
| hristov wrote:
| There is one important factor that nobody in the popular press
| is mentioning. Few analysts in the financial industry are
| starting to point it out.
|
| And that is that semiconductor manufacturing has been
| chronically and almost criminally underinvested. The
| coronavirus pandemic was just a triggering event that brought
| the whole house of cards down.
|
| The thinking in the financial world for the past 10-20 years
| has been that software is the hot, growing license to print
| money industry and actually manufacturing chips is a dirty,
| competitive, low margin, low return on capital industry best
| left to the Asians. And of the actual chip manufacturers the
| ones to be most favored were the ones making digital chips and
| the ones making analog and power semiconductors were the
| dirtiest most disliked commodity like companies.
|
| Even within the semiconductor world, the financial world heaped
| money on fabless semiconductor companies like stock market
| darling Nvidia and did not give much respect to the companies
| that owned the fabs and made the chips. And even less respect
| was paid to the ones that made power and analog chips.
|
| Guess where the biggest shortage is now. In power and analog.
| Also, in packaging, another field that was considered unsexy,
| low margin and too competitive to bother with.
|
| Everybody talked about how software is eating the world and
| heaped massive amounts of capital on software companies but
| they kind of neglected the important role of semiconductors.
| And even when they talked about semiconductors they talked
| about the "important" ones, the "brains" of the computer, the
| cpus and the graphics chips.
|
| So while software companies (especially SAAS ones) would have
| license to lose large amounts of money and still have receive
| endless streams of capital, companies that manufacture chips
| would be judged severely by the market on profitability and
| free cash flow. This is especially true for analog and power
| semi manufacturers.
|
| Free cash flow is a very dangerous metric for a growing
| industry. Capital spending gets subtracted from cash flow to
| arrive at free cash flow, which means that if a CEO is judged
| by free cash flow, he will try to minimize capital spending.
| That of course will hurt future growth.
|
| I have been investing in analog and power semiconductor
| companies for many years now, and the CEOs of all these
| companies knew that a jump in demand was coming. But they all
| wanted to keep their jobs so they all talked about how they
| will grow their revenues by minimizing capital outflows etc. If
| they were cheered by the market for having cash outflows of the
| type many SAAS darlings have, we would be swimming in
| semiconductors right now.
|
| For example, if some one wants to do some further reading,
| check out old investor presentations of Texas Instruments. By
| old I mean a couple of years ago, before coronavirus. Probably
| the largest power and analog semiconductor manufacturer in the
| world. Their entire sales pitch to investors was about free
| cash flow and capital return to shareholders. That is great for
| many types of shareholders, but this is not something a high
| growth company should be doing. Needless to say now they are
| swamped by demand and do not have production capacity anywhere
| near to what demand is.
|
| There is another peculiar quality of semiconductors. They are
| easy to store and they do not go bad after taking some minimal
| precautions in storage. This means that any rumor of a shortage
| and price increases causes everybody that uses semis to go out
| and buy out everything the suppliers will let them buy.
|
| So there is a very unstable situation. A- there is a shortage
| and B - even the possibility of a shortage causes hoarding
| behavior that makes the shortage worse.
|
| That already unstable situation existed before coronavirus. And
| then coronavirus came. And it triggered a heightened demand for
| semiconductors. And that triggered a snowball effect of
| hoarding and higher prices, more hoarding, etc.
|
| The solution is that prices should go up (already happening).
| Stock prices of semiconductor manufactures should go up. And
| here I mean actual manufacturers, not fabless chip designers.
| This should happen especially for analog and power
| semiconductors where the biggest demand and the biggest
| underinvestment lies. This has not happened as much as it needs
| to. Higher stock prices should cause more money to go to the
| fab business and that should eventually result in the necessary
| growth in semiconductor manufacturing.
|
| All of this will take time. And meanwhile there will be a lot
| of hoarding. There may also be occasional panics where the
| hoarders dump a lot of hoarded inventory thinking prices are
| going down, cause prices to go down and later discover that
| prices are shooting back up again after their inventory gets
| used up.
|
| But in the end hopefully we should end up in a world where (1)
| there is much more investment in semiconductors and (2) we
| eventually get all the benefits of the wealthy, high
| production, environmentally sustainable, all electric future we
| have been dreaming of.
| sytelus wrote:
| The problem is that stock prices are not going up. TSMC
| actually tanked (I lost money) mainly because various
| governments pledging for domestic production which is
| probably still 5 years down the line. This only further
| aggregates the shortage.
| ineedasername wrote:
| _By old I mean a couple of years ago, before coronavirus_
|
| So much from before seems old and foreign. Definitely one of
| those events that marks a definitive before & after... and
| _during_ , since we still don't quite know how or when things
| will settles out to a new normal.
| wonnage wrote:
| The trade war didn't help, China started buying massive
| stockpiles of chips before the restrictions kicked in:
| https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-war/article/3120304/us-china-...
|
| It's a little dumb that basically all advanced chip
| manufacturing in the world happens within a thousand mile
| radius of Beijing and we're over here an ocean over wondering
| where our supply went. More energy needs to be focused on made-
| in-USA and less on the thing we have no control over
| digikata wrote:
| The article is long on speculation, but really doesn't have
| even basic data such as inventory or shipped component levels
| to do the the most basic verification of the theories.
|
| Are we shipping more chips than even, only demand is allocating
| unevenly?
|
| Are covid + multiple factory incidents at fault?
|
| Even the cost the stay at the cutting edge facts seem a little
| suspect for at least some chip markets. e.g. embedded chips
| such as for automotive use are generally are multiple
| generations behind fab technology - and really don't need to
| stay on a cutting edge fab to keep profitably producing for
| many industrial embedded components.
| YZF wrote:
| Nobody knows for sure. It's a complex phenomena.
|
| - Blame Toyota with their Just In Time inventory management
| ideas.
|
| - Factory closures, lockdowns, etc.
|
| - Increased demand for certain items. Everyone's at home
| surfing the web, playing games on their computers, mining
| bitcoin?
|
| - Monetary policies are creating excess (see bitcoin mining)
| demand.
|
| - Shipping delays. Ports running at reduced capacity. Ships
| sitting at sea waiting to get access. Suez Canal blocked.
| Shipping companies have no spare capacity. Blame Toyota.
|
| - Building new factories takes time, getting/building new
| machinery takes time, everything was set up to not have any
| over capacity (since that's loss) ... blame Toyota again.
|
| - Big companies swallowed everyone so we don't have as much
| diversity of products as we used to. Probably related to easy
| money as well.
|
| tl;dr Toyota, Greenspan, Covid ... Somewhat in that order.
|
| EDIT: Should probably add the trade war between the US and
| China to that list.
| [deleted]
| georgyo wrote:
| Toyota may have been the people who pioneered Just in Time,
| but there are also one of the few car manufacturers that
| actually had a stock pile of components. They realized that
| supply chain disruptions are too damaging not to have a
| cache.
|
| Saying blame Toyota is funny, but really all the execs who
| say a cost savings and took without consideration of supply
| chain problems are actually to blame.
| Multicomp wrote:
| > - Blame Toyota with their Just In Time inventory management
| ideas.
|
| Toyota had a stockpile [1] of semiconductors and are only
| now-ish running into the same supply problems everyone has
| been since March 2020.
|
| [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-07/how-
| toyot...
|
| > But the Tohoku earthquake's aftermath pushed Toyota to
| increase flexibility, and the value of inventory Toyota
| carries has almost doubled since 2011. Speaking at a briefing
| in February, Toyota Chief Financial Officer Kenta Kon said as
| part of the company's business continuity plans, it keeps as
| many as four months of stock for some crucial components such
| as chips. Toyota didn't expect the semiconductor shortage to
| disrupt production in the near term, he said.
| baybal2 wrote:
| There is a very simple explanation. China is a >60% of the
| world chip market, and probably is even more now since China
| was the first country to reopen:
| https://daxueconsulting.com/chinas-semiconductor-industry/
|
| Giant stocks of everything started to vaporise overnight, all
| at the around same time last November.
|
| I have a few STM32 reels of different models some of which I
| can now sell at $10 per MCU. A 100-fold increase in price, that
| beats any bitcoin.
|
| The starvation of seventies, and hungry eighties have taught
| Chinese a thing, or two about shortages.
|
| People in the ex-USSR countries had the same tendency to run
| hoarding stuff on every economic doom announcement.
| eunos wrote:
| It's less about USSR and more about Trumps trade and tech
| war.
| nekoashide wrote:
| From my understanding companies projected chip needs months and
| years in advance but a few things happened.
|
| 1. Companies cut their orders expecting less demand and lost
| their place in line for orders.
|
| 2. Because of the rush to work remote so suddenly people needed
| everything from new computers for kids, monitors and
| accessories for a home office and in general a lot of stuff
| that used chips.
|
| 3. Because of Covid there were shutdowns at semiconductor
| manufacturers and even disruptions due to fire and weather.
|
| Suddenly the entire supply chain went into shock, something
| that had been perfectly balanced between supply and demand was
| full of uncertainty. Now we have a situation where everyone is
| begging for chips and they cannot be built fast enough.
| Essentially the companies are behind on production and the
| demand is so high they cannot meet it. Everyone keeps
| predicting an end but it seems that manufacturers are still
| falling even further behind than they were before.
| jpgvm wrote:
| Additionally when companies cut their orders other companies
| some fabs and other pipeline facilities were shutdown for
| retooling.
|
| Most of the companies that cut their orders were auto and
| industrials that projected a prolonged downturn and didn't
| want to carry the inventory on their books. They
| predominantly use the components manufactured on less
| advanced process nodes.
|
| Thus when demand for new process nodes was increasing and old
| ones were decreasing at the peak of the pandemic it made
| sense for pipelines to retool to meet that demand instead.
|
| On top of that US-China tensions means SMIC and Hua Hong Semi
| are now banned for many US producers which is further
| constraining supply. Also creating asymmetry where China is
| experiencing lesser a supply crunch. However there is also
| trouble brewing there due to Trump forcing the Dutch to block
| export of ASMLs new EUV lithography tech to China. This means
| they aren't able to start building fabs w/EUV to fill the
| coming supply gap there either but instead are now having to
| pour billions into their own lithography progam. Long term
| this will be good for the market (but very bad for ASML most
| likely) but short term its not great.
| mjevans wrote:
| First, all the predictions went sideways. Consumers needed, not
| just wanted, more cars and equipment to function as PPE. As
| their mobile personal protective transit bubbles. As their
| remote-work conversation devices. As new types of hardware that
| weren't being used for those economic functions before. Even as
| webcams and the like.
|
| Second, the quarantines combine with unemployment that frees an
| abused workforce from abusive conditions. Instead of being wage
| slaves forced to take any job what-so-ever workers are able to
| demand jobs that value safety protocols, pay well enough to
| live in an area (which is also extra insane right now), and
| have reasonable hours (enough, the right times etc).
|
| Third, (rent) given a combination of working from home, closed
| 'entertainment' venues, and general quality of life concerns
| many have decided to flee the high rents of cities for suburban
| and even rural areas where their money goes farther. This
| causes more desire to purchase and more wasteful food packaging
| and production at home as well. Everywhere around me prices
| have gone up on eating out something like 25% since the start
| of the pandemic; my wages have not. So instead of eating small
| portions of bulk shipped and prepared ingredients I'm now
| eating at home more, mostly frozen stuff. The price of rent
| didn't quite increase that much but housing is also insane
| right now, just like even used cars, due to the supply crunch.
|
| Supply correction is how we as a culture, country, and world
| escape this problem. Increasing supply in all of the problem
| areas is the only way out.
|
| Supply means buying power goes up, irrespective of wages. Those
| misguided attempts to raise everyone's minimum wage (tax the
| middle class, since the elite who own the rentable units will
| just raise their rates) would work far better by decreasing the
| cost of a better life. It could also be targeted towards
| desired resources, growing out of undesired patterns and
| standards which is also opportunity for better energy
| efficiency.
| tehjoker wrote:
| > since the elite who own the rentable units will just raise
| their rates
|
| We could also just make the elite pay for it. Just saying.
| b9a2cab5 wrote:
| That doesn't solve the issue, because the high rental rates
| are caused by limited supply due to NIMBYism. If you raise
| taxes on rental income rental rates will just go up and
| pass on costs to tenants. Rentals are highly inelastic.
|
| The real solution is to densify and build way, way more.
| Why doesn't SF look like China with skyscrapers on every
| block?
| erosenbe0 wrote:
| Well not sure about SF but Silicon Valley was partly
| designed low density to keep out Blacks and low-income
| people. That was a selling point; that's how 1945-1980
| suburban American system worked and Santa Clara County
| was the absolute worst. By the time people were maybe
| relatively less racist the developers and zoning boards
| had done the damage.
|
| Edit: it was legal or pseudo-legal until 1964 for
| developers to subtly (or not so subtly) advertise that
| their new developments would not be seeded with non-
| whites. It was a selling point.
| callmeal wrote:
| >What about COVID caused the shortage? Is it shipping speeds?
| Change in demand? Less efficiency down the supply chain due to
| health requirements? Trade changes?
|
| Take a look at "the beer game". One of the lessons from that
| game is that a single change in consumer demand causes a wide
| variety of supply chain disruptions. This lesson was learnt in
| the 1950s and unfortunately it looks like they stopped teaching
| this in mba schools, so we have to learn it the hard way all
| over again.
|
| [0] https://www.shmula.com/the-bullwhip-effect/310/
| bavell wrote:
| Insightful link, thanks! I knew this info intuitively but
| didn't know about the beer game, really interesting! Nice to
| have a little more theory to back up my understanding.
| ineedasername wrote:
| Wow, Factorio is an extremely complicated version of the beer
| game. It's especially obvious visually for my hacked-together
| systems when I get to the flying drone stage and the drones
| exhibit the movement patterns like those on the charts in
| your link. I hate that game.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| It shouldn't be? Maybe I'm missing something, but shortages
| in factorio normally just flow through the chain without
| any amplification. There's no planner deciding to order
| extra to make up for last time or deciding to cut down
| excess inventory when there's less demand. Or to put it
| another way, all the buffers in a factorio factory stay the
| same size and the demand is always just trying to fill the
| buffer. This whiplash effect is caused by dynamic buffer
| sizes.
| ineedasername wrote:
| _It shouldn 't be_
|
| Yeah, it definitely shouldn't. But that's me, hacking
| together whatever I could to see that unsatisfying rocket
| launch and finally get the game out of my head. So I'd
| build something new and supply it from a steel conveyor
| that had a supply buffer, under estimating how much it
| would actually use. Then it would eat too much and cause
| a shortage, which meant other components somewhere else
| overflowed through lack of use, and overall progress
| would slow down until I ramped up steel production some
| more. That sort of thing.
|
| So, ideally, everything _would_ go smooth. And plenty of
| the time for me it did! But a tiny flaw could also be
| magnified through the system and suddenly I can 't
| produce yellow research bulbs because I was two steel
| furnaces short of actual demand needed to for servo arms,
| and production would have peaks and valleys until the
| additional supply smoothed things out.
| Groxx wrote:
| yeah, factorio does feel like it models this pretty well
| doesn't it? especially with drones, because they are more
| flexible about where they go, so the bullwhip can more
| easily spread to physically-adjacent supply-chains.
|
| if you're not over-supplied, when a new spike in demand
| starts a whip through your factory, things can go nuts for
| quite a while. you get power surges. drones that were
| behaving beautifully before start flying in chaotic
| patterns due to under/over supply and making a bunch of
| dumb local decisions about storage boxes. stuff grinds to a
| halt for no apparent reason, only to discover that some
| random component has become a bottleneck for _practically
| everything_ , and then it can quickly shift to something on
| the opposite side of your factory...
|
| in that sense, perhaps the biters help keep your factory
| more resistant. you have to deal with occasional component-
| losses and spikes in weapon demands, and if you don't
| handle them well enough you can get into an awful
| persistent struggling state.
| clairity wrote:
| > "...unfortunately it looks like they stopped teaching this
| in mba schools..."
|
| why do you believe this? we worked through that simulation as
| part of my mba program some years ago, and mba friends at
| other schools said they did the same. the bullwhip effect is
| such a core concept to operations management that it's hard
| to believe it wouldn't continue to be taught, though perhaps
| with an updated simulation demonstrating its effects.
| [deleted]
| azinman2 wrote:
| I've always wondered, why are silicon wafers a circle when you're
| stamping out rectangles from it? It seems so wasteful. I'm sure
| there's got to be a reason...
| Chyzwar wrote:
| https://www.sas-globalwafers.co.jp/eng/products/wafer/proces...
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| That's how the crystal grows when they form the ingot. You
| could square them up, but that's extra processing steps and
| wastes area.
| BenoitEssiambre wrote:
| Because before it's a wafer, it's a big sausage of
| monocrystalline silicon:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czochralski_method
| Isamu wrote:
| The silicon is grown in a process that produces long cylinders
| that are then sliced into wafers. Silicon is not molded, cast
| or extruded, so the shape is result of the growing process.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czochralski_method
| nullc wrote:
| If you make a product with low margins it is much better for you
| to under-produce rather than over-produce.
|
| I suspect this makes it somewhat hard to restart the economy as
| there isn't any surplus of a lot of materials. And since
| downstream consumers are blocked, they fail to generate the
| demand needed to justify bringing up production.
| mrfusion wrote:
| Are there any estimates on when the shortage might be over?
| lvl100 wrote:
| When this run in crypto is finished.
| sneak wrote:
| This is not remotely the basis for the shortage. It is the
| basis for the high price of GPUs.
|
| There are massive shortages at all process node sizes AIUI,
| not just the cutting edge.
| mrfusion wrote:
| I thought crypto was mostly gpu though?
| Fordec wrote:
| GPUs are made from silicon.
|
| Other chips are also made from silicon.
|
| Manufacturers will use said silicon to make whatever chips
| make them the most money per manufacturing run.
|
| Which, right now, is GPUs.
| Hjfrf wrote:
| It's mixed. Ethereum is gpu, bitcoin is ASICs, monero is
| cpu for example.
|
| Heavy overlap in raw materials and supply chain regardless.
| mlang23 wrote:
| Perfect timing, for once. In 2019, I jumped onto the Sonos train,
| got rid of a bunch of old hardware, (finally) replaced my desktop
| with a ThinkPad X1. In early 2020 (before the first lockdown) I
| completely redid my little "home office", investing in 4
| combinable tables, a new 8-channel USB soundcard, a MIDI
| controller, and some more stuff I should always have had... Two
| weeks after I managed to clean out the apartment from old tables
| and stuff, lockdown came. In summer 2020, I finally got the long-
| overdue replacement for one of our HPC clusters at work. Neitzer
| at work nor at home do I plan to invest any money into hardware
| in the next two years. Sure, it might sound easy from where I am
| to say that, but I find this period of the world a perfect time
| to do some consume consolidation. Looking back, I surely spent a
| bit too much on hardware over the last 20 years. Thats fine in
| the first few years of your career, because after all, those are
| not just toys, they actually help you acquire knolwedge. However,
| after a time, it somehow becomes silly. If I am true to myself,
| there is really nothing I need right now. And I guess that
| applies to more people then just me.
| Animats wrote:
| What worries me is that a shortage economy could become the new
| normal. If you're selling 100% of production and can't fill all
| the orders, profits are great. What kept companies from running
| in that mode was fear of competition. If the "free market" no
| longer generates new entrants, why expand and risk overcapacity
| and losses?
| swiley wrote:
| The word your looking for is "inflation."
| farmerstan wrote:
| It means that inflation is going to continue. You raise prices
| to abate demand
| uDontKnowMe wrote:
| Why wouldn't companies raise their prices to match demand in
| the long term?
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| Basic supply and demand economics. Low supply means high prices
| but it also means low unit sales, and this is _rarely_ the most
| profitable state. Once supply recovers, and it will recover,
| supply will increase.
|
| Hey, this "supply and demand" curve picture on Wikipedia is
| tiny, anyone got a freely licensed higher resolution one they
| can upload?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fig5_Supply_and_demand_cu...
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| Free money throws a wrench in that because you'll have
| parties willing to spend drastically more than a product is
| worth (be it due to some combination of one or more of free
| government money, lack of common sense, or obscene wealth)
| giving suppliers an opportunity to raise prices beyond what
| they normally could to compensate for the lost profit margins
| due to low unit sales.
|
| It's a wacky world out there right now.
| thomasjudge wrote:
| Like in the real estate market right now in a lot of places
| in the US
| qualudeheart wrote:
| I welcome the chip shortage.
|
| I implore the national security state and the intelligence
| community to take action and intensify this trend.
|
| Thus the advance of artificial intelligence will be slowed and we
| will have more time to practice AI regulation and control.
|
| Only then may strong AI be permitted to eventuate. Otherwise it
| may destroy us. He who develops AI would be punished severely
| were we to live in a just world.
|
| We need a butlerian jihad against AI, led by the national
| security state, equipped by the brave men and women of Anduril
| incorporated.
|
| The damage to the rest of the economy is unfortunate but a cost I
| am willing to accept.
|
| Now what do we actually need that hardware for, aside from
| training language models or mining bitcoin?
|
| Why don't we also develop more efficient software? Why don't we
| pay people to do so? Many of you in this thread could work on
| this, and be paid handsomely for it.
| nightfly wrote:
| What are you afraid AI will do?
| qualudeheart wrote:
| The main threat model is a Yudkowskian rapid takeoff where
| artificial general intelligence recursively self improves far
| beyond human intelligence, making it like a god with absolute
| power compared to us. This corresponds to the agentic model
| of artificial general intelligence put forth by Bostrom.
|
| Yudkowskian AGI might fail in the long term since it would
| run into Godelian problems it would never be able to solve
| but infinitely loop on.
|
| That humans are immune to those and can behold contradictions
| testifies to a Penrosian supra-turing-machinic aspect to the
| human mind.
|
| Man has a transcendent aspect even if we may not be meta-
| cognitively aware of it at all times.
|
| AGIs could possibly be destroyed through the use of such
| problems, akin to magical spells wielded by powerful magi.
|
| A secondary threat model of mine is based on a world of non-
| general, non-agentic strong AI with many discrete "tool AIs"
| with superhuman ability in one unique area.
|
| The secondary model is mostly harmless except for military
| AI. The genius of Anduril Incorporated lies in their creation
| of drones designed to destroy other drones.
|
| This future is still very dangerous, and I hope that the
| security state will take action to prevent it's arrival.
| [deleted]
| andrewnicolalde wrote:
| Perhaps to further what oppressive humans have long wanted
| but not previously had the capability to do.
| qualudeheart wrote:
| Per the orthogonality thesis (Bostrom) I do not even expect
| AI to have similar moral values to ours.
|
| I expect it to instrumentally secure power to better pursue
| it's goals, and in the process thereof establish hegemony
| over us and other AIs.
|
| From there it could easily try to kill us. I don't want any
| of that.
|
| My preferred outcome seems to be what Elon Musk wants,
| human cyborgs amplified with brain computer interfaces and
| control over machines; never a machine with control over
| many humans or posthumans.
| mathverse wrote:
| It's not only chips.It's everything.Timber,iron,steel,building
| materials, certain types of food.
|
| It's the increased consumption of these goods because of insane
| lockdowns all around the world.People did not spend money on
| holidays but decided to upgrade their homes and electronics.
| sbierwagen wrote:
| Lumber peaked back in May at $1,600. It's down to $576 now:
| https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/commodities/lbs
| imtringued wrote:
| Oh no hyperdeflation is coming!!
|
| I am honestly tired of this. Yes we had a pandemic but we
| didn't have a war that killed and destroyed the very thing
| that produces the things that we are short of right now.
| laurent92 wrote:
| Or is it the adolescence of China, once a baby in consumerism,
| now a hungry teenager engulfing all the calories it can?
| pphysch wrote:
| Or is it the ongoing & _economically unjustified_ printing of
| multiple trillions of USD since 2020, which forces firms
| globally to move away from money or get ripped off?
| glanard_frugner wrote:
| chip shortage is due to smic sanctions, no one seems to want to
| talk about this
| rossdavidh wrote:
| While it is obviously not unrelated to the pandemic chaos, there
| is a deeper issue. As Nassim Taleb has often pointed out, the
| same things that make a system "efficient" also can often be
| viewed as making it fragile. "Just-in-time" means "no buffer". We
| have, for decades, been doing as much as possible to make all our
| economic systems as efficient as possible, which is to say with
| no extra capacity.
|
| Thus, if it had not been the pandemic, it would eventually have
| been something else. Sooner or later, there is always a shock to
| the system. If you have made sure that every step in a long
| complex chain is optimized to have very little slack, the thing
| you have optimized for is fragility.
| radley wrote:
| There's a really good (free) interview on the Verge with Dr.
| Willy Shih who explains whats going on:
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/31/22648372/willy-shih-chip-...
|
| TLDR: it essentially was the pandemic: cancelling orders ->
| redirecting supply -> too late to uncancel + competitive
| hoarding.
| AYBABTME wrote:
| perl4ever had an interesting comment that they deleted after
| being downvoted for some reason. I'm happy to take the
| downvotes because I think their take was a thoughtworthy
| counterpoint.
|
| * * *
|
| >"Just-in-time" means "no buffer"
|
| No, it doesn't. It just means the buffer is somewhere other
| than where you assume it's necessary. That may in fact be a net
| gain. Computers and cars and whatever don't wear out instantly.
| It will be a long time until all the newest equipment that
| already exists is old enough it absolutely has to be scrapped.
| In some other thread on HN, someone said that everything
| depends on manufacturing, and services don't mean anything
| without manufacturing capacity. Services! Like maintaining and
| repairing what's already been manufactured! Like, for an
| extreme example, what happened in Cuba when they couldn't get
| new cars for a long time. Or during WWII when civilians
| couldn't buy new cars. Day in and day out, people talk about
| how terrible a disposable society is, and then we have a crisis
| that requires like 1% less disposal and it's the end of
| society.
| mlang23 wrote:
| I also got downvoted for stating that I feel I have enough HW
| and can live a few years off what is there. I guess people
| have been trained to get the newest thing every year, that it
| now hurts them bad to not be able to do so for a few months.
| And yes, I agree, this could be a wonderful time to actually
| strengthen our knowhow regarding keeping things alive,
| instead of just throwing them away. Sounds like a great
| chance for the climate change people. How is the market for
| used equipment doing btw?
| Jetrel wrote:
| To speak to a "long perspective" on the issue, that was one
| of the things that scared people when electronics moved to
| integrated circuits. There's no "knowhow to keeping them
| alive". Once the magic smoke gets let out, they're just
| _dead_.
|
| There was a time when every part of a computer - including,
| literally, an individual "bit" of ram, could be hand-
| repaired, craftsman-style (and even visually assessed for
| failure), but we've been on a long, long trajectory towards
| none of this stuff being user-serviceable.
|
| We're now watching the rise of SoC, wherein my graphics
| card and my ram crawl into my CPU and disappear as discrete
| components. Strange times.
| mlang23 wrote:
| Well, I get your somewhat nostalgic attitude. But back
| then, computing equipment was also way large, louder, and
| energy consuming. Heck, one of the "museum" disk drives
| we have at work used to make the light flicker in the
| lower floor if you powered it on. So yeah, we're past a
| certain point of repairability. Thats sad, but more a
| function of progress, not really something we can do
| about.
|
| But that doesnt mean all our existing tech will emit the
| magic smoke in the next few months. The endless need for
| more computing power is mostly driven by software bloat.
| We could extend the current smartphone and gadget
| usefulness by a significant amount of time if we stopped
| to fall for constant featurism and did lets say, a year
| or two of cleanup. Sure, "the future" like AR and such
| will have to wait, but heck, this "we will sell you 3d"
| thing is around since the 80s and didnt take of in the
| mainstream yet, so what?
| [deleted]
| nixpulvis wrote:
| This comment was probably down-voted because it completely
| misses the fact that not everyone _already has_ access to the
| needed resources. Sure, even if you already have everything
| you want /need now, and you own high enough quality parts,
| you may be golden for a decade or so. Eventually though,
| you'll need replacements. If access to those replacements is
| limited, how much value does the rest of your scrap really
| have?
|
| Creative outlets for junk are going to continue to become
| more and more fashionable as we struggle to meet our values
| and practical prices.
| shkkmo wrote:
| I don't think the comment completely ignores that. As the
| Cuba example demonstrates, the potential for a strong
| second hand market for existing repairable hardware is
| another form of buffer.
|
| One of the issues is that repairability and/or durability
| have also been decreasing for many categories of goods.
| flyinglizard wrote:
| How much of a buffer can you possibly maintain to deal with a
| year long economic disruption, which changes both supply (by
| lockdowns and factories being offline) and demand (by a shift
| in consumer spending mix and free government money)?
|
| It's impractical to keep 12 months worth of supplies for
| manufacturing, even when you don't try to do lean manufacturing
| - just plain old manufacturing. It's something you need to
| finance, parts getting obsolete and product designs in some
| categories iterate every year or two.
|
| We just need to deal with this new reality. You can do your
| best to avoid the worst case scenario but it is after all a
| statistical inevitability, so you just ride through it.
|
| As I said on another comment here, though, this is going to
| have long standing effects on the other end of the disruption.
| We're going to be left with huge over capacity, unclaimed
| stocks and companies that couldn't produce parts will have
| their customers design out their parts for whatever else they
| can get their hands on. This is a golden opportunity for the
| smaller players in the industry. How giants like ST, TI and NXP
| will deal with this long term - I'm not quite sure. Many
| companies in 2021 and possibly well into 2022 who would
| normally design their products with TI parts will not do that
| because they can't even get samples, let along ramp up
| production.
| jdavis703 wrote:
| Toyota (famous for lean manufacturing) built redundancy in to
| it's supply chain and only recently has run in to chip
| shortages. It may be hard, but it's certainly possible.
|
| 0: How Toyota Steered Clear of the Chip Shortage Mess
| Animats wrote:
| That article was back in April. Then, in August, "Japan's
| largest car maker said Thursday it was cutting production
| in the country by 40% in September because of a shortage of
| semiconductors. The company declined to say whether it
| would shut down plants outside of Japan."
|
| Most of automotive does not need AMSL 10nm and below fabs.
| They need robust 200nm to 300nm chips.
|
| This may yield car redesigns with less touchscreen
| dependence, simpler electronics in the essential systems,
| and an "infotainment" system that's less integrated with
| the vehicle and can be added or replaced later. Already,
| some new cars have shipped with a blank plate in place of
| the entertainment system.
|
| There's a mindset that electric cars have to be more
| complicated. This is strange, because managing the
| batteries and motors is far simpler than managing an IC
| engine.
|
| [1] https://www.programbusiness.com/news/toyota-succumbs-
| chip-sh...
| maxerickson wrote:
| The shortages are hitting ECUs and body controllers, it
| isn't just the fancy cabin electronics.
| radley wrote:
| There's a really good (free) interview on the Verge with Dr.
| Willy Shih who explains whats going on:
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/31/22648372/willy-shih-chip-...
|
| TLDR: it essentially was the pandemic: cancelling orders ->
| redirecting supply -> too late to uncancel -> low supply +
| competitive hoarding. Plus a 10 year $150B head start.
| xadhominemx wrote:
| I don't think it would have been without the pandemic, mostly
| because remote work and education has dramatically increased
| demand for PCs. There is not a ton of excess capacity
| especially at the wafer fab level, so PCs running 25% higher
| than expected was enough to push the industry into shortage.
| There still would have been a cycle (driven by inventory
| stocking / restocking), but the shortage would not have been
| nearly as acute.
| tsywke44 wrote:
| Nope, not just PCs, just electronics in general.
|
| The pandemic allowed tens of millions of well-off western
| office workers to move out of tiny urban flats into more
| spacious housing. While having to spend a lot of time in
| their new homes, which was previously in "public" places (eg
| restaurants, bars, what have you)
|
| Now, what to do with all that space? A giant tv, washer and
| dryer, a nice stereo set, new induction stove, the list goes
| on and on...
|
| PC demand also increased obviously, but probably bitcoin
| miners caused the most demand for PC hardware components
| bserge wrote:
| Funny enough I believe it's not even the real consumer/end
| user demand.
|
| It's just companies anticipating or seeing the same thing (an
| increase in consumer PC demand) and all releasing their own
| shitbox/AIO/desktop/laptop.
|
| I bet most of them are sitting in warehouses unsold.
| yskchu wrote:
| > "Just-in-time" means "no buffer".
|
| Just in time doesn't necessarily mean no buffer, the goal is to
| minimize excessive stockpiling and keep enough for continuous
| production, increasing stockpile when required.
|
| Toyota, some might say THE pioneer of Just-in-time
| manufacturing, was one of the car manufacturers least impacted
| by the component shortage precisely because they started
| stockpiling very early on after they saw the upcoming issue.
|
| Here's a quote from another Bloomberg article specifically on
| Toyota[1]:
|
| "Toyota asks its Tier 1 suppliers to input detailed information
| about their most obscure parts and materials providers in a
| complex database that it maintains. Using this system to glean
| information about, say, a single headlight Toyota purchases for
| one of its cars, it can get information as granular as the
| names and locations of the companies that make the materials
| that go into surface treatments used on those headlights'
| lenses and even the producers of the lubricants used on the
| rubber pieces in the assembly, Toyota spokeswoman Shiori
| Hashimoto says.
|
| These lines of communication alerted the company early on that
| it needed to stockpile chips."
|
| [1]: How Toyota Steered Clear of the Chip Shortage Mess -
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-07/how-toyot...
| xxgreg wrote:
| All of the car companies, dialed down orders at the start of
| the pandemic. Now they are all trying to stockpile chips, due
| to not enough supply. I imagine (no data to support) the
| increased size stockpiles are a large part of what makes the
| problem worse. Kinda like TP really.
|
| Also, Toyota is now cutting 40 percent of global production
| due to chip shortage.
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/business-58266794
| jonahrd wrote:
| This is actually also discussed by Nassim Taleb in his book
| which I assume the parent comment is referencing.
|
| He says Toyota is one of the few examples where just-in-time
| was not distorted and warped. So Toyota implements true just-
| in-time, which can be robust, with buffers. But most other
| companies implement a half-assed version that is very
| fragile.
| temac wrote:
| The thing is that you can not apply this method (suddenly
| stockpile because of anticipated shortage) globally. Now of
| course, putting _gratuitous_ buffer everywhere would not be
| the panacea either. But some buffers may be _needed_ to
| improve global resiliency.
|
| One has to optimize to reduce fragility, but when massive
| chip (or anything else) shortages start to appear for
| extended periods it is obviously already way to late. And way
| too downstream if your strategy was just a punctual stockpile
| decided by a single company. Because that probably would have
| been impossible for everybody to apply this punctual strategy
| at the same time...
| nine_k wrote:
| One advantage of starting to stockpile ahead of a crisis is
| that production is not yet affected much by the crisis, and
| the total amount buffered could be larger.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| The difference is that Toyota is a uniquely intelligent
| company with respect to supply chain.
|
| The average American manufacturing company is run by a CFO
| operating with reports out of SAP or Peoplesoft. Their
| performance is measured by fiscal performance, so running to
| the penny and having no inventory benefits them more than
| making the company resilient. Wall St rewards quarterly
| performance, not resilience.
| gauravjain13 wrote:
| Seems like a low-on-details article with PR-like flavor.
|
| According to this, Toyota cut production by 40%, though it
| does acknowledge that Toyota took less of a hit vs industry:
|
| "New cars often include dozens of microchips but Toyota
| benefited from having built a larger stockpile of chips -
| also called semiconductors - as part of a revamp to its
| business continuity plan, developed in the wake of the
| Fukushima earthquake and tsunami a decade ago."
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/business-58266794
| ksec wrote:
| > "Just-in-time" means "no buffer".
|
| Personally I have been ranting about the Modern use of Just in
| time manufacturing for well over a decade. Just in Time
| manufacturing as it originate in Japan doesn't actually means
| no buffering. Somewhere a long the line in typical Chinese
| whisper fashion the true meaning got loss when it go to the
| west. If you are software developer, just like at Agile and
| Kanban board.
|
| The problem make worst when CEO and COO dont actually
| understand this, and force those in supply chain to comply with
| their view of JIT. It works in a sense when everything is
| normal. It doesn't work when there is a shock. Look at Apple,
| the only company that took JIT to a level beyond Toyota. They
| are doing just fine while others are fighting for parts.
|
| The other thing worth pointing to is that this isn't just
| chips, but also every other commodity. The reason behind all
| these different industry are exactly the same. You could have
| swap the title for Beef, Poultry, Steel, Toilet Paper, Mask,
| Chips, Milk, Pencil, paper etc... I really do wish people learn
| a little about how supply chain works. It is the fabric of our
| daily life and yet very little attention has been paid to it.
| mhb wrote:
| Maybe you should rant a little here about why just-in-time
| doesn't imply no (or minimal) buffers. If not, what does it
| mean?
| [deleted]
| fny wrote:
| Given you can't predict what the shock will be or its
| consequences, how are you exactly going to create a buffer?
| Creating broad redundancies would result in lots and lots of
| waste both damaging to a bottom line and the environment.
|
| Also, is this "fragility" really that big of a problem? Sure,
| prices are going to move up 20-30% for a year or two until the
| supply chain issues ease, but is that worth driving up costs
| for decades preparing for potentially the wrong issue?
| keoqpkk wrote:
| We don't really put a price on environmental and societal
| damage that "just-in-time" does (thinking of truck drivers
| living on the highway effectively acting as the warehouse,
| saving the company to build an actual warehouse).
|
| If we did, more robust models might be financially attractive
| too.
| yunohn wrote:
| I'm quite certain that replacing truck drivers with AI
| drivers would save the environment more than building even
| more warehouses.
| toomanydoubts wrote:
| >prices are going to move up 20-30% for a year or two
|
| I have never ever in my whole life seen prices going down
| after they have gone up. Ever.
| aj7 wrote:
| Gas prices?
|
| It's supply and demand. Prices fall if there is a surplus.
| wiz21c wrote:
| oil price do that all the time: up, down...
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| Yes, publicly traded commodities do all the time because
| it means there are temporary inefficiencies in the system
| that can be arbitraged to turn some profit, until they
| converge at the "correct" price for some period of time.
|
| But GP is correct, _products_ typically don't come down
| in pricing. Consumable goods are more elastic in a free
| market absent collusion, but finished honest-to-god
| products have a well-known price stickiness problem. (The
| price will come down, but rarely back to what it was.)
| Typically the only way that cycle is broken is when the
| product itself is obviated /supplanted by a replacement
| (eg an iPhone will never get cheaper but some new phone
| may come out that is cheaper and everyone moves to it).
|
| These are all obviously generalities though.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| I counter this. In my country, medical mascs were sold at
| 100+ their regular price last spring. Now they are at their
| regular pre-pandemic prices.
| umvi wrote:
| Gasoline?
| Tenoke wrote:
| Have you not bought hardware?
|
| I've seen every computer part come down in cost over the
| years even after briefly becoming expensive through my life
| that recent trends have been odd to me.
| rolph wrote:
| here is a basic treatment of the topic of semiconductor
| fabrication:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor_device_fabricati...
|
| this extends to CMOS VLSI fabrication.
|
| silicon wafers are required as general fodder, as copper clad pc
| board is to discrete analog production.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wafer_(electronics)#Production
|
| the wafers require pulled ingots of silicon, these must be
| extremly pure and of extremely regular crystal latticing
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boule_(crystal)
| eande wrote:
| Old article May 5th of this year, which in that industry is a
| long time. Nevertheless the situation since did actually get
| worse as predicted. Not only is it chip shortage we should call
| it component shortage. A standard 10k 0406 package resistor is
| sold out around the world. Many high quality, high density
| capacitor you can't get. The same goes for the standard
| semiconductor parts like diodes, MOSFET or TVS. Semiconductor
| sales rep give you now +50 weeks lead time for the many ICs
| meaning no real forecast at this point. They generally tell you
| 2022 will be tough maybe Q4 will ease up.
|
| Many of the major semi companies are running at fairly high
| capacity, but supporting elements like IC package build capacity,
| sometimes materials can't keep up as well.
|
| We looked at some boards to redesign, but when you are short
| hundreds of parts it gets nearly insurmountable to manage a
| hardware redesign. Interesting and challenging allocation period,
| definitely worse than 2003-2005.
| sytelus wrote:
| Shortage in supply is everywhere. Even in labor market. While
| walking around I cannot pass by without a desperate plea for
| staff needed. I see businesses closing down literally because
| of shortage of staff. It's as if half of humans suddenly
| disappeared and other half decided to consume massively.
| a3n wrote:
| Truck driver. Besides Walmart (my major shopping store,
| because you can park a truck up in there), truck stop
| convenience stores are chronically short of things in the
| last N months. I know, the irony ...
|
| Unflavored half and half single servings for coffee go early.
| The bulk half and half dispensers are usually empty these
| days. (The flavored side is often still available.) Then
| coffee lids. Then large coffee cups. Gatorade Zero often
| goes, and then regular Gatorade. The Power Aide seems to
| always be available. The open cooler boat with yogurt and
| sandwiches often runs low or empty.
|
| Vicious cycle of staff shortages everywhere, thus unable to
| source, produce, deliver and stock at former rates.
| mrkstu wrote:
| Local QT regularly running out of syrup and various cup
| sizes for soft drinks.
| DavidPeiffer wrote:
| Echoing /u/mrkstu, Casey's across the Midwest is generally
| not in stock of the medium cup for soft drinks, which is
| normally available in styrofoam or plastic.
| tpmoney wrote:
| The other half doesn't need to consume massively, just at the
| same rates they always were. When every step along your just
| in time supply chain is running at 50% capacity, the end
| output is even lower than 50% capacity.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Or... Everyone has decided to consume massively because a lot
| of people feel rich after COVID (same income, no holidays,
| travel or social expenses)
| Kiro wrote:
| I'm constantly surprised that so many things in IKEA are out
| of stock. I've been shopping at IKEA for 20 years and never
| experienced this before.
| j1elo wrote:
| Turns out there is no shortage of people wanting to work. But
| there is a shortage on people wanting to be a slave of their
| job for a misery as compensation. So restaurants here keep
| complaining how come nobody wants to work with them.
|
| EDIT: I'm not joking, the salaries for mostly any position in
| a bar or a restaurant in Spain tend to be a joke with long
| hours and shameful conditions. Paying in cash to avoid taxes
| is a common thing. Doing extra hours without extra
| compensation as law requires. You don't like it? Ok bye,
| you're fired, and we'll complain to the news reporter on TV,
| about how nobody wants to work any more nowadays.
| mdorazio wrote:
| Labor shortages weren't a very big thing a month before the
| pandemic, so you have to ask yourself what changed. In many
| cases it's that people got comfortable being paid a decent
| amount to _not_ work, from the pandemic payouts. It's a
| really interesting time to be looking at the economics of
| everything and see how this will play out over the next
| 12-18 months.
| ElFitz wrote:
| Perhaps it's only that, for the first time, they got some
| time to reflect on their job and actually notice the
| impact it had on their lives and health, realised it had
| never been worth it, and want to find something else?
| spydum wrote:
| I think it is closer to that. A lot of people were
| complacent in their jobs, and not nearly tapping their
| potential (market or otherwise). I can't tell you how
| many people I know or heard 2nd hand got furloughed or
| laid off, then landed a significantly better paying gig
| and never went back (sometimes wildly different
| industries). If they were never forced to change, I
| guarantee most would have stayed.
| garmaine wrote:
| Both halves are consuming massively thanks to pandemic relief
| funds and bonus unemployment. Why do you think there's a
| labor shortage? You can get paid more money to sit on your
| ass and order things on Amazon.
| oehtXRwMkIs wrote:
| Reasonable speculation, but if you look into it you'll see
| that right now the most popular hypothesis is a lack of fit
| between job seeking and hiring. Warehouse jobs for example
| are taking a lot of workers away from other industries
| right now.
|
| The most convincing piece of evidence for this IMO is that
| if you compare the states that ended relief funds and bonus
| unemployment early to try to combat this issue with those
| that let it keep going, there was no statistically
| significant difference between the two halves of the USA in
| terms of hiring shortages.
| Animats wrote:
| 0406 package? That's an odd size, apparently made only by
| Vishay, and yes, they're out of stock.
| erosenbe0 wrote:
| It's likely for low resistance and temperature stable
| precision current measurement so the package design can
| contribute to stability. Vishay is a leader in that stuff.
| erosenbe0 wrote:
| Journalists are clueless.
|
| Intel doesn't make 10nm chips that you put in a car or
| bulldozer or telecom box that has to bake in desert heat. Some
| of their older process stuff, yes, but not the top.
| wereHamster wrote:
| Is the shortage of common components (such as the 10k 0406
| resistor you mention) due to: increased demand that can't be
| met due to unavailable capacity or because the manufacturers
| scaled production down during the past year and now there is no
| capacity to scale it back up? Or because supply chain shortages
| that feed the fabs (raw materials)?
| baybal2 wrote:
| Passives are actually quite quick to produce. I think it's a
| good proof that a few giant distributors in China keep
| buying, and flushing them down the drain.
| q-big wrote:
| > Passives are actually quite quick to produce. I think
| it's a good proof that a few giant distributors in China
| keep buying, and flushing them down the drain.
|
| What are these immense amounts of passives used for?
| aj7 wrote:
| Damping.
| CompuHacker wrote:
| Everything, but I think they are suggesting that the
| market for them is being suppressed by hording or
| destruction of product.
| azinman2 wrote:
| Wait why would anyone buy up a large percentage of
| something to only destroy it?
| the-dude wrote:
| To hinder competitors? To avoid storage costs?
| londons_explore wrote:
| Apple has been known to buy all of the worldwide supply
| of a component to destroy it, delaying competitors plans.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Source?
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| I don't think there is one quite so nefarious, the tale I
| usually hear is that Apple buys out the manufacturing
| capacity, say, on 8GB ram chips - and then its
| competitors can't find 8GB chips for their own phones,
| and have to offer a meager 6GB of RAM instead. (If you
| think about it, doubling your RAM just so manufacturers
| don't have the capacity to supply your competitors is
| pretty ruthless and genius)
|
| Googling aroubd I see other stories of Apple buying all
| available capacity of 5nm manufacturing or glass or
| sapphire for smartwatch screens etc, here's one source
| for RAM tho (2009): https://appleinsider.com/articles/09/
| 02/18/apple_buying_up_a...
| Tenoke wrote:
| In 2009 maybe but for the last 10 years there have always
| been competitors to Apple who have cheaper phones with
| more ram on them.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Buying something to destroy it so someone else cannot
| have it is nefarious.
|
| Buying something in sufficient quantities that results in
| others not having it, but still selling out of it is not
| nefarious.
| microtherion wrote:
| And it's not like Apple waltzes in and just stuffs all
| the RAM that's lying around into a shopping cart. One of
| their uses of their cash reserves is to pre-commit to
| buying the components they need far in advance.
|
| In principle, it seems to me that this _shouldn 't_ be
| causing component shortages -- on the contrary, it should
| reduce planning uncertainty for component manufacturers.
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| The fact that some companies have contracts for
| reoccurring scheduled delivers of parts means when the
| SHTF it's going to be really bad for those that don't.
|
| If Apple has a contract to buy 10% of a manufacturers
| capacitors. But then material shortages drops the
| manufacturers capacity in half. Apple's share is now 20%
| and anyone without a standing order is SOL.
| erosenbe0 wrote:
| They reserve supply in enormous quantity to box out
| competitors, as you would expect from the top dog.
| Perhaps they even reserve more than they need sometimes.
| But have not seen that they would do it just to
| deliberately destroy.
| tux3 wrote:
| I can answer that in the abstract. I don't think that's
| what's happening, I don't have any reason to think that.
| Just answering in a vacuum.
|
| Imagine you sell widgets for $200 a pop. Widgets are hard
| to manufacture, production is limited. Someone else has
| 10k widgets that they want to sell for $75 per.
|
| If you buy all the stock, people will be forced to buy
| yours, because of supply constraint.
|
| 200-75 = 125 is more income than if you price-matched and
| sold at 75.
|
| Now why destroy them, and not just sell them back? Well,
| they're not necessarily identical to the widgets you
| make. Maybe they have the other brand's logo stamped on
| them. Maybe the datasheet doesn't quite match.
|
| Either way, your customers might notice. If you just buy
| and burn, no one downstream of you sees anything, except
| for higher prices
|
| Note also that the above sounds immoral enough to be
| illegal in a whole lot of countries, so I would advise
| you not do that, though I'm neither lawyer nor spiritual
| advisor.
| phkahler wrote:
| With consolidation, some of the less common component values
| are being discontinued. I would imagine the same may be
| happening with standard values in larger sizes and 0406 is
| kinda big these days.
|
| Longer term this shutting out of companies not on the leading
| edge will result in other changes. Components fabricated
| integral to the PCB being one such change.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| > Components fabricated integral to the PCB being one such
| change.
|
| I hadn't heard about this, and it sounds interesting. Do
| you have any references?
| phkahler wrote:
| I only saw it in a presentation from a high end board
| house. And then only for limited use and probably wide
| tolerances? But the idea is still in my head and makes
| some sense. Imagine something like a silk screen laying
| down passives. No, they didnt say how they do it, that
| was just my thought.
| fortran77 wrote:
| We've been unable to get USRPs -- and we need a few dozen for a
| project. We're starting to look at chinese "clone" versions to
| see if they're any good. National Instruments has no idea when
| they can ship again, and no supplier has any:
|
| (See Newark, for example)
|
| https://www.newark.com/search/prl/results?st=usrp&sort=P_PRI...
| sneak wrote:
| There seem to be a fair number of secondhand ones on eBay.
| nikkinana wrote:
| Because china
| tpmx wrote:
| I've been wondering:
|
| How much of this is caused by component fragmentation?
|
| As an example, Digikey lists a staggering _55k_ separate
| microcontroller variants (active products):
|
| https://www.digikey.com/en/products/filter/embedded-microcon...
| YZF wrote:
| You'd think that would be a positive? Presumably only a very
| tiny fraction of those are suitable for automotive applications
| e.g. also presumably some of those were only made in smaller
| quantities trying to hook some big customer.
|
| I think we've always had a pretty large variety of
| microcontrollers, just something like an 8051 was available in
| hundreds of options from various companies. Microchip has
| always had lots of different ones with slightly different
| options. Sometimes (often?) those are the same die in a
| different package with some different build time options
| enabled.
| tpmx wrote:
| I'm not following you how on that would be a positive (in a
| chip shortage situation).
|
| Say you use 50 microcontrollers in a car. Probably 15+
| separate part numbers? One or two of those can't be acquired,
| so boards need to be redesigned and the production line is
| held up.
|
| Now, imagine a different world with wide cross-licensing
| between manufacturers and instead of doing hundreds of
| separate variants slighly cost optimized for various purposes
| for each major microcontroller design, let's just have a
| small number of kitchen sink variants.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| It's a trade-off though, since every one of those
| controllers will probably be less efficient and more power
| hungry then more specific parts would have been
| tpmx wrote:
| I agree that it's a tradeoff, but not in power efficency.
| It's easy to shut off parts that are not being used.
|
| It's primarily a tradeoff between a) increased chip size,
| b) number of external chip connections, c) cost, d)
| probability that having a small number of
| footprints/designs will help.
|
| So, in short: cost vs winnings from having a lean library
| of component.
| jhgb wrote:
| You would have thought that the whole point of
| microcontrollers was to decrease the number of different
| chips that have to be manufactured on the basis of them being
| programmable.
| boznz wrote:
| Maybe we need an open source set of microcontroller package
| footprints so they are at least pin compatible ?
| kiwidrew wrote:
| Not only that, but most of those microcontrollers are single-
| source, which amplifies any supply chain issues because you
| have to wait for your specific MCU to become available; there
| are no 'drop in' replacements any longer.
| intricatedetail wrote:
| Sometimes you can get MCU with the same pinout but missing
| certain features. Can be a way out if your product does not
| need those. Unfortunately I find any possible replacements
| are gone too...
| bserge wrote:
| Huh, this made me wonder, is there a reverse auction
| marketplace of sorts, where a buyer places orders and all the
| sellers provide a small or big batch, or fill the order
| completely.
|
| Seems like it would be a great addition to any existing
| marketplace.
| amelius wrote:
| Yes. Designing boards around the shortage is quickly becoming a
| new artform.
| mrfusion wrote:
| Any further reading on this? I'd like to understand it more.
| Are there certain chips that are plentiful that we could port a
| lot of software over to?
|
| (Might be a good business opportunity if so)
| jbay808 wrote:
| I would guess that the GP means designing such that your
| board accepts multiple footprints for compatible parts, so
| that if your first choice of op amp (or voltage regulator,
| etc) goes out of stock you can populate another one.
|
| That might be a similar part by another company, or it might
| be an identical part in a different package (often ICs are
| available in two or three package shapes, and you might not
| be able to predict which ones will be in stock).
| krisoft wrote:
| > Are there certain chips that are plentiful that we could
| port a lot of software over to?
|
| I sense a potential misunderstanding here: Not every chip
| runs code. Microcontrollers and processors do, but there are
| many different kind of chips. Some convert voltages, some
| massage signals, some drive motors, etc.
|
| Why is this important? Porting code will only help you when
| you are swapping microcontrollers or processors. Which is
| just a tinny sliver of all the ICs in use. Porting code won't
| get you anywhere if what you are missing from your BOM is a
| boost-buck IC, or an opamp.
| jmwilson wrote:
| It basically means order sufficient parts before starting
| layout or even before finalizing the schematic. It's not just
| microcontrollers that are scarce, it's also "dumb" ICs like
| power management, discrete logic, A/D interface, etc.
| joncrane wrote:
| Wasn't Wozniak an absolute wizard at minimizing chip count on
| circuit boards? What used to be a lost art is turning into one
| of the hottest skills around.
| dvh wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muntzing
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Resiliency and degrading gracefully is beauty.
| buitreVirtual wrote:
| "Former Intel Corp. boss Craig Barrett called his company's
| microprocessors the most complicated devices ever made by man."
|
| Not very smart to boast about this. So AMD makes more performant
| chips with less complicated designs?
| butz wrote:
| How about using old hardware for longer and building optimized
| software that performs great even on old hardware?
| mrfusion wrote:
| Or build low tech versions of products. No one really wants a
| smart tv for example.
| ahtihn wrote:
| That's just not true. Most people are happy to have Netflix
| and other streaming apps integrated directly in their TV
| without having to acquire an external device.
| Tenoke wrote:
| Sure, but it is a bit counter-productive to have no non-
| smart options for people like me who just plug it to a
| device instead.
|
| Even if I look at my parents' TVs - all smart but they
| don't need or use that, they just watch cable.
| omgwtfbyobbq wrote:
| I think it's in the middle. Even my wife isn't a fan of
| built in apps compared to a discrete external device.
|
| I'd like to see more power efficient dumb tvs. My favorite
| TV is a 65" led tv that sips power. At the same time, I've
| read that manufacturers providing data on their customers
| helps subsidize lower TV prices, and in that case adding
| apps likely doesn't incur that much more cost.
| oriolid wrote:
| Netflix is cool, but stuff like SambaTV and showing ads
| right in the main menu are reasons to keep the smart TV
| away from both Internet and my home network. Chromecasts
| and Apple TVs are at least a bit less obvious about it.
| tluyben2 wrote:
| I thought I would hate them but accepted my fate and got
| one last year after our not so smart TV died after 18
| years. I had no bad experiences so far: very smooth ride.
| hkt wrote:
| This sort of thing put me off for life:
|
| https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/samsungs-
| war...
| tluyben2 wrote:
| Yes, that's mostly why I did not want one. But unless we
| go open everywhere it gives us all a worse experience and
| anxiety to think about. First of all we need phones to
| change as those are, well in my opinion, worse than TVs.
| But I agree: why not a smart TV with fully FOSS Linux?
| Using the browser and vlc and such, it would be quite
| perfect for most people if packaged right.
| overtonwhy wrote:
| Until a couple years later and the apps stop working from
| lack of updates and you've got the TV for another decade.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| People will just buy TVs more often.
|
| "The customers must love this since they're buying 3x as
| many TVs! Keep em coming!"
| M2Ys4U wrote:
| > People will just buy TVs more often.
|
| Yes, and that's the problem.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| I know it is. Good luck convincing enough consumers to
| give a shit though. It's unfortunate.
| ithkuil wrote:
| The shortage also applies to low tech complements such as
| resistors.
|
| Probably a healthy ability to reuse, repurpose, repair and
| recycle can be quite effective against the inability to just
| buy a new thing (regardless of whether the new thing is hi or
| lo tech)
| version_five wrote:
| I would love low tech versions of a lot of stuff.
|
| For a car, my guess is it's impossible to comply with modern
| emissions and safety regulations without ICs, not to mention
| the redesigning and retooling that would be required. I would
| suspect that these regulations have also basically evolved
| symbiotically with the industry to be a most for them, and
| they would have no interest in pushing to allow less complex
| cars.
|
| For TVs and for cars, there are big revenue streams
| associated with things chips do, like serving ads and
| tracking what you do with your car, and well as making it
| impossible to maintain without a dealer. Companies would be
| very reluctant to shut this down.
|
| None of this helps consumers, but I think that's where we
| are. Time to look at getting an old motorcycle maybe
| qualudeheart wrote:
| I'm a proponent of that. Just rewriting old java or python
| monsters in an efficient language like Rust would easily give
| us an order of magnitude better efficiency.
|
| A special class of theorem provers could be developed, proving
| that a program runs below a certain level of spacetime
| complexity.
|
| This would entail a great increase in energy efficiency.
|
| I also endorse holy information warfare against inefficient
| proof of work cryptocurrencies and a transition to efficient
| proof of stake.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| I like Rust, but gosh it produces the second-biggest bloated
| binaries I've ever seen. (Yes, it's mostly people using it
| wrong, though apparently I'm one of them.) The only thing
| worse is C++. (Again, probably people using _that_ wrong, but
| that doesn 't mean it doesn't happen.) Java and Python, by
| comparison, are tolerable, even when people use them wrong;
| when Java programs are huge, that's usually because of a mass
| of hideous "business logic" rather than a billion
| dependencies.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > the second-biggest bloated binaries I've ever seen
|
| Let me guess; Go?
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| I've never managed to get a Go program to compile, so I
| couldn't tell you. I was referring to C++ - though in
| fairness to the compiler, I had to brute-force myself
| through that source code too.
| Animats wrote:
| _I like Rust, but gosh it produces the second-biggest
| bloated binaries I 've ever seen._
|
| Are you building in "release" mode? The debug builds can be
| 10x bigger. cargo build --release
|
| You still get stack backtraces and subscript checking.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| It's not releasing that's the problem; it's developing.
| Development is much harder with the release profile,
| because stuff like overflow checks are disabled.
|
| But yes, I have tried my own custom debug profile that
| turns on the optimisations to try to get the size down.
| The _final binary_ is smaller, but `cargo build` still
| regularly leaves me with just kilobytes of space
| remaining, and then fails outright until I `cargo clean`
| and try again (which I think is build script related).
| qualudeheart wrote:
| For binary size you could use my hypothetical theorem
| prover ensuring a binary size below a certain point.
|
| That would come at some kind of compile time or efficiency
| cost since you couldn't anymore optimise for those but I'm
| sure that's something one could opt for.
|
| I don't think binary size matters though. Storage is very
| cheap these days.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| People keep saying that. I have 1.8 GiB available for
| _all my build files_ , and that's only because I keep
| deleting the build files of my other projects (meaning
| they have to be recompiled whenever I go back to them).
| Storage matters for me.
|
| At least the prices are almost normal again, now that
| Chia's over.
| qualudeheart wrote:
| Couldn't you get 4x that much from a $3 usb stick?
|
| You could also have self modifying code such that the
| size of the binary automatically changes as needed.
|
| If you ship a lisp interpreter instead of rust, you can
| have the interpreter recode itself and any lisp files to
| a smaller size. You'd just implement a compression
| algorithm that preserves the functionality of the code
| compressed.
|
| I think you could do that with rust too with a self
| compiling binary. It'll require some real technical skill
| but if you hire a real hacker you can pull it off.
|
| My cousin his solution for the competitive programming
| contest had something like that.
| mlang23 wrote:
| Do people still know about upx these days? However, I
| think executable compression is besides the point of OP.
| Around 18 years ago, I was going through the codebase of
| a program I maintained as a Debian package, and as a udeb
| for the installer. Back then, I was trying to make it
| small enough to fit on the first _floppy_. I learnt about
| unnecessarily large datatypes in structs, packing,
| padding and alignment, and that adding "static" to
| module-local functions and data can really do things to
| the binary size. These times are over. Nobody cares about
| binary sizes anymore, the main argument against doing so
| is "we cant be bothered, we need to innovate."
| ithkuil wrote:
| I doubt a $3 USB stick would perform decently enough to
| not become a bottleneck in rust compile and link times.
| bbarnett wrote:
| There are no bottlenecks in, or even arbitrarily related
| to rust.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| > _It'll require some real technical skill but if you
| hire a real hacker you can pull it off._
|
| I do have a project a bit like that, but I'm not using
| Rust for it. I was trying to make my own language (like
| Rust, but more powerful and also smaller), but I'm
| probably just going to use a modified (safer) C.
|
| If I were to write it in Rust, I'd have to compile _it_
| in the first place... and if I could do that easily, I
| would simply use Rust.
| jhgb wrote:
| A ramdisk wouldn't help there?
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Not with 4GB of RAM. I already have to close Firefox to
| compile non-trivial programs.
| jhgb wrote:
| Ooops. 48GB here, regretting that I didn't get 64GB. (My
| excuse is that I needed it for osm2pgrouting which ate up
| to 90GB of paged memory on a country-sized input file.
| That hurt a lot.)
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| I have never been gladder that I abandoned my OSM data-
| processing project before I got that far. (I was planning
| on processing multiple country-sized input files for
| their road networks - on a friend's computer, but it only
| had 16GB, so that would be a lot of paging.)
| CommieBobDole wrote:
| Storage is indeed very cheap, but so are CPU cycles, for
| the same reason.
| seabrookmx wrote:
| But it doesn't depend on a runtime. The Java program may be
| smaller but it depends on hundreds of MB of JVM.
|
| If you're building a docker image for example Rust is going
| to be smaller.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| The JVM is 114MiB on my machine. A near-minimal ggez
| program in debug mode is about 100MiB,1 and ggez is
| _small_ for a Rust application library. When you start
| getting into the 300s of dependencies (i.e. every time I
| 've ever got beyond a trivial desktop application),
| you're lucky if your release build is less than 100MiB.
|
| Sure, I could probably halve that by forking every
| dependency so they aren't duplicating versions, but
| that's a _lot_ of work. (It 's a shame Rust doesn't let
| you do conditional compilation based on dependency
| versions, or this would be a lot easier. As it is, we
| have to resort to the Semver trick:
| https://github.com/dtolnay/semver-trick/ -- not that many
| people do that, so it's functionally useless.)
|
| Take GanttProject as an example. It's 20.6MiB of files,
| plus the JVM. I challenge any of you to make a Rust
| version (with accessibility support in the GUI) that can
| open (something resembling) its XML files and draw _some_
| (vague graphical Proof of Concept) representation on the
| screen (with editable text fields), in less than
| 114+21=135 MiB of binary. And then tell me how, because I
| 've been trying to do that kind of thing for over a year.
|
| 1: I can get it down to around 8MiB with release mode,
| lto etc., but that significantly increases the build time
| and only about halves the weight of the intermediate
| build files.
| bbarnett wrote:
| But it is rust! Every problem in every HN thread can be
| solved with it!
|
| How dare you claim a larger binary...
| mlang23 wrote:
| You haven't seen no haskell binaries yet :-) The haskell
| lsp client is around 150MB :-)
| alasdair_ wrote:
| Java is remarkably efficient already. I'd bet you won't get
| an order of magnitude improvement.
| nomdep wrote:
| This practice of injecting Rust in every conversation no
| matter the topic, is getting tiresome.
| qualudeheart wrote:
| But for good reason, no?
|
| I would personally prefer a language model designed to emit
| x86 assembly, akin to Github copilot, but I understand that
| to be a minority viewpoint.
| skohan wrote:
| Why x86 assembly? Seems like the world is moving away
| from a single dominant instruction set
| shawnz wrote:
| "Hypothetically", JIT can outperform native code given the
| right circumstances. Why not put more effort into improving
| JITs instead?
| bserge wrote:
| And who's gonna pay for that, Pushkin?
| baybal2 wrote:
| > I'm a proponent of that. Just rewriting old java or python
| monsters in an efficient language like Rust would easily give
| us an order of magnitude better efficiency.
|
| Do not rewrite software in Rust, because Rust is not an
| efficient language. It's a memory, and RAM hog, and it's
| unstable, with major breakers every release. Switching to
| Rust is not a thing for a profit seeking enterprise.
|
| In practice, it's an n-fold downgrade from good C on
| performance.
| qualudeheart wrote:
| If you can so that in C all the better.
|
| I know there exists a formally verified secure C compiler.
| Ideally you would have a similar compiler which guarantees
| low energy uses.
|
| In my experience Rust already does a great job there but
| I'm happy to behold whatever evidence exists for C being
| more energy efficient.
| skohan wrote:
| > with major breakers every release
|
| Source? I was under the impression that Rust took an
| aggressive approach to back compat.
|
| And I'm also not a proponent of rewriting in Rust for it's
| own sake, but the other commenter was suggesting it in
| place of Python, which would probably be a huge net gain in
| efficiency.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Possibly with the caveat that the unstable versions of
| rust are going to be more prone to breakage (I mean,
| obviously, but it is a way to hit issues). It was my
| impression that most people didn't need unstable anymore,
| though.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| Bunch of SoCs and board have horrible patched binary drivers
| that will never be kept upstream.
|
| Once the OEM sold the board, they made all the money so they
| don't care about long term support.
| fny wrote:
| This isn't about computers. It's about all the other things
| that have chips in them. Look up SiC chips in particular,
| they're in everything.
| flyinglizard wrote:
| If you check the inventory of a company like TI, it seems as if
| their manufacturing went offline overnight. You can not find TI
| parts anymore on Digikey. Same for ST. This is unthinkable. Only
| some companies that are a bit more specialized and upmarket like
| Analog Devices still have some stuff left.
|
| I wonder what would be the long lasting effect for these
| companies where entire products will get redesigned around what's
| available - many times these product designs live for 5-10 years.
| How many companies had to get TI parts out of their products?
| How's that going to affect TI revenue in few years time?
| etaioinshrdlu wrote:
| Meh, there are thousands of microcontrollers from TI available,
| in stock, on digikey.
| https://www.digikey.com/en/products/filter/embedded-microcon...
|
| Many of them have quantity thousands in stock. Especially the
| MSP430 line.
|
| Granted, maybe the chips you need are not available, but you're
| exaggerating a bit.
| jml7c5 wrote:
| I do wonder how much of this is exacerbated by hoarding. Similar
| to the Great Toilet Paper Shortage, where fear of continued
| shortages caused panic buying which caused extended shortfall of
| supply. And that was in an industry where production was not
| constrained and warehouses were full!
| 11thEarlOfMar wrote:
| If we can find availability of any of dozens of parts we are
| short, CEO orders are to buy out the inventory.
|
| Hoarding is a component of the shortage, and may be the both
| trigger and cause for extending the problem from months to
| years. Semi companies are buying new equipment at record
| levels, but even the equipment companies are thrashing to find
| chips to control their equipment.
|
| Analysts may want to keep an eye on balance sheet inventories
| at electronics manufacturers like Jabil, Flextronix, Fabrinet
| and their ilk to get an idea of the extent of hoarding in the
| market.
| neonate wrote:
| http://web.archive.org/web/20210902153602/https://www.bloomb...
| TedShiller wrote:
| It's not a shortage it's called inflation
| grycefispies wrote:
| I find it fascinating that through all this, rarely if ever is it
| mentioned through traditional media channels that the reason in
| large part for all of this might just be because of our over-
| reliance on China and other countries when it comes to
| manufacturing.
|
| How beautiful would it be if chips, and many other things, were
| built here in the US? In addition to the myriad of obvious
| benefits, another would be not having to wait over a month or
| more between a chip "rolling off the line" and finally making the
| month or more long trip from overseas.
|
| Sure, most news articles regarding this issue will mention
| offshore production in passing - its impossible not to. But very
| few if any are actually making that a focal point of the article.
| throwaway2048 wrote:
| china does not, and never has made the vast majority of ICs
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