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Honest question: How can everyone be short of chips? I understand that e.g. car makers reduced their orders and their capacity was given to other manufacturers

Honest question: How can everyone be short of chips? I understand that e.g. car makers reduced their orders and their capacity was given to other manufacturers so they are kind of screwed but surely since the overall capacity got increased (albeit by a relatively small amount) then some manufacturers should have stuff. As far as I can see, pretty much everyone who uses electronics seems to be not just "a bit short" but royally screwed at the moment.

aseipp 5y ago
In the abstract, it's sort of like asking "How can there still be traffic jams on road XYZ, when there's an open lane that was added recently?" The problem isn't the number of lanes, it's that fundamentally that mode of traffic (mass individiual transit) has capacity limitations, which when exceeded cause it to go into a "bad" state, after which recovery is difficult and arduous. Furthermore, just because you stop letting cars on the specific road doesn't mean the jam resolves instantly; you actually have to significantly reduce pressure over time before that can happen. And that jam causes cars to overflow into other roads, causing other problems. Just removing the "trigger" (too many oncoming cars) that caused the problem is not enough to recover from either the initial problems, or the side effects. People here are using all kinds of networking/hardware analogies and while generally I'm loathe to use those (they often reek of "All I have is a hammer"-syndrome), you do see these problems a lot in such designs. A good example is when something like a database goes down due to having too much load. Recovering from this failure often isn't just a matter of going from "too much load" to "enough load to handle", you actually have to shed significantly more load than that to recover the system, because that initial failure might cause a cascade of failures that prevents that. This often manifests as a kind of ritual where a system admin pulls a big number of levers in the engine room all labeled "Do Not Touch" in just the right order to shed load and reboot things correctly. Real world supply chains are doing the same thing, but their actions are priced in and done months in advance. Logistics is a hell of a thing. I realize this is not a concrete answer about electronic supply chains (someone else can handle that) but rather a more abstract classification, but I think the general idea applies here.
HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago
Well, bear in mind that you're only hearing about the people who're complaining and those will tend to be large manufacturers with significant production volumes. The little shops all over the place that bought a year's inventory are fine now but still anxiously wondering what will happen when inventory runs out. I just left my last job (engineering services) a couple months ago, but we were already warning new customers that they should be prepared to buy whatever inventory we could find if they wanted to be able to ship product by Christmas.
genmud 5y ago
Same reason we had issues with toilet paper last year. Real shortages can fuel panic induced purchasing which have massive ripple effects. People aren’t buying what they need for the next month, they are trying to get a year or 18 months of supply.

aseipp 5y ago

In the abstract, it's sort of like asking "How can there still be traffic jams on road XYZ, when there's an open lane that was added recently?" The problem isn't the number of lanes, it's that fundamentally that mode of traffic (mass individiual transit) has capacity limitations, which when exceeded cause it to go into a "bad" state, after which recovery is difficult and arduous. Furthermore, just because you stop letting cars on the specific road doesn't mean the jam resolves instantly; you actually have to significantly reduce pressure over time before that can happen. And that jam causes cars to overflow into other roads, causing other problems. Just removing the "trigger" (too many oncoming cars) that caused the problem is not enough to recover from either the initial problems, or the side effects. People here are using all kinds of networking/hardware analogies and while generally I'm loathe to use those (they often reek of "All I have is a hammer"-syndrome), you do see these problems a lot in such designs. A good example is when something like a database goes down due to having too much load. Recovering from this failure often isn't just a matter of going from "too much load" to "enough load to handle", you actually have to shed significantly more load than that to recover the system, because that initial failure might cause a cascade of failures that prevents that. This often manifests as a kind of ritual where a system admin pulls a big number of levers in the engine room all labeled "Do Not Touch" in just the right order to shed load and reboot things correctly. Real world supply chains are doing the same thing, but their actions are priced in and done months in advance. Logistics is a hell of a thing. I realize this is not a concrete answer about electronic supply chains (someone else can handle that) but rather a more abstract classification, but I think the general idea applies here.

HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago

Well, bear in mind that you're only hearing about the people who're complaining and those will tend to be large manufacturers with significant production volumes. The little shops all over the place that bought a year's inventory are fine now but still anxiously wondering what will happen when inventory runs out. I just left my last job (engineering services) a couple months ago, but we were already warning new customers that they should be prepared to buy whatever inventory we could find if they wanted to be able to ship product by Christmas.

genmud 5y ago

Same reason we had issues with toilet paper last year. Real shortages can fuel panic induced purchasing which have massive ripple effects. People aren’t buying what they need for the next month, they are trying to get a year or 18 months of supply.