It sort of does help; chip prices have risen because customers are out-bidding each other. If you're willing to pay 10x 2019 prices you can probably get whatever chips you need. Many companies are deciding that's not worthwhile.
>If you're willing to pay 10x 2019 prices you can probably get whatever chips you need. Many companies are deciding that's not worthwhile.
The problem as I understand it is a company like TSMC sells capacity for the some time period - like a year. The automakers thought people wouldn't buy cars, so they relinquished their slots. Turns out car demand exploded, so they went back to TSMC and said "hey we need those slots" and TSMC said "sorry your slot already got sold to nvidia".
Chrsyler could offer to pay TSMC 10x more, but that that ultimately wouldn't do much, the slot is gone and they would have to buy the capacity from nvidia. nvidia is in no position to sell because they are also facing extreme demand. How would it look to nvidia if, while gamers across the world can't get their hands on 3080s, they sold their fab capacity to Chrysler for $$$$?.
I think your simplifications could change the logic here.
Chrysler does not directly buy from TSMC, they buy from i.e. TI, Renesas, Microchip, NXP, ...
Many of those companies do still have fabs, and even if not, they are not competing with Nvidia. They are producing on the old, old fabs, at 40, even 80nm. We would need better numbers on where these microcontrollers are fabbed to be able to tell how this interferes with i.e. Nvidia and Apple on TSMC 5nm.
I'm not even sure it's strictly speaking still true that automotive only uses outdated fabs. Tesla seems to have disrupted the use of low-end chips at least in high end cars, like Jaguar Land Rover.
Change "probably" to "definitely" and I'm with you. Automotive chips need to be a lot more reliable than a PS5 GPU, and that kind of reliability takes time to test and prove. Not to mention that automakers try not to change parts unnecessarily because their economies of scale are only as useful as their ability to use one component across several models and years. If you care little about thermal efficiency and power consumption, and you're not doing extremely abstract computations, there's no reason whatsoever to spend tons of money on a smaller lithography. I was looking into this recently, and the price difference between some of the equipment involved is around two orders of magnitude from the leading edge to the trailing edge.
Not even 80nm. Most stuff in that space is 130nm+, some extremely old, but still produced ICs from early nineties are on 300nm+ for use on equally old automotive parts.
If you look at the concurrent user numbers on Steam, it seems like there's overwhelming engagement in the gaming space right now. I thought the same as you until I looked into it a bit more.
(Also, bitcoin is mined on ASICs nowadays, but I get what you mean.)
I've never heard of other crypto currencies referred to as Bitcoin by anyone other than noobs. It's like calling the Mexican Peso a Dollar. The semantics are important - i.e. for doing something like currency conversions.
Are we noobs here or is this a tech forum where people might reasonably be expected to know the difference between Bitcoin and Ethereum? I'd argue it's the latter.
You can't say that Bitcoin is responsible in a discussion about GPU shortages. It's flat-out wrong and obfuscates the actual problem. It's Ethereum that's mostly responsible for said shortage, and seeing as how Ethereum is moving to proof of stake soon that problem might be alleviated. Bitcoin uses all custom hardware for mining and is not affecting the GPU shortage. The problem with Bitcoin mining is power consumption, not chip contention.
That will be actually fun. Make a company invest in some random crypto coins, presents movements. Just call all of them bitcoin... Argue that at this point it is generic name... Skim your fees from top.
Chip shortages are at a point in the US were government contractors who already have right by law to jump ahead of anyone else in line when ordering and can probably pay whatever price they want are still being told that new shipments won't come for 16 months.
Yes. It’s really a testament to the praise of Tim Cook as a master of operations.
It’s quite a statement that Apple launched four variants of the same product (M1 Air, M1 Pro, M1 iMac, M1 iPad) in the middle of a supply chain apocalypse, all within a few weeks and is both delivering on schedule and even putting the product on sale.
Call your HP rep and try to buy an LCD monitor right now.
10-15 years ago, Cook's level of competency wouldn't have been anything special, but that of competent operations lead.
The industry in the West not only shipped everything to outsourcers, but even forgot how to manage outsourcers as well, being fully reliant on turnkey services.
To be fair, this only works because it is difficult to make money off of protein folding. It is kind of a waste, but not wasteful enough to criticize it.
It's not correct to think that increased prices solves shortages. I work in automotive chip industry. We have many cases where no amount of money could fix the shortage within the next 9 months. Only choices for carmaker is to produce fewer cars or produce the car without the chip that is short (which is not always possible).
There are contracts that might prevent that from happening, just like lead times don't disappear, even if you outbid everyone else (if it was a bidding issue).
Throwing money at a problem to try and solve it can be impossible in various ways.
Yeah, but -- though I haven't run the numbers -- it seems like Jaguar would be better off taking smaller profits while overbidding for the chips rather than just go idle and make something. Even selling at a loss may be preferable to the huge damage to brand from such a discontinuity. (Remember how hard the major internet sites work to avoid downtime.)
It's not just the normal customers, though. A predicted shortage caused a run on chips by people looking for a profit. I've been working on a PCB design for months in which I specifically picked a chip to design around that was newish, in current production, and plentiful at all the major suppliers. I got my first test run done, made a few changes, ordered a second run, which I intended to populate myself, and there were exactly 4 chips left at a single major supplier. Yet, Octopart suddenly lists dozens of new suppliers I've never heard of.
