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How will 'chipageddon' affect you?
- peterburkimsher 6y agohttps://archive.is/mKtup https://archive.is/mKtup
- ilaksh 6y agoHow long until the TSMC in Arizona gets built? Or other similar things. I feel like we need to find peaceful ways to resolve our severe differences with China. Either that or stop depending on China's neighbors for critical technology. I just hope that there can be some kind of progress with the new administration in Washington.
- chapium 6y agoMaybe they can peacefully stop genociding.
- Skunkleton 6y agoTSMC is Taiwan. They aren't genociding.
- pestatije 6y agoTaiwan aren't, but the OP was saying that they could be the next to be genocided: "stop depending on China's neighbors for critical technology"
- ilaksh 6y agoI was not trying to get into the genocide thing. I just know that Taiwan and South Korea are very close to China. And so I feel like even before China really builds up their military much more, the proximity of those places to China is a pretty significant military issue for US and its allies. Its hard to see how it does not provide military advantages. More generally, it seems like we want to hold out hope that in the long run serious military confrontation can somehow be avoided down the line. But if not, chip production is a fairly key item that you don't really want to be happening on your enemy's doorstep.
- LockAndLol 6y agoSo this is what purism was talking about. Seems like the wait will be longer yet again. They don't have much luck those guys, do they?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- terse_malvolio 6y agoWhat?
- mkl 6y agoSeems to be referring to this: https://puri.sm/posts/librem-5-update-shipping-estimates-and-cpu-supply-chain/ https://puri.sm/posts/librem-5-update-shipping-estimates-and...
- ahelwer 6y agoGraphics card prices really are something. In late 2019 I purchased an nvidia gtx 1060 used for $120. Now just yesterday I sold that same card with an additional year of wear on it for $220. This is a four-year-old card design that can barely run modern games at 1080p/60fps/medium settings. I'd also been keeping track of used i7-4790k CPU prices, looking to upgrade from my i5-4670k. They started out at $120-$130 earlier in 2020 and are up to $160-$170 now. For an eight-year-old CPU! It used to be the case that computer components aged like milk, price wise, but with the death of Moore's law in the 2010s that is less and less the case. I remember RAM prices spiked a couple years back too.
- nimos 6y agoHuh - wow. I think I have a 1060 in my closet. I bought 2 for 100 each in 2019. Was planning to use one for GPU VM pass through and could never get it to work properly.
- ahelwer 6y agoMight be sitting on a good chunk of change with those! Especially if they're 6gb models.
- mey 6y agoI have been looking to upgrade my i7-4770k rig to a Ryzen 5900x, but after seeing this insanity and paying attention to what the mfg's are being vague about, looks like I'll be waiting until June (or later). By then, there may be an entirely new generation of chips ready.
- zamadatix 6y agoCPUs aren't too bad. I've got a 5950X I bought at MSRP and I just found a site with a 5800X in stock for MSRP. 5900X on the same site is backordered but didn't see how long the wait is but I doubt it's months considering the 5800X was in stock. Intel is releasing Rocket Lake shortly but it won't have any options with more cores than the 5800X. Zen 4 isn't launching until late fall. Not sure availability will be any better on either of these launches anyways. GPUs are a little bit more ridiculous. You can get them if you don't need it to show up tomorrow but getting one at a reasonable price any time soon is much more a challenge than doing the same for a CPU. That being said I did manage to get a reasonably priced 3070 in a build early on but I put that to luck more than anything. Motherboards I haven't had any issues with.
- dvirsky 6y agoIs this related to why Sony has been having a hard time catching up with demand for the PS5?
- ndiscussion 6y agoYes, they use the same type of new AMD GPUs
- samus 6y agoThe PS5 uses a custom Zen 2 processor. It uses the same 7nm node as Zen 3 though, which is quite enough to make TSMC slow in fulfilling both orders.
- brutal_chaos_ 6y agoGPU improvement rate is stalling (or more likely pixel count growth is slowing), so less visual improvement easily obtained? And given that cryptocoins created a new use for GPUs, we have a price influx in even "old" cards. My 2¢
- IdiocyInAction 6y agoGPU improvement rate does not look to be stalling. Nvidia is still introducing impressive new features (support for HW accelerated ray-tracing, NN acceleration for stuff like DLSS, etc.) while steadily improving performance. It's just getting harder to make games look nicer, because they already look really nice. Artists/Graphics devs have learned to do really impressive things using just rasterization. As someone who is interested in GPU programming, ML and rendering, I personally find it really impressive what Nvidia has been doing over the last couple of years. Though I have to say, for all its faults, CP2077 really blew me away graphically (using the RTX support) like no other game did so far. Also, VR would also really benefit from better GPUs. And 4K gaming is also not quite there yet. So actually, I maybe wouldn't even say that. Performance improvements are still welcome. The problem is more that there is an unprecedented demand for compute. ML, Crypto mining, Gaming being more popular than ever with Corona, etc. just means that demand is higher than ever. Combine that with the new console launch and exhausted semiconductor manufacturing capabilities and you can easily see why customers are biting the bullet and going for less pricy, older cards.
- AstralStorm 6y ago4k gaming is fine unless you brute force lighting by ray tracing. Even Cyberpunk which is very unoptimized. VR is a separate story. It needs both high resolution and high frame rates. 8k is not handled by current GPUs. DLSS is a cute hack. We have better scalers than that in video market, its main advantage is speed. Instead, fixed function scaler should be better than outdated 5-tap filter. Remind me again when it matches basic scalers put in Smart TVs. The gaming GPUs are hilariously underpowered for compute, even something like 3090, vs MI100 or A100. It's just the latter cost $10k per unit.
- elihu 6y agoAre there specific chips, or products from particular companies or geographic regions that are in short supply, or is this just a general lack of fab capacity?
- reader_mode 6y agoFrom what I've been able to read it's not fab capacity but ABF substrate shortage screwing up most chipmakers
- KirillPanov 6y agoSource? Ajinomoto Build-up Film is used only for high-end flip-chip packaging. Very few automotive ICs use such advanced packaging. Most non-EV cars probably don't have any at all. https://www.ajinomoto.com/innovation/action/buildupfilm https://www.ajinomoto.com/innovation/action/buildupfilm
- nickff 6y agoCertain manufacturers have been hit hardest, examples being NXP and Infineon, at least partly due to an increase in demand for automotive components. It seems as though motor control, and 'connected home'/IoT devices may have also contributed to shortages. Either due to maxed-out fabs or shifts in uC/uP usage, the shortages are wide-spread.
- 01100011 6y agoI asked this question the other day. From what I heard, it varies, but for some items like microcontrollers the lead times are out to 52 weeks. There's a lot of noise about the shortage of high end parts from TSMC, but I'm much more concerned about shortages that can impact more common consumer goods. Having issues like this when the economy is trying to recover from a pandemic could have far reaching consequences now that so many products contain semiconductors.
- starky 6y agoFrom what I gather from my sources that are involved in the procurement side, it sounds like there is a general shortage that is affecting certain chips more than others. Say you are using a chip where there are only a handful of customers, then companies aren't going to make your part as they have other higher runner chips they can run instead.
- jpm_sd 6y agoIt's stressing me out. I'm an EE at a startup and I'm scrambling to pre purchase whatever's left on the market to get us through the next 6-12 months. Thank goodness I already laid in a huge stock of processors, the parts I'm scrounging for right now are for battery management, signal isolation, and switching voltage regulator control.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- cillian64 6y agoI was doing electronics design and prototyping a couple of years ago when MLCC capacitors were getting impossible to find in common values. I feel your pain.
- Gibbon1 6y agoI remember that, there was a shortage of caps and shortages of low end CPU's across manufacturers. Placing Planned Purchase Orders for your current products helps a lot to weather supply problems.
- baybal2 6y agoWhat are you making, if not a secret?
- geogra4 6y agoI just need a gt 1030 for an old pc and the prices just seem outrageous for such a low end card. It's more expensive now than it was at release almost 4 years ago!
- trebligdivad 6y agoThe real scary thing is we're down to TSMC and Samsung who can now hit the latest node; that seems to be the problem - and the cost of building fabs is insane; it looks like we really need to do research into cost.
- Taek 6y agoWe are doing research into cost. This stuff gets massively cheaper every year. It's cheaper and easier than ever to build a 16nm fab. Profit oriented companies take those cost savings and choose to drive further down the technology stack (to more complex and expensive nodes), where there are fewer competitors that have enough profits to build competing production lines. Moore's law is almost our friend here. Being at 3nm instead of 16nm is decreasingly important.
- gary_0 6y ago> It's cheaper and easier than ever to build a 16nm fab. Is anyone doing ~16nm microprocessors besides Samsung/TSMC/Intel/GloFo? I wouldn't call it "cheap and easy" if only they can do it. (After a quick Google, it seems that China's state-owned SMIC is also starting to do ~16nm, but that's all I could find, unless you mean memory and not processors).
- Can_Not 6y agoI wouldn't call it "cheap" if it's not cheap for a new player to enter the market, but instead only marginally cheap for established players.
- throwaway4good 6y agoThe shortage is amplified by the us china tech war that forced key supplier asml to limit deliveries of chip making equipment. Also tsmc cancelled euv equipment orders due to the huawei ban: https://semiwiki.com/forum/index.php?threads/asml-reports-2021-euv-shipments-sliding-into-2022.13631/ https://semiwiki.com/forum/index.php?threads/asml-reports-20...
- MrsPeaches 6y agoThanks for sharing. Key quotes from this: "it's supply chain limitations by design, because the customers told us, we don't need them, and then coming back and said, oops! we might have been wrong." From the CEO it's due customers thinking it was going to be bad (for various reasons) and then it wasn't. The process have long lead times and when you pause them you can't just expidite them, they have a fixed lead time.
- KirillPanov 6y ago[edit: this post appears to be getting a lot of downvotes. please consider replying if you disagree] > The shortage is amplified by the us china tech war I keep hearing this vague accusation, over and over, with no evidence provided. Taiwan is not part of China -- at least as far as the sanctions are concerned. China exports lots of finished electronics but very, very few semiconductors -- and virtually none for the automotive sector. SMIC is not competitive. They're kept afloat by the Chinese government and supply almost exclusively for domestic products. > that forced key supplier asml to limit deliveries of chip making equipment. Source? > Also tsmc cancelled euv equipment orders due to the huawei ban: How would that make any sense? TSMC is completely booked to the hilt right now. Would any sane person think "gee, that's a great cancel our expansion plans" That $150 million ASML EUV scanner order that got cancelled was from SMIC, not TSMC: https://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/business/asml-delays-euv-machine-shipment-smic-2019-11/ https://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/business/asml-delays-... Again, China not Taiwan. > https://semiwiki.com/forum/index.php?threads/asml-reports-20 https://semiwiki.com/forum/index.php?threads/asml-reports-20... I'm not going to read the whole thing, but the word "Huawei" appears only once on that webpage, as part of an anonymous blog commenter's assertion. That is not a credible source.
- laurentdc 6y agoI've noticed the used video card prices have skyrocketed. I've put up an eBay auction for a GTX 1060 6GB and it ended up selling for twice than what I bought it used two years ago. Also lots of people DMing me asking if I have more to sell. Is there some mining craze going on with old cards?
- aclatuts 6y agoOn ebay I bought from a seller unloading five RX 580x previously used for mining to power an external GPU to game on a mac. I think a lot of people are getting into gaming again and a lot are looking for cards that can play their game just well enough.
- terse_malvolio 6y agoSeemingly another side effect of quarantine
- berkes 6y agoAnd mining. Ethereum is still mined often on videocards. And in wake of Bitcoin skyrocketing, ETH prices are way up too. So it pays more (in dollars) to mine, now.
- freeflight 6y ago> Is there some mining craze going on with old cards? Combination of mining craze and massive demand for entertainment electronics and GPUs since everybody has been stuck at home due to pandemic and decided to build/upgrade their computers. Which also lead to the situation that scalping outfits have extended their services from covering mostly designer appeal to now also include electronics like GPUs and consoles. The popularity of this also attracts a lot more people to use these kinds of services as a form of investment, which most certainly does not help an already supply constrained market.
- Vaslo 6y agoI am waving my money to 3 companies - AMD, Nvidia, and Sony for new computer parts and a ps5. Alas, haven’t even been close to getting any of them. Come take my money
- magicsmoke 6y agoAccording to the efficient market hypothesis, if there's profit to be made and those companies aren't taking it, someone else will. Have you considered eBay?
- FridgeSeal 6y agoEfficient market hand-waving magic goes out the window when scalpers wildly and artificially distort availability.
- sincerely 6y agoWhat are you talking about? Aren't scalpers doing exactly what efficient market hypothesis would suggest by buying products that are underpriced (graphics cards, consoles) relative to demand and selling them at the highest price people are willing to pay?
- qmmmur 6y agoThey only become that valuable when you completely restrict the supply by scalping them. If I went to the shop and bought all the food and resold it at a higher price that's not 'the market at work', I'm just not a dick head.
- freeflight 6y agoThis! Particularly when we've reached a point where "scalping as a service" has become a thing. There are outfits out there that charge a monthly subscription for access to prioritized acquisition channels in combination with bot networks. This is streamlined to such degree that people don't even need to hold physical inventory themselves: The scalping outlet handles all of that for them, all they need to do is supply the capital for the bots and set the parameters for buying/selling, everything else will be handled by the service.
- Namidairo 6y agoIt's already stalled onboarding of HFC customers in Australia due to lack of modems. Apparently the supplier of modems (Arris) are unable to source enough SoC's from Broadcom. Due to this, people needing replacements and any in-flight new orders apparently have wait times of up to 9-10 weeks... Not helping this is that some people try to sell them in the secondary market despite them being premises (or rather segment) locked. [1] https://www.nbnco.com.au/utility/temporarily-limiting-the-number-of-HFC-connections https://www.nbnco.com.au/utility/temporarily-limiting-the-nu...
- Qub3d 6y agoFor others who didn't know (like myself), HFC in this case does not refer to Henry Ford College, nor to Hydroflorocarbons, but to Hybrid Fiber-Coaxial networks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_fiber-coaxial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_fiber-coaxial
- hateful 6y agoI would think "right to repair" has a lot to do with this. When you have to replace everything only after a few years, a lot more chips would be needed.
- Pelam 6y agoMaybe this will somehow stop the insanity of premature obsolesence. A 6 year old Android tablet is hardware wise in great condition. Some games that happen to install work great. However, the last software update was about 4 years ago. The tablet has storage expansion, but due to artificial limitations in the Android system, only a fraction of software will utilize the sd card. These are only minor examples. I could rant for hours on the ”who cares, it’ll be garbage in a year attitude” that has invaded much of the tech world, but others have done a better job. I my self am some times party to this attitude. It all results in a lot of waste of all kinds and also bad user experience. To look at the silver lining, maybe this scarcity and some other trends will result in a small corrective trends in engineering and management. In the meanwhile I’ll keep dreaming of a new gaming PC for a year or two.
- berkes 6y agoIt's small, and on the grand scale probably negligible, but e.g. Fairphone is making phones which are designed to be repaired and maintained. They are growing fast, year over year. If anything, such companies show there is demand and money to be made, there.
- KozmoNau7 6y agoI certainly stress a lot less, since I decided to get off the hype and upgrade train. I've got 600+ games on my Steam account that run perfectly on my PC, even though most of the hardware is 2011 vintage and the only "new" hardware in it is an SSD and an RX560. Life is much calmer in the slow lane.
- Terr_ 6y agoYeah, although I'm getting a little nervous about failure-rates now that some core parts of my system are in the 8-10 years old range. (Basically everything but the video card and SSD.) Particularly the factory-sealed liquid-loop, which has both moving parts in a pump and gradual liquid chemical degradation to consider. On the flip-side, that particular component seems like it would be less sensitive to silicon-fabbing issues.
- hda2 6y agoThat's what happens when you centralize silicon production to a few players. Integrated circuits are a requirement for modern life. Every country should have its own fab, even if not competitive, to cover its own needs during shortages like these. What if the shortage was longer and more severe? Are people living in smaller countries willing to go without electronics? I hope people will learn from this.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago> Are people living in smaller countries willing to go without electronics? Are people living in smaller countries able to afford redundant fabs?
- tehjoker 6y agoMaybe not, but simply having workable fabs producing reasonable quality on all continents from different governments / companies would go a long way.
- Laforet 6y agoSmaller fabs do exist, but they don't enjoy economies of scale unless they could project very strong demand down the road. Nobody invests in such a venture guaranteed to lose a lot of money. Another issue more pertinent to automotive manufacturing is certification. For example, car makers once had to wait almost a year for Renesas to rebuild their facilities in Naka following the 2011 earthquake despite the company operating fabs in multiple countries. The latter were perfectly capable of producing the product in demand but the cost of certification is so prohibitive that moving production elsewhere was never brought up as an option.
- cma 6y agoArticle say it is wafer and substrate limited, how would fabs in more countries help?
- eunos 6y agoFabrications are capital intensive yet the returns are not high. Something that many VCs/countries quite abhor. Also, mass sanctions last year doesn't help.
- uptown 6y agoI'm in the market to replace our 11 year old car and the supply has just dried up with what we'd been looking at. Best case seems like maybe the summer, but at that point, I'd almost rather wait for the next model year.
- generated 6y agoHow do we profit off this?
- totalZero 6y agoDepends. Who is "we"? Presumably this will be good for the foundries and makers of industrial semiconductor machinery, and bad for fabless companies. Hard to know the time horizon, however.
- bike 6y agoWell this is really a long shot, but the chip shortage is causing production cuts across the car industry. Roughly half of all palladium is used catalytic converters. The cutback in new vehicle production should have a pretty noticeable affect on the price of palladium. If you can time the end of the chip shortage then you can make some money in the palladium futures market. How far fetched do you think this is?
- swordsmith 6y agoApparently there is a big shortage for ABF (Ajinomoto build-up film) substrate, which is big part of PCB manufacturing (see for example https://www.hardwaretimes.com/ps5-supply-to-be-affected-by-abf-substrate-shortages-in-2021/ https://www.hardwaretimes.com/ps5-supply-to-be-affected-by-a..., https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20201214PD202.html https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20201214PD202.html). Big suppliers of ABF substrate includes multiple companies from Taiwan Unimicron, Kinsus Interconnect, and Nan Ya PCB, which all trade in the Taiwan stock market. I considered investing in those companies...but seems like only Nan Ya has been showing an upward trend. Perhaps we are still early?
- wruza 6y agoDo second-order manufacturers ever profit from situations like this? All margins seem to go to final product makers, not to a whole chain.
- pastrami_panda 6y agoI can't answer broadly or about profit specially - but the stocks of all big wafer producers have risen sharply since fall 2020, something to the tune of 30% or more in a couple of months.
- Guthur 6y agoI really wish people would stop butchering the English language. `Monopoly producers...` And then goes on to list two fucking supplers in TSMC and Samsung, that's not a monopoly, let alone the fact there a many other major semiconductor companies Intel, Global Foundaries etc.
- rusk 6y agoOligopoly so
- Guthur 6y agoSure if you want to, it would at least be more correct than implying there is a monopoly, which is categorically false. Though i'm not sure how many cutting edge semi conductor fab players we should actually expect, the investment required is significant.
- cable2600 6y agoThat is why when IBM made the IBM PC based on the Intel 8088 they made Intel license the chip design to AMD and NEC in case Intel could not make chips quick enough to meet demand.
- dehrmann 6y agoAnd people thought Intel's fab problems were going to doom it. Maybe in 5 years, but right now, they've got a product 80% as good as competitors when there's a shortage. It's a compromise a lot of people are willing to make right now.
- FrozenVoid 6y agoA car doesn't need a computer, its more needless complexity and more points of failure. A classic car can't be hacked, locked or broken by software. The crisis is direct consequence of adding useless bloatware into cars, which only need simple microcontrollers - not latest 7nm CPUs.
- pmlnr 6y agoI worked in automotive 10 years ago, and I completely agree. It had become insanely bloated since.
- xondono 6y agoNo car is using anything even near 7nm. The automotive sector is very cost sensitive and if anything, there’s too much complexity because they insist on using parts that are too old.
- FrozenVoid 6y agoIn that case the car companies would have no problems with CPU supply https://www.wsj.com/articles/ford-other-auto-makers-cut-output-on-chip-shortage-11610280001 https://www.wsj.com/articles/ford-other-auto-makers-cut-outp...
- detaro 6y agoWhere do you see that the shortages only affect 7nm parts? Because they don't, a wide range is impacted.
- FrozenVoid 6y agoMarket is dictated by 7nm as its the current gen lithography tech(with some 5nm fabs operating now) . You don't see them rushing to build fresh 40/65nm fabs just because cheap processors are in deficit, because its not profitable long-term.
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- AYBABTME 6y agoSounds like the beginning of "Accelerando" as we're slowly starting to turn our vicinity into a Matrioshka brain.
- rayhendricks 6y agoSwitched to Apple chips for desktop and phone. Looks like their supply chain is still intact. Sold my old system for around what I bought it for, so if you want to game these times are whack.
- neogodless 6y agoHa it's bothering me the way you worded that since you can't get those chips without the attached hardware and software! But it does get me thinking. Obviously we think of Apple systems as premium, and so we can expect premium computer chips to get prioritized - Apple likely paid TSMC handsomely to get (most/all?) of the 5nm allocation for the A14 Bionic and M1 chips. But are other high-end chips "premium"? Because the AMD Ryzen 5, 7 and 9 (5600X, 5800X, 5900X, 5950X) are all in very short supply (at least on my U.S. online stores). BUT... those are just for enthusiast builders. You can find OEM systems with those chips. So I guess the only lesson is that being a computer manufacturer will give you priority on high-end chips, and in times of short supply, that's where they'll go first, drying up the supply for small buyers.
- danmur 6y agoI thought this was going to be about chips made of potato. What a relief.
- mrlonglong 6y agoYes, prices for low end AMD processors are crazy and stocks are non existent. Just before Christmas I decided to build a spare computer and wanted to get an AMD Ryzen 3100, prices for that was hovering around the 99 GBP mark. Then I had to put it off until the new year. Now 3100s are like hen's teeth and if there's any the prices are about 180 GBP. I'm not that desperate right now, I just hope prices will drop but the question is when?
- Nux 6y agoMy experience as well. Bought an Athlon 3000G last year for £42, it's now over 100... I'll have to postpone building that PC for now.
- Spooky23 6y agoThe pricing and availability is crazy because the suppliers are afraid to ramp production. In many categories, like cheap laptops, webcams, small printers, etc demand exploded. More Chromebook orders came in 2020 Q3 than normally happen in a year. Laptop LCDs are super-constrained as well. The dilemma is that expanding manufacturing capacity now will reduce margins tomorrow, especially since the order books will be empty as COVID fades as schools open again. My guess is you’ll see prices in free fall as the edu backlog clears and COVID restrictions fade. Probably this time next year.
- phendrenad2 6y agoThis is really hurting me, I've noticed that there are fewer inexpensive Chinese arduino-knockoffs with better specs.
- xondono 6y agoAll these articles seem to miss the point between why the car industry is facing shortages, and conflate it with the shortages on high end silicon devices (which have very different causes). High end devices have seen a massive bottleneck on TSMC and in some of the required materials like ABF, combined with very high demand (new console cycle, people buying new computers for work/study from home). The automotive sector suffers from another problem. For decades all manufacturers have converted to JIT (lean manufacturing), which means that most of them counted on almost daily deliveries of parts to keep operating. With the transport restrictions and difficulties on many countries, this has become unmanageable and unwieldy, and factory operators have made the obvious call, increase stock margins. Typically a factory might keep stock enough for a day of operations. A manager sees that they will have problems getting their deliveries in time, so increases their orders to cover a week. This depletes the local distributor that also tries to avoid keeping large stocks. Now a lot of other managers in other companies see that part vanish, and fearing that they’ll be out of parts, they increase their stock keeping too. With boards having from 100 to 1000 unique references, the effects propagate from one manufacturer to another, while everyone runs to get enough stock to avoid having to close. There has been no less parts than one year ago, but the massive “de-risking” means that there’s now too much demand to keep everyone happy.
- WanderPanda 6y agoInteresting and clear explanation, thanks! Do you also see this as a possible driver for general inflation? Or is this JIT production mostly restricted to the automotive sector? On a tangent: Is there any good place to learn about the current state of supply chains? I searched youtube occasionally, looking for talks / interviews with people who have in depth insight in what is happening right now (/during the last year) but I could barely find anything. Shouldn‘t this be one of the hottest topics right now?!
- mschuster91 6y ago> Or is this JIT production mostly restricted to the automotive sector? JIT is a major trend everywhere where logistics are involved, but in car manufacturers it's the most pronounced - simply because the sheer physical size of many components required for a car would mean that car manufacturers would need big warehouses, which they have torn down or sold many decades ago. Instead, society has picked up the cost of storage - by building ever more and more bigger highways for all the trucks.
- rasz 6y agoThis is a perfect moment for China to invade Taiwan and disrupt TSMC. That would leave only China and Korea as two main sources of modern semiconductors.