from Hacker News

Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

by __Joker on 10/18/22, 9:14 AM with 690 comments

  • by top_sigrid on 10/18/22, 10:07 AM

  • by programmer_dude on 10/18/22, 12:40 PM

  • by bouncycastle on 10/18/22, 12:05 PM

    Related: There is a massive TSMC factory being built in Japan right now. Take a look at the pictures, I've never seen this many cranes at one location:

    https://www.nhk.jp/static/assets/images/newblogposting/ts/7P...

    https://cdn-cw-english.cwg.tw/ckeditor/202205/ckeditor-628ae...

    It looks like a forest of cranes...

  • by valdiorn on 10/18/22, 12:10 PM

    So, can someone explain to me why I can't get ANY chips for anything at all? Everything is out of stock that I use in my designs (Audio processing equipment). microprocessors, microcontrollers, ADCs, DACs, audio codecs, memory. Even bread and butter diodes were hard to source a few months ago. You name it, Mouser/Farnell/Digikey/the manufacturer doesn't have it. And if they do, it's priced at 500% MSRP.

    It may be "swinging the other way" but we're at the very depth of the curve right now, and lead times are frequently 12-18 months. I can't see any evidence that it's swinging back, personally, maybe someone else does (like the writer of this article).

  • by Isinlor on 10/18/22, 11:03 AM

    China already declared that it will use force in Taiwan if "possibilities for a peaceful reunification should be completely exhausted".

    From Chinese Anti-Secession Law:

    Article 8: In the event that the "Taiwan independence" secessionist forces should act under any name or by any means to cause the fact of Taiwan's secession from China, or that major incidents entailing Taiwan's secession from China should occur, or that possibilities for a peaceful reunification should be completely exhausted, the state shall employ non-peaceful means and other necessary measures to protect China's sovereignty and territorial integrity.

    https://www.europarl.europa.eu/meetdocs/2004_2009/documents/...

    It is USA/EU strategic interest to avoid too deep dependency on Taiwan. We should support the status quo there as people of Taiwan are prosperous and peaceful nation. But we can't be caught off guard by China as EU was caught off guard by Russia.

  • by mensetmanusman on 10/18/22, 11:17 AM

    Highly recommend the economist’s podcast on Xi called ‘The Prince’

    Xi became a Leninist and is trying to be the next Mao. He is a true believer that his glory and the glory of China can only happen by taking back Taiwan.

    TSMC is a huge reason for this conflict. The current US policy is trying to slow China’s technological might for that next war.

  • by lvl102 on 10/18/22, 12:01 PM

    Intel messed up big time and I hate to see the US govt dump more money on incompetence. They are failing their way to success.

  • by alexk307 on 10/18/22, 2:45 PM

    It seems silly to measure short term success in an industry known for "notoriously cyclical" booms and busts. The size of the investment needed to create these manufacturing plants in the US, coupled with the complexity and time it takes to build them, combines perfectly for articles like this.

    I can't think of a reason that on-shoring chip fabs would be a bad thing for the US - other than the vague threat of China retaliating. Cutting off foreign dependencies in high-tech industries would surely be beneficial in the long term.

  • by iancmceachern on 10/18/22, 3:39 PM

    It's the people, the talent, the knowledge that drives any industry like this.

    The US government, US, we, gave Intel and some other companies a huge sum of money to stay awesome.

    Then they announce huge layoffs to get rid of a lot of thr talent, people, heart of their business.

    So, wouldn't we have been better off as a society of we had just offered thT CHIPs money as a startup find and asked a bunch or people from Intel to leave and build new semi companies using this fund?

    In the end the meteic for success of the CHIPs program in the short term should be number of people working in semi in the US. How did we dedicate money and resources to this thing of national importance and end up with fewer experts working on it?

    Money is the root of all evil, power corrupts us all.

  • by habibur on 10/18/22, 10:39 AM

    Wondering if that means Raspberry Pi will be available again.

    Still no sign of stability in supply.

  • by swamp40 on 10/18/22, 3:22 PM

    > American chip bosses now fear that China could retaliate

    They will certainly retaliate. The question is how. Most think they will react similarly, banning cutting edge electronics exports that could have military use.

    But I suspect they will go after our weak spots. Prescription drugs, solar, lithium. I'm sure there are more.

  • by sabujp on 10/18/22, 2:02 PM

    semi stocks are at all time lows and PE levels. Don't let this doom and gloom piece prevent you from buying more

  • by Melatonic on 10/18/22, 6:08 PM

    Seems like a dumb article - their whole argument is that we should NOT be building fabs in the US because demand has recently fallen and we MIGHT end up with too much supply?

    Seems like a good thing to be honest. More supply means cheaper prices and even if demand is a bit lower there is no way it is going to keep going down. We have CPU's in damn near everything these days. The drop is probably mainly because of crypto mining falling of a cliff.

  • by mrjin on 10/18/22, 11:38 AM

    Not sure how well/bad is AMD doing right now. Have been using Intel machines for over two decades now but not long ago I finally switched to AMD with my new PC and I regret haven't done so earlier. In the meantime, I'm also about to ditch Windows. I guess I'm not alone. Time to say goodbye to Wintel league.

  • by mFixman on 10/18/22, 5:50 PM

    I know nothing about the chip-making process, and news about fabs and the chip industry confuse and scare me.

    Can anybody link me to a guide with the basics of these topics, like what exactly is a chip (is it a microcontroller? a part of a larger system?), or why the few giant fabs can't be replaced by a lot of smaller and cheaper ones?

  • by achenet on 10/18/22, 4:08 PM

  • by tannhaeuser on 10/18/22, 11:50 AM

    Thanks (O/T: copy-pasting text into vim to even read TFA high times to flag ad-ridden, basically unreadable content, or not link to it in the first place)

  • by tgtweak on 10/18/22, 2:34 PM

    To be perfectly honest, this is still within a 1000km radius circle that encompasses Taiwan, South Korea and Japan. That covers the majority of next-generation fabs that aren't Intel.

    It's great to legally diversify these fabs, but it does very little to mitigate geopolitical issues that are brewing in and around the east china sea.

  • by nonrandomstring on 10/18/22, 4:05 PM

    We've reached or are approaching "peak tech".

    The other day we were discussing Pablo Azar, "Computer Saturation and the Productivity Slowdown" (Federal Reserve Bank of New York Liberty Street Economics, October 6, 2022) [1]

    Simply reinventing systems and deliberately obsoleting stuff to create fake demand is over. The metaverse isn't hoing to happen. People are fatigued with tech.

    We're entering a different era in which we need to make better, more humane and effective technology, not just more and more and more of it.

    [1] https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2022/10/comput...

    EDIT: less trashy link

  • by lakomen on 10/18/22, 6:57 PM

    Paywalled

  • by jarym on 10/18/22, 10:14 PM

    > Toshiya Hari of Goldman Sachs, a bank,

    Never thought I'd see an Economist article explaining that GS are a bank hahaha

  • by machinekob on 10/18/22, 10:44 AM

    tl:dr Global recession => lower chip demand for consumers

    China ban => lower demand from CCP

    nvidia RTX 4090 still out of stock in most places :|

    I'm pretty sure datacenter and military chip usage will grow in next few years even if recession hit consumer market even harder then past year then US chipmakers will get fat checks just 2be prepared for China retaliation (probably feels good to be Intel in chip war time).

  • by senttoschool on 10/18/22, 10:16 AM

    A few months ago, I posted that here that governments around the world should not interfere with the chip industry just because of the covid-induced shortages. The reason is that supply and demand will naturally sort things out and that any government handout to chip companies to increase capacity will be wasted because chip demand will swing the other way.

    The chip industry is now swinging the other way.

  • by chatterhead on 10/18/22, 3:40 PM

    1) We need chip manufacturing to be nationalized in the USA - if it's that important to national security we don't need to leave it in the hands of private industry.

    2) Taiwan is not China. We are going to break the rest of China up because Xi decided to consolidate power instead of steward the distributed power he inherited.

    3) The USA isn't in trouble at all; we will expand our industries, inflate our currency and strengthen it so demand globally grows as Russia, EU and China falter.

    4) China took HK almost 3 decades early so why should anyone believe their word on territorial respect.

  • by bsenftner on 10/18/22, 10:45 AM

    With the Skyscraper tall wall of facts that article is composed, one would think such writing would have an index of references. But nope, what The Economists publishes sounds factual but is barely a nudge above laundry room gossip with a complete lack of references, lack of accountability for that wall of facts. It is truly amazing how manipulated our official discourse is on these critical issues. How to know what is opinion?

  • by bullen on 10/18/22, 11:38 AM

    Everything can be predicted if you understand energy.

    Companies can't survive in a peak world without manufacturing crap. Sell more because your tools break.

    So now they are looking at how to do that under the premise of eternal growth:

    They will try to lock us down in the hardware = deprecate older hardware and force you to move to never software with TLS 1.3.

    That has never succeded because you can always hack everything = They will try to rent out the accounts.

    They allready started that process, but I'm not buying it. I have all the software I need under permanent license.

    Since processors now have peaked, everyone is buying all the computers they can, the really smart ones are buying low energy devices like Raspberry but 1151 Xeon is also sold out.

    Anything manufactured today will probably have hardware kill-switches or programmed obsolescence. For companies: "To not lock your customer down for eternity is suicide"...

    Edit: Loving the downvotes without comment...