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Yeah, this also makes no sense to me: > The Covid pandemic boosted demand for appliances that use chips, such as phones, TVs and games consoles. SOCs in phone

by ruuda 5y ago

Yeah, this also makes no sense to me: > The Covid pandemic boosted demand for appliances that use chips, such as phones, TVs and games consoles. SOCs in phones and game consoles are produced on very different processes than chips used in cars, no? Cars don't need the smallest dies or most energy-efficient chips. These industries are not competing for the same capacity. Or am I missing something?

gameswithgo 5y ago
modern car entertainment systems often use some of the same parts as tvs/game systems/pcs etc perhaps the engine ECU is not the chip that is in low supply
detaro 5y ago
They certainly overlap. SoCs aren't the only chips in game consoles or other devices, different kinds of chip production have shared supply chains that themselves are struggling, SoCs used in cars aren't necessarily that different from the ones in other appliances (e.g. NVidia Tegra X1 is used both in the Nintendo Switch and some cars, and probably a pile of other things) ...
petre 5y ago
> SOCs in phones and game consoles are produced on very different processes than chips used in cars, no? Yes, some of them are different. Consumer chips are not industrial norm, they have narrower environmental operating ranges. The foundries producing automotive chips shifted production to consumer chips during the lockdowns, as the auto production lines were on hold. This caused supply chain disruptions. Add to that US > China IP export bans and you have a black swan event.
kube-system 5y ago
Not everything is a purpose built CPU, GPU or SoC on cutting edge nodes. There are many general purpose ICs that are boring and ubiquitous: Display drivers, power conversion, amplifiers, microcontrollers, etc.
- Breza 5y ago
  Agreed. If you move far enough up the supply chain, you'll find the same components being used in many different types of devices.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
fouric 5y ago
Hypothesis: there's a correlation between shortage of chips made with cutting-edge processes and chips that are not, because a lot of them are made by the same companies (and the supply-chain issues are impacting companies not just product lines). For instance, in addition to having the bleeding-edge 5nm node, TSMC has a lot of larger nodes and specialty non-digital-CPU nodes, too[1]. [1] https://techtaiwan.com/20210816/tsmc-speciality-technology/ https://techtaiwan.com/20210816/tsmc-speciality-technology/

by ruuda 5y ago

gameswithgo 5y ago

modern car entertainment systems often use some of the same parts as tvs/game systems/pcs etc perhaps the engine ECU is not the chip that is in low supply

detaro 5y ago

They certainly overlap. SoCs aren't the only chips in game consoles or other devices, different kinds of chip production have shared supply chains that themselves are struggling, SoCs used in cars aren't necessarily that different from the ones in other appliances (e.g. NVidia Tegra X1 is used both in the Nintendo Switch and some cars, and probably a pile of other things) ...

petre 5y ago

> SOCs in phones and game consoles are produced on very different processes than chips used in cars, no? Yes, some of them are different. Consumer chips are not industrial norm, they have narrower environmental operating ranges. The foundries producing automotive chips shifted production to consumer chips during the lockdowns, as the auto production lines were on hold. This caused supply chain disruptions. Add to that US > China IP export bans and you have a black swan event.

kube-system 5y ago

Not everything is a purpose built CPU, GPU or SoC on cutting edge nodes. There are many general purpose ICs that are boring and ubiquitous: Display drivers, power conversion, amplifiers, microcontrollers, etc.

Breza 5y ago
Agreed. If you move far enough up the supply chain, you'll find the same components being used in many different types of devices.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

fouric 5y ago

Hypothesis: there's a correlation between shortage of chips made with cutting-edge processes and chips that are not, because a lot of them are made by the same companies (and the supply-chain issues are impacting companies not just product lines). For instance, in addition to having the bleeding-edge 5nm node, TSMC has a lot of larger nodes and specialty non-digital-CPU nodes, too[1]. [1] https://techtaiwan.com/20210816/tsmc-speciality-technology/ https://techtaiwan.com/20210816/tsmc-speciality-technology/