Structurally, electrification, such as the mass production of electric vehicles, and digitalization need semiconductors, mostly of the high-end variety that can only be produced by the most advanced semiconductor foundries
There's nothing about electric car propulsion that requires "high end semiconductors". Auto companies have been pricing electric cars as a luxury product, and adding too much crap that has nothing to do with the powertrain to justify that to buyers.
The Ford F-150 Lightning’s extended range battery is currently only being offered as part of a $20k luxury electronics package starting at the XLT trim. The XLT is itself a mostly cosmetic $10k lighting package. You have to spend 80% over the base price to increase the battery capacity 30%.
Stellantis is worse. The all-electric Jeep Wrangler is supposed to come out in 2024 priced around $70,000. You have to get the "Rubicon" "trim level", which used to mean differential lockers and a lower low gear, but now includes such things as "biometric owner identification".
This kind of thinking is going to result in Chinese electric car manufacturers taking over the industry.
People will shell out insane amounts of money because of the Jeep brand. Clapped out, 10-year-old ones still can get $20k, even if you tried to take it remotely "off-road" it would break in 10 different ways.
If people made purely rational decisions when purchasing a car, the only manufactures left would be Toyota and Honda.
Always hilarious when people build $100K+ off-road ridiculous trucks, as unless you're totally loaded and don't care about smashing it up, it's going to get babied off-road or just never see more than a regular camping trip or some gravel. Actual hard-core off-roaders aren't driving super-expensive rigs; they're in crapcan K5 Blazers, Suzuki Samurais, old but built jeeps, tube frame customs, and side-by-sides. $40k in a SxS will get you about what a jeep would for 2x that money.
Don't even get me started on the bro dozer poser trucks. Those just exist to intimidate other people on the road, and with bumpers so high and tires + ground clearance that could easily run over something like a Corvette, they shouldn't be allowed on public roads. If only we had real vehicle inspection like some in the EU do.
> If people made purely rational decisions when purchasing a car, the only manufactures left would be Toyota and Honda.
Not sure if this is different regions or just dated. In Australia now, Honda is a joke. They are overpriced, offer terrible support, etc. Toyota is quality beige, overpriced but reliable, kind of like Sony TVs 15 years ago before Samsung and LG became dominate.
Just like with TVs, the Korean companies (Hyundai & Kia) are the smart money brands at least in the Australian Market.
Kia/Hyundai (they're basically the same company since they own each other) have had a horrible track record in the last few years. They cannot build an engine to save their lives. They scrimped on the quality of the piston rings and other internal components and they ware out very quickly.
A Kia with 150k miles is end of life, but a Honda/Toyota with that mileage is basically still being broken in, yet the Honda only has a $2k premium over the Kia.
a slightly off topic question from a novice with some messy off roading experience... is there a decent, efficient, smaller off road capable car? my current level of experience is driving through deepish (several inches) snow in chains and rocky road terrain in the eastern sierras .... in a subaru impreza...
and honestly I really feel like I want to do this more!
I've come the the conclusion that the only electric vehicle I'm likely to own is a custom conversion. I don't drive often, but when I do it's often a rental or car share. I've come to despise anti-privacy features that have become either standard or required on modern vehicles, from built-in connectivity to tpms, cars are getting to be worse than smartphones.
I'd absolutely kill for something like the K5 Blazer-E, but without the connectivity likely built into eCrate.
Same. I don't need a massive sedan or crossover, or massive range...I commute <10 miles per day, and have 7 family members within 15 miles. Most of my trips are just me, or just me and my son...why is the only electric coupe the Smart Car?
Your credibility is damaged by the fact that Stellantis has not announced any all-electric Jeep Wrangler, certainly not pricing or trim levels, and doesn't offer biometric owner identification on any current or future models either.
You seem to be getting upset about a situation that exists only in your (or someone else's) imagination.
The Jeep Wrangler EV, while staying true to its traditional SUV characteristics, wouldn’t disappoint the modern customers who also take into consideration convenience and tech features. The off-road-focused electric SUV will boast several new-age features teased by Stellantis like Peer-to-Peer Charging, Remote Vehicle Tracking, Biometric Recognition, Jeep Drone Pairing, Jeep Trails, Group Ride, OTA Updates, and AR HUD.
No need for the snark. It is not official, and may not end up being accurate, but is what has been reported.
I would take the lightning over the TubroV6 everyday.
I would never buy a Turbo car or truck... but I also would not buy the Lightning today for the same reason. I like to keep my vehicles for a long time. long term reliability of the Turbo V6 is just not there, nor the battery life of the electrics
So until then I will stick with naturally aspirated v8's
Tesla and BMW have, but they're hardly the entire electric car market. Other all-electric vehicles like the Nissan Leaf EV ($23k MSRP) or Chevy Bolt ($34k MSRP) are positively affordable compared to a Tesla Model 3 ($45k MSRP) or BMW i3 ($44k MSRP). Both of those are still cheap next to a Jaguar iPace ($70k MSRP) or a Tesla Model S ($95k) though.
Keep in mind that even a Honda Civic starts off at $22k MSRP these days.
I wish Tesla would cut the crap about self driving tech (which is probably driving up their margins and their stock value) and bring more affordable mass market cars to market. Clearly selling high margin cars is good for business but one can hope.
I strongly suspect that would be a disaster for their stock price.
They remain priced at $837B market cap (even after a dramatic recent rout where Elon sold the top and is now under SEC investigation for doing so), while Toyota has a $300B market cap. Toyota makes ~8M cars per year [1]. Tesla made 400K cars last year [2].
Toyota made 20X more cars and has a market cap just 36% of TSLA.
There's a few ways cultists (err, sorry, investors) justify this valuation gap.
1. Self driving cars.
2. High margins.
If you give up on self-driving and you start making lower-margin cars, you start to look an awful lot like a car company, which would mean you'd have to reduce their stock price to just 10-20% of where it's at right now. From $800 to $80-160. And that's generous, leaving room for some of their fun pet projects like the always-next-year solar roof tile [3].
Tesla seems overpriced when you look at their Solar/EV/battery sales, on the other hand Toyota is still pushing Hydrogen fuel cells which suggests active mismanagement to many investors.
As far as I am concerned the majority of the auto industry is a dumpster fire of incompetence. I don’t think Tesla is a good investment at this point, but a significant growth premium is perfectly reasonable IMO.
Sure a significant growth premium is reasonable, which is why I gave them one when I valued them between $80 and $160 per share.
Without a growth premium they'd be valued at $40.
They're currently valued the same as the entire rest of the auto industry combined. Plus a few utility companies. Plus the battery arm of Panasonic. There's growth premium, then there's fanciful delusions.
Like Toyota, I am still not convinced that our battery Tech is really there. We are starting to see more and more horror stories about Tesla battery Replacement costs on used vehicles, and recalls from major manufacturers.
The Resell value of battery cars may drop to Zero if very purchase is a $20,000 gamble if you will have have to replace the battery.
Personally I think hydrogen fuel cells is the better long term tech, but more than Toyota will need to adopt it
There are two different issues here. Assuming it’s a random risk you would expect car dealerships to offer some from of insurance/extended battery warranty.
However, if the batteries need to be replaced every say 12 years spending 16,500$ onto replace a 75kWh battery is less than gas prices over that time span. Further the labor is only 2,300 to replace a battery so falling battery prices could easily make that a pricey but expected repair that’s worth doing once.
Of course that’s assuming a full replacement is needed, the other option is to add capacity to adjust for reduced range. A 75kWh battery that lost 40% capacity only needs an additional 30kWh of batteries to be back to full capacity. An initial design leaving a void and appropriate hookups largely solves the problem of battery degradation.
> "Further the labor is only 2,300 to replace a battery"
Why so much? Almost three working days at $100/hour?? Here[1] for example is a video of a Nio ES6 electric car in China with a battery swap station you can book on a smartphone, drive into, and it robotically swaps the discharged battery for a charged one in ~8 minutes, with possibly one person working there dealing with paperwork (of all things).
https://youtu.be/DPVrraVbEIM?t=82 shows me that removing a Tesla Model 3 battery needs the front and rear seats, center console, and all the carpet and interior bits removed, because there are bolts going down to the battery pack. That explains the price.
I didn’t mean that 2300 was low, rather that labor is often equally or more expensive than the part but in this case it’s (only) 14%. Which means if the battery price drops by half you will see a replacement costs drop to 9,400.
>>if the batteries need to be replaced every say 12 years spending 16,500$ onto replace a 75kWh battery is less than gas prices over that time span.
That is a far too simplistic way to look at the issue, and one that is at odds with how the majority of people budget their lives. So even if technically correct (and I have not done the math to confirm) it has little relvance to the resell value of the car.
Reality does not often matter, for example certain model of cars have become known for being "trash" simply because of a 1% failure rate of a part. Most people will never have the failure but the resell value of that model takes a HUGE impact because of the perception.
If electric vehicles are PERCEIVED by the public as being unreliable past 10 years old, the resell value of older battery electrics will approach zero. You need this resell market to support new sales. The exception to this is normally the "luxury" market which is somewhat insulated by resell value because the owners typically do not care. This is also why most of the battery electrics are in that market.
But if you want to replace the Camry, or the F150, Resell value is Critical as most people only keep their car for 5-6 years, and the typical car is sold 3-4 times in it life.
As it stands right now, the battery powered car needs at least 1 full replacement to get the same life of a typical ICE car. That replacement, is more expensive than an engine for an ICE, and it typically more than the car is worth, that makes these cars a ticking time bomb to most used car purchasers. Even if the cost of gas is more over the 12-15 life. That plays no part in the metric of used car value
You say that yet EV sales and used EV sales aren’t facing that issue. A low mileage 2012 Model S is still worth ~37k, and 2013 are selling around 39k. It’s easy enough to see why, a 250 mile range * 1,000 charge cycles ~= 250,000 miles.
As to the underlying perception, I expect people will see old EV’s as being a great long term investment because they have vastly fewer bits that need to be replaced. People will be talking about slapping a new battery into an EV with 250k miles, and spend less on gas and repairs as you aim for 500k miles. Especially after a few more battery price drops.
Primary reason for that is battery issue has not reached the wider market, Tesla's are still a novelty, and owning one is an aspirational desire for many people, it is not a utilitarian car like a Camry.
Also you talking about a Car, when new in 2012 Dollars was $93,000 (that is $114,000 in today;s dollars), that is an EXTREME deprecation rate.
For comparison lets look at the Most popular vehicle in 2012, the F150. The most expensive F150 that year was the Harley Davidson Edition @ $53,000, That same truck 10 years later sells for $28,000 or 53% of its original value
The Tesla Model S Performance at a Original Price of $93,000 selling for $37,000 or 40% of its original price. Another Key factor here as well that tips this even more to the F150, is that the majority of F150s on the market from 2012 have 150,000+ miles on them, where the majority of 2012 Model S on the market have 1/2 that or less.
The Tesla Resell value is value is already in the tank compared to ICE, and that is with its cult like status symbol. Other Battery vehicles that do not have this cult like status are FAR FAR worse, and Tesla's will at some point see a similar fate if they ever become the next Honda or Toyota
A 9 year old BMW model 7 which ran 74+k new with 78k miles is only 20k, that’s at best retaining 27% of it’s value after 9 years. A 10 year old 150k mile BMW model 7 is down at 15k that’s down to 20% of it’s purchased price.
Depreciation is simply higher on more expensive cars, look at a wider selection of cars and 40% after 10 years is quite good especially on a 100k car. That said anything unusual such as the F150 Harley Davidson you looked at tends to retain it’s value much better.
BMW is hardly the example I would use to defend your stance, BMW are also widely known for their expensive maintenance costs as they age, that is the reason why they are soo poorly valued.
That is the trend Tesla is going towards, and it is not a trend to defend your position that Battery cars can / should replace ICE
The market can not bear every car having a resell value like BMW's
This is the problem with your argumentation or rather we seem to be having 2 different conversation
The topic here, I thought, was the problem with Electrics replacing the common car, highlight luxury example is not the point and I am not sure how you believe that refute the idea that batteries will be a liability for resell value
So far you are just tossing out example of vehicle resell with out explaining how or why this refutes my position that selling used electric vehicle will be increasing hard, thus lowering their resell value, if the uncerntiy of battery replacement costs loom in the future buyers mind.
no one is going to buy a 10 year ICE car if they think the engine will need to be replaced in 2 years, like wise no one is going to buy a 10 year old electric car if they think the battery (@$15,000) will need to be replaced in 2 years.
This fact will hurt the electric car adoption, and could / will prevent it from being anything more than a luxury item for rich people, who instead of being able to sell it to a less well off person, will have to sell it for scrap making our waste problem even worse
Ok, sure let’s step away from actual data and work in theory.
> lowering resale value, if the uncertainty of battery replacement costs loom in the future buyers mind.
Saying batteries are a liability for resale value is no different than saying engines are a liability for resale value. High mileage cars have lower value than low mileage cars because they face more mechanical issues. The question is just how much.
> no one is going to buy a 10 year old electric car if they think the battery (@$15,000) will need to be replaced in 2 years.
This breaks down you you start running the numbers. Look at it this way, people are going to buy an EV that will last another 5 years before needing a battery at some price let’s call it 15k. Take an otherwise identical car and say it needs a 15k new battery right now is it worth 0$? No it’s worth more than that because after replacing the battery you have a car that’s going to last longer than 5 years. It’s also going to have the full range of a new car etc.
Essentially, it’s only a bad idea to replace the battery when a car with a new battery would be worth less than the cost to replace that battery. Of course the random factor could also play a role, but that’s down to design or manufacturing defects not some inherent issue with EV’s. Put another way some ICE cars had huge issues with head gasket replacement etc, but people singled out specific makes and models with issues rather than saying the ICE was simply an unworkable design.
PS: Saying it needs a replacement at some fixed point isn’t generally true. Battery’s rarely just fail, it’s normally a steady degradation such that someone can say range will be at least X miles for N years if I drive 13k miles per year but someone that doesn’t need as long a range or drives fewer miles could go much longer without replacing the battery. Presumably the market will do some filtering so people with lower range requirements will be getting great deals.
A majority of Americans cannot afford an unexpected expense of $1,000, let alone $16,500. The fact that its cheaper than the amount of gas you'd pay over that lifetime is irrelevant considering most Americans are not rich enough to shop comparatively like that. It's expensive to be poor.
> A majority of Americans cannot afford an unexpected expense of $1,000
1. Those statistics typically use a very misleading definition of 'afford'.
2. It would be the exact opposite of unexpected, and even if you procrastinate you just get reduced range and the car keeps working.
And you could probably get a monthly payment plan for an electric car battery.
> The fact that its cheaper than the amount of gas you'd pay over that lifetime is irrelevant considering most Americans are not rich enough to shop comparatively like that. It's expensive to be poor.
You'd pay the new battery money after saving on gas for 12 years. Replacement batteries are not an "expensive to be poor" problem.
>>You'd pay the new battery money after saving on gas for 12 years.
How do you figure? For example lets look at my buying pattern
Some One leases a new Vehicle... 3-4 years later they return it, that is when I come in, I buy a Lease Return almost every time. I keep that for 5-6 years. At which point I sell or trade for another lease return. the car is typically about 9-10 years old at that point. Someone Buys this from me or the dealer then 2 years later is hit with a $16,000-$20,000 bill
People do not normally keep a car for 12 years... So you would not have "saved" for 12 years
>Those statistics typically use a very misleading definition of 'afford'.
It is not really, as it is based on cash savings of a person to incur the expense with out using debt. If we are talking about a $16-20,000 expense on a 12 year old car, it is unlikely anyone will finance that expense has it would exceed the cars resell value. No lender is going to give you a loan to replace the battery. This problem exists today with many hybrids.
> it is based on cash savings of a person to incur the expense with out using debt
When you use debt every day, it doesn't matter very much whether you put an unexpected expense on debt. What matters is how fast you'd pay that off. If it will be gone in a couple months, that's afforded. And that's a lot of people when it comes to sudden hundreds-of-dollars expenses.
> No lender is going to give you a loan to replace the battery.
You can get a loan to buy a car, why not a battery for a car? I expect it to become possible as these things become more common.
> it is unlikely anyone will finance that expense has it would exceed the cars resell value.
Once you put in a new battery pack, won't the value go up a lot?
And basically every new car becomes worth significantly less than the loan value in the first week. This isn't a new problem.
> the car is typically about 9-10 years old at that point. Someone Buys this from me or the dealer then 2 years later is hit with a $16,000-$20,000 bill
If they've only had the car for 2 years then they've barely lost any capacity. Would they even need to replace it so soon?
But if we look at it in simple terms and say the battery is 80% dead, then shouldn't the part of the car's value represented by the battery be reduced by $14k when they buy it? Either way the answer is to consider 80% of a battery as part of the price, just like any other worn out parts a used car might have.
>And basically every new car becomes worth significantly less than the loan value in the first week. This isn't a new problem.
Actually it is, that is why most lenders require you to have Gap Insurance in addition to liability on a new Car Loan
Now i suppose "battery" insurance could also emerge as a new product, but hat really do not change my position any
>If they've only had the car for 2 years then they've barely lost any capacity. Would they even need to replace it so soon?
Are you not following the conversation? Or do you believe every time the car is resold the battery is going to be replaced?
In my hypothetical, a person buys a 10Year old car, then 2 years later they need a battery replacement costing more than the car is worth. They have only had the car for 2 years, but the battery did not magically become new when the car was resold.
> Either way the answer is to consider 80% of a battery as part of the price
The open question is if this can be accurately predicted, sure if you can pull up a report and with 99% percent accuracy show the wear level of the battery that may not be an issue.
My understanding however that this is a "best guess" and is not very accurate and predicting when a battery will actually fail, the health monitor of battery pack far from being as exact as you seem to make it out to be.
> Actually it is, that is why most lenders require you to have Gap Insurance in addition to liability on a new Car Loan
Actually it is... what?
I said it's not a new problem.
And you can use the same solution: get $3k of gap insurance on your new battery.
> but hat really do not change my position any
Why doesn't that change your position? You're saying it's hard to save up that much money, but if you can finance it like a car purchase then you don't need to save up that much money.
> Are you not following the conversation? Or do you believe every time the car is resold the battery is going to be replaced?
I am following.
I was suggesting that batteries don't usually outright fail. If you start with a vehicle at 75% of original range, you don't care as much that it dropped to 70% of original, and you could continue to ride that battery down the slope.
> The open question is if this can be accurately predicted, sure if you can pull up a report and with 99% percent accuracy show the wear level of the battery that may not be an issue.
If batteries are completely failing without much warning then that's probably a job for insurance? But you need enough people to start having that problem before that product will exist. I doubt we'll reach a point where it's a widespread problem and no insurance is available either.
But even if you can't measure the specific battery, if they've used it an average amount for 10 years, and most batteries last 12 at that use, then it should still cause a huge discount.
The stock market doesn't value a company solely by what it's doing today, but also by what people think it could do tomorrow.
Toyota is rock solid and stable. In 10 years you can bet they'll be making the same number of low margin cars they do today (same as 10 and 20 years ago) and making the same amount of money. (again, same as 10 and 20 years ago)
Their stock price is reflective of that - there is essentially no plan or path to "growth".
Tesla is growing MASSIVELY. It's basically a certainty they'll be making 2+ Million high margin cars by 2023, likely up to 5 Million in the next 5-10 years. The stock price reflects that massive growth.
It's gambling, and people are betting that Tesla is going to grow massively, and that Toyota is going to stay more-or-less constant.
> Tesla is growing MASSIVELY. It's basically a certainty they'll be making 2+ Million high margin cars by 2023, likely up to 5 Million in the next 5-10 years. The stock price reflects that massive growth.
So 5-10 years from now they'll still produce half as many cars as Toyota. Assuming they can do so without reducing their margins, and that in the interceding decade, not a single other mainstream automaker will produce a competitive vehicle. That's quite an assumption.
Based on their growth trajectories, they won't reach Toyota's production rate until about 10 years from now - in spite of being valued the same as the entire rest of the auto industry put together today.
It's like if the odds of a horse to win are 1:10 but you're betting 100:1. It's irrational and has no basis when compared to other similar companies.
They're not betting that the "company will do great in the future" - that's not really how this works - they're betting number go up.
There's a lot of ways for number to go up, some to do with the underlying business, and some to do with short-term price action gambling. The difference is the former is sustainable over time - positive sum even - the latter is not, and the market will usually drain the latter out.
Tesla is a good company. But Toyota can't really grow much more because most of humanity has ridden or owned or knows someone who owns a Toyota. Short of selling Toyotas to alien civilizations, "GROWTH" here comes off as a weak shill for TLSA stock.
Well, 300k a quarter is 3x as much as 400k per year, so if you keep everything else the same it turns your estimate into $240-480 a share and that would be a much more survivable drop.
3. Growth. It makes sense to value Tesla at 3 times Toyota if starting three years from now Tesla is selling four times as many cars as Toyota at the same margin. Might not happen, but I think that's what a lot of investors were betting on. Not to say there aren't a lot of cultists too...
The other auto makers are also in self driving '.they are only doing quiet R&D, but if you are betting on automation Tesla isn't the best long term bet even before you look at potential upside.
Yeah, Uber had this realization a few years ago too. If you recall, they were also developing self-driving technology in hopes of reducing their cost basis. However, they abandoned the project after an internal report leaked indicating that it wouldn't get them more than, IIRC, a 5% uplift - for exactly the reason you say. Once one company has it, the rest will not be far behind.
Self driving is a marketing side show, they are really just focused on manufacturing scaling right now and opening factories ASAP to meet demand. And because they are having a hard time meeting demand, they have no need at the time to make cheaper market versions, which will make their demand problem worse. They announced recently that they are not focusing on new models this year, just scaling. They are in mega scaling mode.
IMO the key competitive advantage they have in the us/can market is their supercharger network and how they are ahead tech wise, making them %20 better cars than current competitors.
Why would they do that? Being a luxury brand has a lot of advantages. No reason for them to dilute it with cheap offerings - others could pick up that market, if they want to.
Is that the US? Pricing can be weird depending on region. In AU a leaf starts at $50K, a model3 at $60K, not much difference really. The cheapest here actually is the MG at 45K. But more competitors are starting to ramp so I expect prices will drop across the board as EV becomes a commodity.
Exactly! I would love to own a simple compact car like the Honda Fit or similar with an electric drive train and without leather seats, fancy wheels and various electronic assistive driving features.
I love our Leaf but ProPilot isn't that great, very much version 0.1 of something that might be less crap in future. The adaptive cruise control bit is fantastic but lane following only works when you're on very well marked roads that don't curve much i.e. highway driving and comes with a page-long list of times when it just won't work (driving into the sun, with wipers on, in fog, etc etc). Anywhere other than the highway it'll dance on and off every five seconds. Plus you have to weld your hands to the wheel and continuously wiggle a little or it'll turn itself off, which makes it mostly pointless.
Self-park is similarly crappy. Way too slow to be of any use.
Unless you're buying new though it's certainly worth getting one with ProPilot because the price difference in the second hand market is practically nothing. I dunno if the lower trim levels come with the 360 camera either but that's a great feature as well.
I maintain that most of the car's electronic guts (minus infotainment and auto-steer etc) could be done with a handful of 8051s. The problem is almost nobody it seems knows assembly anymore. The standards of CAN and LIN were created in the days of 8-bit MPUs, even I2C is quite old.
(I like assembly, but would never suggest it for a professional situation unless painted into some unforeseen corner, and assy would be the only way out.)
I would not get into a car implemented with 8051s. I entered the market on a project where an 8051 only had to manage a 2x16 character display, 16-key pad, and several motor/limit switches. The dang thing was challenged at that.
ESP32 / STM32 can do a whole heck of a lot, they're getting popular in modular synths now too. AFAIK a lot of vehicles use RTOSes for anything related to driving / vehicle stability, but I think they can use mostly whatever for infotainment, and that "whatever" seems to be largely low / mid-range stuff running absolutely garbage software that only gets updated if NHTSA makes them.
That checks out. I've contemplated getting one of those CANbus/ESP32 combos but I'm just not feeling lucky enough to muck around with my car's network for grins.
No, 8051 is just a sloppy piece of silicon. I wrote a symbolic linker and tokenizer for B-52 BASIC and an EPROM formatter so we could cross-develop on PC. We just had a busy little system and 8051 was not very reliable for anything realtime.
Squillions of them. Microchip, Silicon Labs, Infineon, and Maxim all produce such µCs, like the Silicon Labs EFM8BB - up to 50MHz, a small handful of kb of program space, a smaller on-die RAM, off you go. Or pick a more specialised IC like the Cypress FX2LP family of USB controllers - they embed an 8051 core so you can apply firmware using cheap, widely available tools.
My point wasn't to encourage 8051s in cars; it was to say that many, many types of fairly mundane MPUs can do the work needed for most of the car's subsystems. Yes, Cortex M0+ chips are just fine for this, and are (relatively) blazing fast.
I know Tesla was able to pivot to different MPUs during the shortage, because the code is pretty much decently layered; so only the Low Level code to wrap the peripherals needed to change.
It's true, it's hard to replace MOSFETs when you have 1KV / hundreds of amps needs --- however, it is possible to make MOSFET arrays using lower-capable parts.
Obviously, infotainment and AI-ish tasks are not what I'm talking about.
> There's nothing about electric car propulsion that requires "high end semiconductors".
Fundamentally, no, but that doesn't mean that these cars have been designed with chip availability in mind, so at least one of the components in the cars relies on chips that are not in supply. It's not a fundamental requirement but due to how they are being built. The article is still wrong though, namely because there is nothing special about electric cars. For ICE cars, there are supply chain issues too.
I saw a news video (CNBC?) on YouTube looking into how the chip supply shortage is affecting car sales. One of the car manufacturer representatives said they have had to cut features like power windows / locks, as may be expected.
However, he said heated seats (and some other luxury things) are an absolutely critical feature that couldn't possibly be omitted in an emergency situation like this. They're essentially as critical as having the steering wheel or brakes.
If you are doing a new design and estimates of area, pads, packaging and volumes are in the right place, TSMC 28nm or Intel 22nm are both very nice design points.
Proven tech, single patterned mask sets, fully amortized fabs.
At typical automobile volume, it is unlikely that a sub 10nm design would pencil out.
(Edit : oops - Vision and/or ML engines for self-driving or driver assist might get there as long as the design is not dedicated to typical car volume)
MOSFETs (both Si/SiC and more recent GaN) switching transistors may be made on special (Epi or Sapphire) wafers, but the Fabs are very old school (e.g. 2-6in vs 12in for CMOS) and the process geometries are practically neolithic (e.g. 90s). Processing equipment is more limited by the lack of desire to build or support something so old. Die sizes are also quite reasonable (e.g. 4kW/cm2) However, there is still enormous capacity for processing them around the world (both in US/EU, and around Asia).
Perhaps, for the new GaN on Sapphire wafers there could be a significant manufacturing limit? Mostly, those are used for Blue LEDs today.
Those appear to marketing names applied to DC Chargers. I suspect that the GaN2&3 refer to higher frequency operation. This may be due to lower parasitic capacitances, and would allow smaller components/inductors to be used at comparable efficiencies and lower cost. Certainly, the wafers and materials seem to be the same.
The do need high frequencies. It's orders of magnitude slower than digital, but the amount of power being switched presents entirely new problems. You could flip your statement around and say that digital circuits are less complex because they're low power. But that would be equally meaningless.
Digital FETs are CMOS made with fins or whatever to switch as fast as possible. Analog FETs are something else to make clean predictable signals from mature manufacturing processes. Power FETs are big arrays of trenches to not destroy themselves. You can't really compare them. That would be like comparing a racecar to a passenger van to a rock hauler. They're all vehicles, but they have different purposes and success metrics.
I am not an professional EE, but a person who professionally works on circuits from time to time.
That's absolutely not the case. The higher is the switching frequency, they higher are the switching losses in a MOSFET.
MOSFET is an electrostatic device, the charge needs to both go in, and out from the gate. The more switching, the more current goes through the gate back-and-forth.
You're talking about different things. A slow FET has a slow rise time. It spends more time crossing through the inefficient region between fully off and fully on. Switching frequency is how often you cross in one direction.
Up to a point, you can decrease total converter loss by trading conduction loss for switching loss by increasing frequency and resizing components. After that point, you start losing efficiency again. There's a sweet spot.
Yes, I see your nickname. That's the case if we go into details.
I think he specifically means high-end, high-frequency power FETs, since all the rage today is about them.
I would add that there is no real need for super-high-end switches in EVs, and component size for them is not a huge premium. There is no shortage of smart inverter topologies which achieve very good size, and efficiency without using any kind of fancy GaN of SiC switches. They will not be as small as them on the lower end, but around 100kw there is virtually no difference.
It's not a detail. It's a more complete picture. Both of your comments are different slices of the same pie.
I don't see anything written above that pertains specifically to any type of FET.
Your last paragraph is a new topic. It's true that Si can be as efficient as SiC and GaN, despite what the marketing usually says. But there are other benefits to new materials. They already support higher voltages with planar technology, and 3D will increase that further. Gate driving will get easier and more rugged.
> Your last paragraph is a new topic. It's true that Si can be as efficient as SiC and GaN, despite what the marketing usually says. But there are other benefits to new materials. They already support higher voltages with planar technology, and 3D will increase that further. Gate driving will get easier and more rugged.
There are 1000V+ silicon switches today which are not as fast, but have for, for example, very good RDSon. 1000V I think is an upper limit one would go for passenger car EV motors.
Automakers prefer low end chips because cars are an extreme environment. Cars need to start at -70c and +50c. For that latter one some of them need to work when it is sunny and they are inside the car which adds a lot more.
By “high end semiconductor” do we only mean small process size? There are other areas of “high end” capability, like the efficiency gains promised from using more exotic semiconductor materials.
Also, lots of silicon that goes into cars isn't of the high-end variety. A ton of infotainment systems, for example, run low to mid-tier chips, not always current-gen. If an auto mfg can get away with using a $3 part instead of a $5 even though it makes the UI laggy and sucky to use, they'll consider it. TV mfgs are also notorious for this, especially when it comes to under-speccing RAM.
Not the bare propulsion, but battery management does require sophisticated sensors and software that has to run in real time in order to carefully manage the charging and discharging of the batteries. If you don't do that, your battery life will suck. I could see that driving a need for high end semiconductors for electric vehicles.
I suppose they need things ICE cars don't usually have, to control multiple motors, a torque controller, regenerative braking, battery management, charge controllers, electric heating, and so on. But then ICE has to manage things they don't, like O2 sensors, ignition timing, etc.
I disagree. Electrical vehicles require a larger chip area, typically chip quality is determined by degree of successful ion impregnation into the substrate. This is why die location can determine higher potential chip performance.
Crossing fingers we will we be able to pick up 3080ti then for $100 bucks? I still think it may take much more time for the other affected industries to make up.. Which means there still some sort of supply chain communication problems...
This is coming and you will soon have any GPU want on ebay for nothing.
Inb4 someone tells me they will just mine something else. Nothing else is remotely able to handle the hashpower without crashing the price of the coin.
This has been "coming" for years, I'm sick of seeing the Ethereum community use it as a way to whitewash their wasteful PoW excess. You and everyone else should stop even talking about it until it's shipped.
> It is important to note that an implementation goal of The Merge is simplicity in order to expedite the transition from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake. Developers are focusing their efforts on this transition, and minimizing additional features that could delay this goal.
This is the exact forum to discuss this.
I can't wait till your kind of vitriol has no legs to stand on.
Electricity resources aren't limited; electricity gets cheaper when you install more solar panels, not more expensive. That will continue to be the case for the next three orders of magnitude of marketed energy consumption growth.
Some of my older notes on the topic are listed in https://dercuano.github.io/topics/energy.html, and there are further notes in Derctuo and Dernocua. Unfortunately I don't have a very clear summary anywhere.
I actually stayed at Arcosanti for a few days in college. Very cool concept that I wish had more traction. Maybe with a touch of what people are ready for today.
Depends greatly on the conditions of the facility they were mining in. Heat kills these units. A professional set-up (not to be confused with a large one) will have much more mild impact on the units than a building with poor thermal considerations. Then again, high end miners will be running custom firmware which could also compromise the card lifespan.
Hard to say the number because it is difficult (but sometimes not impossible) to deduce the device from on chain data. ASICs do exist but they have not obsoleted GPUs like has happened on other projects (such as Bitcoin.)
FPGAs were never big for mining. There was like 3 months in early Bitcoin where they people seriously tried deploying them but the simple fact is they are way too expensive from manufacturer markup for mining. And if you want to make your own you’ll just end up making an ASIC instead.
What's up with the weird pretentious verbage in that webpage? "Beacon Chain"? "Mainnet"? "The Docking"? Are they just exaggerated PR verbs, or am I just too old for this?
You don't have to be old to be ignorant. "Mainnet," and "Chain," have non-arbitrary, universal meaning in the distributed ledger space. 'Beacon' is not arbitrary either as it fits the function it names. I'm not going to sit here and defend Ethereum - but to answer you question: most of that verbage has meaning independent of Ethereum's PR.
> Are they just exaggerated PR verbs, or am I just too old for this?
False dilemma.
They are proper nouns.
Beacon chain is simply the name of the network launched a bit over a year ago. It is likely intended to be named as an aspirational thing to move toward.
Mainnet is the network launched 7 years ago. Usually distinct from "test networks", testnet, and seen far beyond ethereum into all cryptocurrency networks, and inherited from the idea of test, development, staging and production environments seen in the best practices of all web projects in the broader tech sector.
This is an article about them merging.
What is "weird pretentious verbiage" about that? If there was anything odd it would be "the docking" and that article immediately says that was a former name, making it a moot point.
"Mainnet" is a well established technical term, universal across the blockchain space.
The chain names (e.g. "Beacon") are basically version codenames - think of them like the "Buster" in "Debian Buster".
"The Merge" is the (arbitrary) name they gave to a specific future event, because people like to be able to easily refer to things they're talking about. I assume the previous name was discarded due to political correctness.
I know can you believe software companies are using words like Windows (they belong on a house!), mouse (it’s a rodent!) and keyboard (it’s on a piano!).
Ethereum wasn’t designed to be a money alternative.. it’s a distributed virtual machine that incentivizes computational contribution with token economics… the token Eth is only valuable in the pursuit of performing work via the Ethereum Virtual Machine on the Mainnet, not as a currency (at least, not any more than beanie babies could once have been a currency due to demand / fungibility)
You can blame miners but it's just extremely high demand for these cards - once the merge happens and GPUs stop being super profitable, we'll see that not much has changed in terms of availability - and 40 series cards[0] will be just as hard to get. The only change might be a temporary drop in second-hand prices as the mining GPUs flood eBay for a month.
> Inb4 someone tells me they will just mine something else. Nothing else is remotely able to handle the hashpower without crashing the price of the coin.
Devil's advocate: won't a fork of Ethereum which keeps PoW be able to do exactly that? (for example, Ethereum Classic?)
The market cap of ETC is much lower so if you have all that hash on it they sell their coins, no one wants to buy ETC nearly as much as Ethereum and poof goes the price.
Mining rewards and the price of a coin are mostly separate. Coins wouldn't crash, but rewards would be spread across more miners, reducing mining profits per hash rate.
> Nothing else is remotely able to handle the hashpower without crashing the price of the coin.
You fundamentally misunderstand how mining works. Difficulty automatically increases if blocks are being mined at faster than the expected rate. Needing more GPUs to mine the same number of coins raises the price.
> Needing more GPUs to mine the same number of coins raises the price.
Ridiculous. Price is determined by how much people are willing to buy or sell it at, which they decide based on speculation. The amount of GPUs that will be put to the task of mining is dependent on price. Not the other way around.
I could create an alt coin that requires some arbitrarily large number of hashes to mine a single block and receive 1 coin as reward. Yet I cannot command a higher price for it, because no one wants to buy my coin.
Miners will only sell at prices that cover their costs. Yes you need demand too, but it's a question of equilibrium. If demand is high, price will go up, attracting more miners. But if the cost of energy/gpus goes up, miners won't be willing to sell for the same price as before, which will also increase the price.
No I meant difficulty adjustment and I know they can also adjust now. What's being missed here is that price go up because of buyer AND seller behavior. The dynamic goes both ways. If there is a demand increase, price goes up, so miners mine more. But if costs for miners go up, they won't sell for less than their costs, so that also causes the price to go up.
The total hashpower of a coin adjusts to the point where the total cost to deliver that hashpower is just below the total mining reward.
Thus, a coin that issues $50k worth of coin per day will have $50k/day worth of hash power. If difficulty goes above that, mining becomes unprofitable.
That's correct, that's the kind of equilibrium that should be reached. I'm just pointing out that price increases can find from supplier costs going up, not just from increased demand.
At this point I don't even know if PS5 really exist. It's impossible to find in the store and there are some people whose job is find PS5 at MSRP in the stores and resell it.
Sales numbers on the PS5 seem to indicate demand is unprecedented. Even if supply can be ramped up the demand is still unmet. The world has never had so many people seeking in home entertainment simultaneously.
I guess I am also part of the problem. I hate the idea of a scalper but I bought one from a high school student who is scouting them out and buying them then reselling them at a $100 markup over MSRP to make money for college. They learned to code for this. I figured it was the right kind of entrepreneurship to support even if the entire supply chain issues we face are allowing less scrupulous people to profit akin to how this student is.
> I figured it was the right kind of entrepreneurship to support
You're supporting a scalper. You're teaching him that there's money to be made by positioning yourself as a middle man. There's no value creation here, just value extraction.
That would only be true if there were actually enough PS5's to go around, but the scalpers bought them all up anyway. There's real value in the products actually being available to buy at all, and the only reason they're available is because they're being resold at a higher price.
They were also available to buy before the scalpers bought them - that's how they bought them. The scalpers injecting themselves as middle men didn't change anything except the price.
No that's wrong. If you have $850 right now you can buy a PS5. If nobody on earth marked up the price, you wouldn't be able to buy one for any amount (without getting very lucky or expending a lot of effort to find one).
There were N ps5’s and there are still N ps5’s. The only change is from first come first serve to a market price. Without those scalpers, those units that you can buy today would already be owned by end users. Instead they’re sitting with the scalpers.
You’re completely ignoring the people who would otherwise have them. It’s less available to them and more available to those you’re talking about. It’s zero sum, at best.
I don't think I'm ignoring anyone, but I really like living in a society where goods are actually available for purchase. All I'm saying is that that's such a good thing that it counts as value added by the scalpers. There are maybe a couple issues obscuring my point, though.
First, there's a sense that scalpers are illegitimate and cheating the system. If Sony were to raise the MSRP themselves, or retailers did it instead, most of the anger and complaints would disappear. Honestly, they should absolutely raise the price. Scalpers are making the market function better in this case, because the "official" outlets are not doing their jobs.
Second, most people in the West are not used to thinking about real scarcity and what it means. (If there was a terrible coffee shortage, you might be happy to find a guy who will sell you a cup for $20.)
This is how the economy works. Scarce resources cost more money. Setting price ceilings just mean the people who are willing to pay the most can't get the item.
Isn't that the fault of Sony for selling them at a lower price than what people are willing to pay?
And the value being provided is the possibility of buying the PS5. Even without scalpers, chances are that someone else would have bought it. Scalping only works when the demand is very high compared to the supply.
PS5's are purchased between $700 and $1,000. PS5's aren't the only device with premium. Used cars have an unprecedented premium, alongside all GPUs.
The market is saying that semiconductors, especially GPU accelerated compute time is worth this much.
You can point at miners, you can point at scalpers, you neglect that every cloud compute and cloud gaming provider is building massive data centers full of GPUs as fast as they can get their hands on them at a premium too.
It doesn't take a free market libertarian to observe that its the MSRP that's wrong.
I'm not arguing people aren't willing to pay more. I'm pointing out that the scalper is providing nothing of value to anyone but himself. You can apply your same logic to healthcare, because people are always willing to pay more. It's the cornerstone of the US healthcare system.
I'm discussing ethics and you're discussing economics. The problem is this obsession with finding arbitrage to extract value from the system, which is the entire point of your comment where you're defending the market because someone can profit from it without actually providing any value. I'd like to live in a world that isn't full of selfish assholes trying to fuck everyone else over all the time. I understand market dynamics just fine - I got rich from it and I'm a shittier person for it.
Okay, let's discuss ethics. I don't see or have an ethical problem with this. Scalpers are taking a risk, if the supply was greater they lose, if the supply becomes greater before they can move their inventory then they lose. The supply is not greater. It is an amoral reality.
> I'd like to live in a world that isn't full of selfish assholes trying to fuck everyone else over all the time. I understand market dynamics just fine - I got rich from it and I'm a shittier person for it.
It is not possible to live in a market based economy and fulfill that desire. It is very easy for me to accept that. Demand for the asset simply has to dry up. It has not. People that want a PS5 can get one, at the available price. Scalpers are providing liquidity, you provided liquidity. Individual owners would be removing liquidity, likely causing greater premium in price to let one go and further hoops to jump through.
You're saying people scalping PS5s right now are taking a risk and deserve to be compensated for it. Setting aside how absurd I think this is, in the same paragraph you say this is both an "amoral reality" and you "don't see...an ethical problem with this."
You're using market dynamics to justify morality. My point is you extrapolate this and you end up with the US healthcare system, which is completely fucking broken providing less value at higher cost. Parasitic middle men don't deserve to be compensated and we should do everything possible to eradicate them.
It's actually quite easy to live in a market-based society and not have these problems - it's called regulation and we need a shitload more of it. It's how we established a minimum wage, and abolished child labor, and even separated commercial banking from investment banking for a period of time.
Good thing we are talking about consumer electronics and not healthcare, but if you must extrapolate then I can tell you my position is one of liquidity and services that provide liquidity, which the US healthcare system does not satisfy because of different market inefficiencies. So you can save that guilt trip for some other form of penance you pursue, good luck with your personal redemption arc, that doesn't move my position on consumer electronics scalpers or some other forms of middlemen.
I'm not trying to guilt trip anyone I'm just pointing out how retarded "the market" can be by using an obvious example. You're right, consumer electronics is not the same as healthcare. You're defending scalpers because you say they provide liquidity, but you're ignoring that they're creating artificial scarcity in order to price gouge you. It seems like things are misaligned to me, but agree to disagree.
Although scalpers don't behave in a uniform way, I'm envisioning a reality where individual owners using them for their consumptive purpose would be creating greater scarcity.
You're envisioning a world where people are using the product as intended, and simply because it's not available to richer people instead that is what you view as the problem?
It seems to me the problem is scarcity (I think we agree on this much), and people trying to profit off that aren't anything more than parasites (we seem to disagree on this).
Not really my stance except the one thing we agree on.
MSRP is wrong, the console is worth around $750, this would match the inflation adjusted price of home entrainment consoles for the last 40 years. In both of our views - maybe ironic to you - it would be more ethical to diminish the returns of scalpers by having the price correct in the primary market to begin with. The only reason it hasn’t happened is because Sony doesn’t want the vocal backlash especially when they drop the price to $200 just a few years from now.
As long as the primary market chooses to misprice, all the symptoms - like all the startup partime retailers you say aren’t providing a service - are completely benign. Extracting value isn’t unethical, to me that is blaming Sony’s “make work” program (the mispricing) as unethical, taking us back to square one: charge the correct amount.
I’m not here to agree, I’m completely fine with that disagreement and it doesn’t end the conservation at all, I’m here to elaborate.
I don't have a strong opinion about the manufacturer raising prices in this instance. In the sense that there is a wild mismatch between supply and demand it makes sense to do so, and I'd rather the manufacturer reap the reward. I haven't thought enough about knock-on effects though. Yes, I'd prefer the manufacturer raising prices to having scalpers do it. I'm not trying to nitpick here, but I never said otherwise.
My focus was entirely on the immorality of the scalper. In my opinion, they aren't providing value. In fact they are actually reducing value, since they have to hold at least some cards in order to sell them, actually restricting supply (and that's assuming they aren't doing it intentionally to create more artificial scarcity, which I'm sure some are). All they are doing is matching a limited supply with the highest bidder. Without scalpers just as many cards would get delivered to end users, now the only difference is those end users are richer. They are constricting a bottleneck and profiting from it at the expense of consumers and arguably even GPU manufacturers.
> Extracting value isn’t unethical
We just fundamentally disagree here. Parasitism is unethical to me. I understand it's inevitable, but that doesn't make it okay.
> I'm not arguing people aren't willing to pay more. I'm pointing out that the scalper is providing nothing of value to anyone but himself.
How is the scalper different from the retailer or the distributor (assuming there's a distributor between Sony and the retailer, although their might not be)
The scalper is providing value to the retailer by paying for and taking delivery of their inventory (although, if the scalper overbuys and then returns, that's a negative); although, if the demand is so high that the product never sits on shelves, the scalper doesn't provide much value to the retailer.
The scalper provides value to the customer by having inventory available.
I personally don't like to pay more to get something now, when I could wait and get it later for less, so I wouldn't buy from a scalper, but I can see there's value provided. The market shows there's value too.
Ethically, as long as you're honest about it, and personally, that would include not returning items you overbought, I'm not sure I see an ethical problem. If something is hard to find, and you take time and effort to find it, you can and should charge a premium to compensate you for your time. Sure, people buying to resell may move forward demand, and make the item harder to find, and that feels a bit squishy, kind of like if everyone stocks up on a commodity at once, it makes it harder to find, and makes stocking up more desirable, etc, but eventually people have enough and there will be a lull and then back to normal. Does that make stocking up unethical? I don't think so, but maybe it could be argued.
I picked one up via gamestops website of all places after trying and failing for over a month to get my order in at various retail websites. When I went to get the package from my doorman, told him it was a ps5 (and my tribulations to acquire it) and he said “oh I got one from a guy who lives in the building like a month ago, he’s had lots of them coming in”. I’m still mad and this was a few months after the launch…
Find local Discord servers with bots and people tracking stocks and sales going on. Within less than a week, you should be able to get your hands on one.
Yes, it's absolutely stupid to have to commit to this for a full week to just be able to buy a console.
I managed to buy a PS5 for MSRP-ish. I bought the console for 599€ and it came with a "free" second DualSense controller. The PS5 itself is 529€ and a controller is 70€.
There's deal alerts, specials at various retailers with a subscription like Walmart. You just have to continuously try and change up your game if it doesnt work.
There aren't any games for it yet practically speaking? It's not like the PS2 giving you access to a DVD player or PS3 a blu-ray until games appear. Even if it can "4k" a PS4 HD game, that's not that wide an audience.
It happens with age and responsibilities. My kids are grown and my friend are all stressed right now, so I've played 80 hours of valheim this week and the kids have been on 16 hours of elden ring last 2 days. Before my friends and I got going on valheim/astroneer I hadn't played games heavily for like the whole pandemic.
I’ve noticed this too. I think it’s a mix of age and no good games.
There’s more games than ever coming out but it feels like the number of really good titles is still low. Kinda like movies and TV too. I guess the market is so large now it’s a lot easier to succeed with mediocre content.
It wasn't really about what games were out there just what I felt like doing. I did a lot more physical real world stuff during the pandemic.
There are tons of amazing games out there. It's just like a new book series or author though. You gotta get to the hook.
What types of games do you like I can offer many suggestions. There have been plenty of amazing games in the last 1, 3, 5 years.
Now a days it's easier to make games, you just leverage an engine not invent graphics primitives. But it's harder to get noticed and make money. And easier to make small losses and harder to have massive blow outs. Games is a lifestyle business now.
You don't need to play new games. My Steam library is full of cheaply-bought games and there are quite a few childhood games I'd love to revisit.
If you need a recommendation, I'd go for faster than light or slay the spire. If you have a lot of time, the X series recently released a free extension for X3:TC called farhams legacy, which you can pick up for dirt cheap. But there are many games that aged well.
I think this is a discovery problem, although I don't know your subjective idea of a really good title. I'd say I have more good games than I can reasonably play, some with near-infinite replayability thanks to human opponents and a chess-like complexity of outcomes.
There's a lot of cookie cutter uninspired money grubbing crap from big studios and small, but go find what people are playing by numbers, dig past the AAA shovelware, and there are plenty of gems.
There's great stuff from studios big and small. Sure they're still printing cod/bf/Madden. But they're also making rdr2/ghosts/botw/Mario Odyssey/Metroid dread/monster hunter rise. Just like indies are making valheim/astroneer/slay the spire/monster train/loop hero/hades
If you 'can't find a game to play' while having a fast PC, you probably aren't really interested in gaming any more, not enough to justify the time cost.
Or maybe you're overwhelmed by choice, between Steam sales, Game Pass, indie games, F2P, Epic Store freebies, and more, there's always something new you can try out whithout spending much money at all.
Although I suppose it can still be hard to find something really enjoyable to play if you were obsessed with a genre that's effectively dead these days (RTS? MMOs? Shmups?). But even then, there's usually indie devs out to fill every niche they can spot
>>probably aren't really interested in gaming any more, not enough to justify the time cost.
This, basically, which to me I find completely ironic, given that GAMES is literally what got me into computers back in the 80s, ran the Intel Game Lab in the 90s, worked as IT for the company that originally manufactured, packaged and shipped many many games, such as EverQuest, my best friend is an Production Director at Blizzard (with whom I worked for at Intel's game lab) and many other career accolades in the gaming space thats too lame to go into...
Whats weird, is that I ALWAYS have a high-end gaming machine... sans much gaming time...
I bought a PS5 in October because I was really excited for BF 2042. That game was a crushing disappointment. What's worse is the fact that it's pulled a lot of my friends from BF4 and they're still playing it, hoping it'll get better.
That's left single player games, and honestly single player games take a lot of time to get started. There have been weeks now where I start my playstation, look at who's playing. Look through my library to find a game I'm willing to sink hours into, find nothing and power off the machine.
Not many good games these days. I recently played through Age Of Empires 3 and 4. I just dont like stuff like Elden Ring that is popular these days due to Dark Souls or every third person game being turned into an RPG with stats and inventory and side quests.
You could try FB marketplace. I have seen MSRP floating around for quite the last few months. I haven’t purchased one really because most of my friends are either on PS4 or Xbox 1
Current forecast is August 2023 so I’m sure glad I bought my 3090 at retail price and a couple of used 2080ti right around the start of the chip shortage. They’ve been running nonstop training stylegan :)
Very unlikely, there will always be enough demand for most modern node technology to be expensive. Be it CPUs or GPUs. Those won't drop massively in price, but we might be lucky to go back to 500-1000 range.
Although I do think there will be an oversupply "crisis", I think the article is too optimistic about the timing. From what I have read the new foundries will start production in 2024-2025, and I don't see demand going down anytime soon, and that's not to mention some of the backlog that has accumulated. Although I am curious as to how amd and nvidia have been handling this. Do they have stockpiles of chips themselves?
There’s alot of stuff stuck in the shipping channel or backlogged.
Not the same commodity, but as an illustration, I just got a bunch of 4k computer displays direct from an OEM. Normally we get stuff like this 30-60 days after manufacturing. These devices were tagged as last July and received a week ago.
I’ve been told that lots of stuff gets stuck waiting for final package assembly. (Ie the monitor stand, cable or even manual) Although chips aren’t end user products that have to have accessories, many require packaging or other subcomponents that may be lost in the mail.
Additionally, contracts prioritize certain customers, and many manufacturers don’t have good processes to deal with diversions. If you order 20,000 widgets, they may not stop shipping until to hit some high water mark. So when the US government say “emergency, ship me your widgets now”, your order gets “stolen”.
COVID response activity is winding down, so I’d venture to guess you’re going to see a lot of cancelled orders and chaos. Imo, you’ll see prices of consumer facing IT gear crash in the June-August timeframe as schools and students are flooded with gear, only to surge again as component makers retool.
Also, like gas prices (quick to rise, slow to sink), I think you’ll see manufacturers keep prices high in the many markets that are controlled by little cartels. Why sell Ford some chip for $1 when they are paying $12 today?
> Why sell Ford some chip for $1 when they are paying $12 today?
That's a very good point. When you're competing to get your part selected for a new design, you want to sell it cheap, but once they've done all the work of incorporating your part and testing it, you want to make it expensive. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
Yes they do. First, they normally buy complete electronics (functional devices with or without software), not just chips. Second, they do have strong contracts, spreading for 3, 4, 5+ years, specifying the volumes for each contracted year and also the piece price (among other details, of course).
To add to the logistical supply chain issues, the fleet of Anotov aircraft (including the AN-125 and AN-225) play a crucial role in the fulfilling a range global logistical needs, but the factory in Ukraine is reportedly damaged, leading to expected impacts to their serviceability and spare parts manufacture.
This will almost certainly have flow-on impacts to the broader shipping and commercial airline market, and further screw up delivery of your monitor’s user manuals.
Oversupply is just as much a crisis as undersupply. The lead time on ramping capacity up and down is long, which leads to a cyclic market which overshoots in one direction or the other. It's hard to predict the cycles.
However, an "oversupply" crisis means that either:
- prices falling, meaning costs aren't covered;
- equipment isn't running 24/7 as intended, leading to higher costs
This means businesses go under. There's a firesale which is nice, but the structural damage is far more harmful.
Personally, I'd like to see this industry a little bit more socialized. I'd like my chips produced in the USA, even if they cost a little bit more, so we're self-sufficient. I'd also like the supply chains to be in the US. I think the same goes for the EU, China, and hopefully soon, India and Africa. Having five independent supply chains costs five times as much, and I understand the efficiency argument for having just TSMC (and maybe Samsung or Intel), but I think both COVID and Ukraine highlight the risks of systemic failure.
We're just a little too over-dependent on each other.
I also wouldn't mind if my taxes paid for some excess, unused capacity, as they do with food production. That's also less efficient, but gives resilience.
We don't need to be self-sufficient everywhere, mind you. Most goods aren't essential. I do think each region should be self-sufficient for food, medicine, and now, ICs.
I have a tiny little side business making an electronic gadget. I've had to get good at substitution. Granted this is easier for me, I don't have to go through an engineering change order process, and can usually trust my gut on what's going to work. Still, it's a PITA.
Yeah it's a pain for those in the business. Thankfully it's just a hobby for me, but I've talked to professionals who were on their fourth board revision due to substitutions... can't be fun.
I feel like there’s a great opportunity here for electronic engineers with a good eye for supply chain dynamics to consult into all manner of industrial and consumer markets to assist with strategic re-engineering of their products.
Note that Ethereum is switching to proof of stake this year, almost surely before Q4. It's true that this upgrade has been coming for years, and it's also true that it's actually arriving this year (if interested, see https://eth2.news).
After Ethereum switches to proof of stake, global demand for GPUs will plummet as GPUs are uncompetitive for BTC mining, and beyond BTC, ETH is by far the largest remaining proof of work coin.
This. I've been planning to buy a new gaming rig for two years, but wasn't so much a priority that I would pay exorbitant prices for even midrange hardware.
When normality is restored, I'll be happy to finally upgrade.
The main difference is that gamers are consumers, while ETH miners use GPUs to make income. Even though gamers were buying scalped GPUs, I'd imagine GPUs going to back to being treated as a consumable (rather than something that generates income) would help prices.
But people who don't necessarily need it and/or don't make money with it won't pay insane prices for (ab-)used mining GPUs. It won't be insanely cheap, but definitely a lot cheaper.
People that care about PoS could have already invested in something else. The people stuck on Ethereum will boast about PoS coming soon, but if tomorrow they said they were going to wait for 5 more years they'd stick with Ethereum and talk about PoS for 5 more years without switching to a different PoS token.
In my view, this site is strong evidence for the thesis that demand for GPUs will plummet, here's why:
1) If we tweak your link to sort by Market Cap, we can see the next biggest coin to mine after ETH is has only 1% of ETH's market cap https://shorturl.at/lxLS5
2) These smaller coins do not have the capability to automatically or naturally grow bigger market caps, trading volumes, and buy-side demand just because ETH switches to PoS. Mining profitability ultimately comes from a coin's buy-side demand, which is proportional to many things-- fame, developer activity, etc.-- and none of the PoW chains in that list are anywhere remotely close to "breaking out" and growing proportionally with Ethereum, or, say, Solana. How do I know this? Well, I'm an insider that focuses all of his time on ethereum and web3, you'll have to take my word for it :)
As someone rather naive in regards to cryptocurrency, I don't understand what you're basing this on:
> These smaller coins do not have the capability to automatically or naturally grow bigger market caps, trading volumes, and buy-side demand just because ETH switches to PoS.
What would they need to cross that barrier? For example, don't all coins have the ability to manipulate trade volume by sending money between owned wallets?
Sending money between two wallets you own creates transaction volume not trade volume. The latter comes from orders matching against each other on an exchange and requires paying the exchange fees so it is not as easy to fake (you need the exchange itself to be in on it, or they take all your money in fees).
Can you translate for people (like me) who don't know what all those numbers are supposed to represent? I can't make sense of it or relate any of them to GPU demand.
I don't understand much of the site either, but at a high level, my guess is that it's sorting crypto coins by computation required vs $$$. Right now ETH is at the top, aka for every flop you put it, you get the most return, but there are many others not far behind. So even if you were to eliminate Etherium entirely, there would still be plenty other that are profitable to mine.
Why sell a GPU for a fraction of the price, when you can just switch over to another coin and make 50-90% of the money you were making still.
If you have a GPU you could use it to "mine" various coins. That site calculates which of them is currently the most profitable and how much profit you're likely to make with a given hardware configuration
Right but what happens when another blockchain technology hits the scene that’s trendy and happens to be PoW? People who made significant investments into GPU miners and the infrastructure to support them won’t go away quietly.
That's fair, what if another PoW coin gets really popular?
The good news here may be two-fold
1) the existing group of public chains have matured greatly and their network effects are quite strong now. It is no longer so easy to start a new chain
2) virtually all new chains are PoS because it's understood to be significantly more secure and less expensive vs. PoW
3) public chains take years to grow, and right now, there is no PoW public chain on my radar that has a chance of generating nearly as much mining demand as Ethereum (and Bitcoin but ASICs)
For those reasons, the idea of a new public chain appearing from nowhere and impacting GPU demand seems in practice unlikely to occur.
> virtually all new chains are PoS because it's understood to be significantly more secure and less expensive vs. PoW
PoS security relies on the integrity of the stake — and the integrity of the stake relies on the “security” of the PoS system. It’s an intractible circularity problem.
Yes, a large sample of recent altcoins have shipped PoS, but this is no more relevant to a PoW v PoS security debate than a modern top 40 “hit songs” chart is to a debate over Beethoven v Bach.
I have been full-time on Ethereum for years, I'm a software engineer, and I have a relatively intimate knowledge of the specific milestones the community has been achieving and why that implies that proof of stake will ship this year.
Here's an overview
Dec 2020: proof of stake launched in production, but isn't yet used to secure ethereum, it runs in parallel
October 2021: the last major upgrade to Ethereum before switching to proof of stake went live in production
Today: proof of stake "Merge" testnets are live, all core teams are 100% focused on the merge, regular progress reports are nominal, etc.
The future was much more certain a couple of week ago.
But yes, that's expected. After supply-line shocks shortage and oversupply follow each other. If people play their cards right, they get a quickly decreasing amplitude on those crises, if they play wrong, they get always increasing ones until a lot get bankrupt.
The chip manufacturers seem well aware of the problem and to be playing it correctly. I wouldn't bet on the oversupply crisis being nearly as large as the shortage.
The future is never certain. There are times when it feels less uncertain. But that's generally an illusion, a false sense of security. Past performance is not guarantee of future (returns).
As someone already mentioned, the media loves to manipulating this state to their (profit) advantage.
I don't think "the news" is actually all that good at informing people. "This happened and then this happened, and now for the weather" are facts and information without context, and without any real meaning.
I haven't watched the news for years, or read the newspapers. I do real articles from magazines and newspapers and books and such (from HN, among other places), which are far more useful. I don't really know what's going on in Ukraine right this moment, but most will have forgotten that in two weeks time anyway, so what's the point? Instead I spent some time reading up on the context a few weeks ago.
The news is also strongly biased towards negative events. The classic example is that "plane crashed" is big news, but that planes are actually very safe. "Man spills pint and gets punched" is news. "Man spills pint and it's all fine" is not. etc. It's not a particularly good reflection of reality.
I installed NOS's (the Dutch public broadcaster's) app on my phone and turned on push notifications. This way I get informed about important news, but can easily avoid everything else.
If the default MO of the news media is to stoke fears and sensationalize the mundane in order to profit off higher viewership, then it's all the more important that we fight through the de-sensitization and pay attention when meaningful world events happen.
For me personally, I find the war to be incredibly distracting, because my attention was almost constantly drawn to it. But throughout the past few days I learned a few thing:
The situation on the ground does not change that quickly, fresh reports are often wrong or fabricated. But most importantly: I've gotten myself to be constantly obsessed over a distant war which made me forget what I actually wanted to do over the past few days.
I'll continue to follow the news, but not every hour and minute, and I'm just thankful a place like this exist.
Because we can completely fill our days with what's going on in Ukraine and yet be able to do very little about it at an individual level and I'm really not sure that's good for someone's sanity.
I was thinking the same thing. It’s not like I’m being asked to direct troops or something.
Instead of watching/reading news for hours. Take 30 min to donate some money and email your representative in Congress on your beliefs. You’ll have done way more to help your cause than watching news and you get your day back.
Maybe, but it's the truth. Most events don't matter on a local or individual level and having access to global news updated every single second is a very recent development, one that seems to be contributing to an incredible amount of anxiety and stress for many people/society as a whole.
Perhaps a more reasonable approach is reading the news once a week. You stay informed, but it's not something you worry about daily.
It's not the truth. You can absolutely read the news and live a happier life from it. I feel better knowing what's going on outside my little bubble even if it's bad stuff.
It's on the individual to find a happy balance of media consumption for their mental health in the same way it's on the individual not to eat candy every day for lunch.
Yeah! Imagine being so privileged you’re allowed to turn off the news and feel happier without mom and dad grounding you from the internet or the government aiming a nuke at you in response, which would thereby prevent you from typing words into a text box and clicking the Reply button when you’re done writing your thoughts.
That would suck because then someone else wouldn’t be able to come along and not actually provide a counterpoint to your comments, but instead just write “what a privileged thing to say”, undoubtedly smirking while simultaneously sipping a latte and clicking Reply to submit their effortless snarky reply from their $5K/month apartment located in the heart of some tech city.
really, you have to be privileged to not watch the news? Then I guess by your reasoning, all those folks that can't afford tv or internet at all are the most privileged of all, correct?
You’ll always find a reason the latest crisis is worth being scared of. But we’re just going to go from one crisis to the next so we need a way to make peace with that.
I think CS Lewis explained it well when the atomic bomb was created:
> In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. “How are we to live in an atomic age?” I am tempted to reply: “Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.”
Remember that not everyone lives at a safe distance from the events that you prefer to tune out. We haven't been referring to low probability threats that are ever present in our daily lives, but acute issues that could change our lives very fast, especially if we don't pay attention.
And of course in that case the information is of immediate importance to you, however if I'm 16000 km away, I'm not sure that I need blow by blow reporting on events that may only impact me through increased costs of goods.
I have absolutely no way of impacting events in the Ukraine, even if I decide to contribute to a charity or try to influence my local member of parliament there is still absolutely no benefit to be gained by anybody (except perhaps the media) of me consuming this coverage.
I can however benefit significantly by avoiding news reporting that is going to continually trigger primitive fight or flight instincts and leave me in a high state of stress.
To add, there's no requirement that you must keep tabs on every atrocity in the world at all times. No one is forcing people to check twitter every hour to tank your emotional energy every day.
There isn't going to be nuclear contamination in Europe because of a stray rocket in a war zone. Come on. Chernobyl isn't going to explode again. This is a perfect example of the irrational catastrophizing that comes from getting your information about the world from the news.
What you want is predictability and stability. The bullwhip effect of supply chain disruptions alternate between shortages and gluts, and they both cause economic damage.
Having a glut of a product or resource destroys manufacturing capability as employees get furloughed, factories shut down, and talent is lost. ...it then creates a shortage when demand picks up and so on.
Markets are good at reacting if the future is predictive, but if it is unexpected, then there is damage in both shortages and gluts.
Importantly, the more complex and deep a supply chain is, the more unpredictable and magnified the bullwhip effect becomes, even when you expect gluts/shortages. This is because every participant in the chain attempts to cushion themselves from the shocks by stockpiling and timing their sales.
In a perfect system, you are more correct than you give yourself credit for. This is not that. In case you haven't noticed, a GPU costs more than the rest of the components of a PC combined. And that's because of so-called market and or supply chain inefficiencies (which I'm supposed to, as a consumer, take on the chin).
In spite of political, personal, or professional neglect, (don't care which one) chip companies are posting gargantuan earnings YOY and seem to be doing fine.
On the other hand, my sibling can't afford a car or a non-pre-built computer.
I guess it's not clear in your post, but who exactly are we looking out for here? The furloughed talent? The "market"?
And regardless, how is that my problem?
Again, I would love to have a level headed discussion about this, but please be honest about who truly loses in an oversupplied market.
BTW, because I see this here a lot: just because the whole "it's more complicated than you think" rationale is not a commonly accepted logical fallacy, doesn't mean that it's not bullshit all the same.
Oversupply is great for consumers but very bad for suppliers. Neither extreme is healthy long term. You generally want a balance between supply and demand so that suppliers have a predictable target they're aiming at and can expect a reasonable profit given the capital expenditures needed to make next generation products. If we go into a prolonged oversupply situation, that will be great for prices to consumers in the short term. However the longer it persists this will of course limit, or even eliminate, profits that can be made. As a result, companies will reduce production capacity and eventually R&D for their next generation products. This in turn will tend to increase prices with minimal product improvements longer term.
I hear you man, but guess what, I'm not a supplier, so again: qui bono.
You're argument assumes we have anything close to a healthy economy now. And in another world, you'd be right. However, that not being the case, your argument is moot at best and disingenuous at worst.
You're looking at it purely from the short term perspective of say GPUs, cars etc. as a consumer. Sure, a short term oversupply to drive prices back down to a sane level (or even below sane for a little while) would be a good and healthy thing. That's coming.
However, what the article is talking about is the risk of a longer term oversupply situation at the foundry level. If that happens the result will likely be even more consolidation. The downside to you as a consumer would be lack of innovation and flat to higher prices over time.[1] Once you get below a handful of players in a market, the worse your options as a consumer get.
The bullwhip effect, the wikipedia page on it is pretty good, has nothing to do with the economy per se. I don't think we have seen it at display as big, as long and as global in my life time. My professional opinion is that a lot can simply attributed to disrupted supply chains and an overall bullwhip effect.
Over supply lead to consolidation. The weak get acquired. There are currently only 4 legit foundries, a legitimate crisis could turn that into 2 or 3. The less competition there is the more market failures there will be.
Not at all. The first noticeable things they'd probably do are ramp down production to meet demand and stretch out product generations even longer. The improvements between generations would be much smaller when they did arrive. Prices would still likely go up generation over generation. The less profit they can look forward to from increasing unit sales from market demand, the more they'd start cutting corners to make their numbers from the demand that did exist... one way or another they will make as much money as possible.
It's arguable that they've been doing a bit of this over the past couple of generations... it would get far worse in a chronic oversupply situation.
In general, oversupply is bad for everyone because all suppliers lose money, but only the ones with deep pockets can survive - increasing market concentration. In this case, I‘m not sure it hurts, since the chip market is already dominated by big companies.
You have to pay for capital depreciation of unused capital. Money does not depreciate except via inflation. So people will tear dismantle the factory and trade it in for something that does not depreciate ie money.
We end up richer on paper and poorer in reality.
Volume 1 Marx would say that the unused capital still represents a source of exploitation. Volume 2 Marx and beyond would say that the problem lies in the circulatory sphere and that it is the money capitalist that is threatening the productive capitalists.
A lot of people consider lean manufacturing a religion and can't seem to see that there are some holes in the plan when you go outside a nation and see that some countries just don't like each other and will use their country's businesses as political capital.
I agree with you man and you would think that would be a given.
However, the critical flaw of highly rational actors is that their actions always incur a reality tax, and, more likely than not, they're nowhere to be found when the bill comes.
"Cyclically, with so much labor and education shifting online, the pandemic has unleashed strong pent-up demand for electronic products."
It's not "pent-up" demand, it's new demand. It would be "pent-up" if people hadn't been allowed or able to purchase before, but now they are. The shifting of labor and education online, if it is a major factor at all, would be creating new demand.
"The stockpiling that we saw in 2021 has also resulted in transportation bottlenecks."
There are many reasons for the transportation bottlenecks, but stockpiling is a best a minor one, and more likely not really a reason at all. If anything, it works the opposite way, with transportation bottlenecks resulting in stockpiling, as buyers know they cannot assume it will always be available to buy Just In Time.
"Structurally, electrification, such as the mass production of electric vehicles, and digitalization need semiconductors, mostly of the high-end variety..."
Vehicles, in particular, need a lot more semiconductors that are _not_ "high-end", which is why Intel couldn't use its spare capacity to help out the auto industry as much as they wanted to; their fabs were actually too modern to make the higher-voltage, larger-dimension semiconductors that the auto industry needed, mostly made in older fabs.
Ok, three factually inaccurate statements in a row, I am giving the rest of the article a pass.
They way I read the article, there is going to be excess supply of things such as power-regulation ICs, 2.4GHz radio chips and so on. I'd guess that consumers will gobble these up all across the world in smart appliances and IoT like never before. GPUs are nice, but they won't regulate your heating amid rising gas prices.
Or may see a shortage in capacitors, resistors, transistors....there will always be a weak link and for most it has been chips. If we shift towards an oversupply and we will as with such lead time to lets build a fab to lets use that fab, markets change momentum. SO you get growth, then shrink back to balance out supply, then some spike via some event or demand and the pulse of industry moves on.
What will be more interested in is how the supply chain changes and will we see a more cautious approach to just in time, offloading warehousing to suppliers or will we see a more granular balance. So that will be interesting going ahead and may well see initial oversupply delayed filling up those buffers.
Oversupply means a few of the suppliers will not be able to sell their chips and might face bankruptcy, leading to monopolies in a decade or so when the pendulum swings back again. Don't worry too much about it though, it's difficult to predict the future and it's equally possible that the market will return to relative balance without overcorrection.
There are not going to be any bankruptcies even in a severe oversupply situation. Chip manufacturers are much higher margin and better capitalized than in the past, and a lot of the riskier capacity expansion this time around has been financed by customers
I can’t think of any more major consolidation that can take place. Maybe within NAND, but for different reasons as there’s not really risk of a long lasting supply glut in that market.
Governments have/may start seeing chipmaking as something of national security, right? So would they let a great amount of consolidation occur or will every continent have its own heavily subsidized chip industry
Temporarily, perhaps. The risk is that without planning that oversupply leads to a period of greater shortage due to cancelled production, bankruptcy etc.
Isn't that obvious? If there is an oversupply of GPU, as a customer I win. If there's an oversupply of some niche ARM chip I might not win but I'm not losing either...
I don’t know if there will be an “oversupply” of GPUs, because now they are all manufactured at foundries and the chip companies can just cut their orders. But with Intel coming into the market, Samsung switching to TSMC, and TSMC putting in $120b of capex, the shortage should be alleviated pretty soon.
If there's an oversupply of GPU chips _and_ everyone builds them into products and sells them. There's a fair amount of demand in that specific instance but that doesn't translate into capacity for everything else and companies aren't going to be quick to lower prices.
To give a real world example of how the chip shortage is affecting me...
The vehicle I want to buy does not come with the chip for heated seats or parking sensors, because they simply do not have enough of them. You can buy that vehicle without those features, and at least with the heated seats, they promise to retrofit them "at some future date." All of the models that got made before the cut-off sold super quickly, and I'm just waiting to buy until the vehicle is complete at signing.
> Because if they wanted them they would buy them?
Only if they can afford them and can justify the purchase. People want many things that for various reasons they don't acquire. It may be cost (units would have to be sold at a loss to get down to consumer-comfortable pricing), it may be that it's part of a larger system. For me to get a new AMD CPU I'd also need a compatible motherboard and, possibly, different RAM (either for physical compatibility or to get an actual performance improvement, even if my old RAM "works" if it's sufficiently slow it's a bottleneck that makes the purchase not worthwhile to me).
I for one cannot wait for the used car market to crash. The new car prices have gone and I don't expect them to come down. They will keep the prices at the same inflated level and offer deals and/or loans. However there is room for elasticity in the used car market and can see it coming down as new car availability becomes better.
Presumably there will be a shortage of three year old cars in a couple of years and six year old cars in four or five years. This is going to ripple through the used car market for a long time.
This is why I don't care about following any 'supply chain' worries the tech community is for some reason worried about. It'll undershoot, it'll overshoot, it'll balance itself out eventually and my interaction with it won't make a lick of difference.
This is how the semiconductor industry used to work - boom bust cycles. The author is probably right that lots of supply will come online at the same time, probably overshooting demand. There’s lots of demand still though, and possibly dealt with by not running balls out 24/7. They’ve been at max capacity for a while and not running at that point might be good for everyone.
This is pattern than falls most supply shortages. Lumber was in seriously short supply during the pandemic and prices skyrocketed. A few months later places has more wood than they knew what to do with and supplies were piling up.
Hopefully the strategy teams at these large semiconductor companies are aware of the Bullwhip Effect [0] and the investments we're seeing are being done with that knowledge already in hand.
IMO the more interesting part of this article is the prediction that a bifurcation will take place. Still a good thing, but interesting that, as of now, most media talks about the "chip shortage" in terms of "Is there a shortage or not?" rather than a more complex model.
Will this mean car prices will return to normal and wait times to receive them won’t be so long? I feel like the auto industry has directly impacted me the most, as I try to look to get a car.
Or just buy a car that has moved past the dealership model. There are a few now, and if the free market wins it should slowly replace the dealer model…
Literally 4-5k saved off every car if you order direct from the manufacturer.
Think we are well past that. Even if these companies had huge stockpiles, they would have been depleted long ago.
No company is going to hoard multiple years worth of inputs. Supply has remained high in semiconductors too, it's more of a demand than supply problem. But of course, elevated demand and normal supply leads to shortages just the same as normal demand and shortened supply.
I hope not, I like the cheap goods that just-in-time produces.
If you look back at what many were saying at the start of Covid you would have thought we would have all been eating our neighbours by now. The reality has been completely different, an artificial shortage of toilet paper and a slight tightening of supply on consumer goods. If anything this tells me our supply chains are quite robust.
There are a lot of things we could have done differently to prevent the current issues. Reducing capital efficiency by requiring massive stockpiles isn't necessarily at the top of the list of good ideas. I'm not saying it's a bad idea, just that this isn't necessarily the first thing we want to jump to across the market.
I wonder how AMD and Intel's announcement that they will stop chip shipments to Russia indefinitely will affect this. I don't know how big of a consumer Russia was but I imagine it could have some impact with all that stock now back on the market.
Their economy is smaller than Italy. Some datacentres and such, but meh, those aren't buying bare chips from intel anyway. They're usually buying complete servers manufactured in other countries anyway.
I'd be surprised if it even made a half percent dent.
They do want that. It’s part of their backup plan for being cut off from the West. That’s why Putin made a big show of meeting with Xi just before the invasion.
One upside of Bitcoin style mining is that its mining chips can't be used for anything else (no GPUs, CPUs, FPGAs, or SSDs used for Bitcoin mining - only special SHA256 ASICs), so it doesn't have much effect on the supply of semiconductors outside of a small number of older foundries allocating some capacity to BTC chips. Other projects like Ethereum intentionally used GPU-optimized mining algorithms, with the idea that this would help decentralization (which hasn't really worked for various reasons).
Bitcoin ASICs are hardly on older process nodes. Intel's just announced chips are using their 7nm process, Bitmain is on TSMC 7nm and 5nm, while Microbit is on Samsung's 8nm.
It depends on third-party requests which are blocked by uMatrix by default. Specifically, you need to enable JS from code.piano.io and experience-ap.piano.io, and XHR to c2-ap.piano.io; in addition to the first-party domain.
There's nothing about electric car propulsion that requires "high end semiconductors". Auto companies have been pricing electric cars as a luxury product, and adding too much crap that has nothing to do with the powertrain to justify that to buyers.