4 ms·

With all this chip shortage, i was thinking that i still have the same laptop from 2014. It's not like it's slow and it's not like they make them much faster an

by jdrc 5y ago

With all this chip shortage, i was thinking that i still have the same laptop from 2014. It's not like it's slow and it's not like they make them much faster anymore. So maybe the chip shortage is not as big problem as rumored?

jeromegv 5y ago
It's not rumoured, it's thousands of articles that explain how this is a big deal and how many industries have had to slow down because of it. Chips are used in everything, your personal laptop is really irrelevant in the equation.
kataklasm 5y ago
How exactly does your old laptop have anything to do with a global shortage?
- gambiting 5y ago
  I haven't been to the hospital in years, so clearly the news about long wait times at the ER are bogus.
- jdrc 5y ago
  Well a lot of the demand that creates this shortage is for replacement of 'old' phones or laptops which are not truly old
  - yourusername 5y ago
    There are multiple shortages going on. For leading edge chips going into phones and GPU's maybe we wait for our game console or new phone a few months. But there are also shortages for automotive sensors, microcontrollers, power delivery controllers. Not buying a new phone isn't going to solve the IC shortage for cars or white goods.
  - zinekeller 5y ago
    The short explanation is that phone and computer chips are incompatible with cars (except in Tesla cars where they do use some, and even then Tesla cars still use chips that are literally have no comparison with computer chips). The long explanation is that the "node" of the process used in phones and computers are different from those used in cars. Most computers can tolerate errors and correct them a bit later, but in cars that scenario can result to injury or even death. Car chips are built to totally different standards, and to borrow a terminology in software, written in assembly and not C. You cannot just reuse the processes intended for computer chips and apply them in cars, you need to manually check that everything still works out.
- vultour 5y ago
  Their point was that most people already have the technology they need, and getting the latest shiniest thing isn't as much of an issue.
speeder 5y ago
Someone crashed my car recently. I had to buy another one (the other was impossible to repair). I ended buying a used base model Mitsibishi Lancer, for the same price a new Mitsibishi Lancer EVO used to cost 3 years ago. And I only bought that car specifically, because it was the cheapest sedan I could find, a Honda Civic or a Toyota Corolla was literally double the price. The reason for that? The chip shortage. While shopping for cars I even found a guy that sold his Lancer dashboard and put in its place a crappy one. Then when checking if I should buy a new HB20, I found out they are coming with crappy dashboards and the ones from 2019 are not avaialble anymore... The reason for that, again is the chip shortage, coloured dashboards with complex functions require more chips, so in case of new cars, the manufacturers are shipping them with simpler monochromatic dashboards with less functions, and some used car owners have been literally selling their dashboards to richer people, because they now are crazy expensive. Meanwhile the government of my country has been terrified of truckers, the truckers been giving them a hard time, specially because of the prices of trucks, both used and new, they are saying that trucking is not profitable anymore and want the government to give them money. Know why trucking is not profitable anymore? Well... the chip shortage made trucks get crazy expensive. The government also was going to switch the machines used for voting, to make election more secure and fair (the new machines would allow better methods of recounting not vulnerable to hacking), but this was aborted, because new machines had their price skyrocket... because of the chip shortage. The list goes on, the chip shortage is not just causing inflation or making people not afford a new laptop, it is literally disrupting production, changing products, changing people behaviour, causing social changes, causing LEGAL changes... The chip shortage literally is affecting how the leader of 250 million people is chosen!
- jdrc 5y ago
  And major crisis, including energy, does that.
  - chaosite 5y ago
    So this is a major crisis, i.e., a big problem, right?
- op00to 5y ago
dylan604 5y ago
I used to think that about my 2011 laptop as just looking at the CPU speeds were not really much faster. however, CPU is only a part of the system. GPU/RAM/SSD/etc have seen several generational leaps ahead and all add up to an improved experience. Also, even though the CPU speeds aren't much faster, the transistors in the chips are drastically changing. So some bits of code run faster because now they are on the chip.
gruturo 5y ago
Indeed a laptop built in 2014 is unaffected by a chip shortage in 2020-22. Until it's accidentally dropped and you need a replacement. Or you want to buy a webcam for it. Or a car, a TV, an oven, a dishwasher. Or you interact with any service which is itself impacted, and then you suffer longer wait times, higher prices or are denied service. Maybe your ISP can't ship you a replacement if your router just got fried by lightning. And let's hope you don't need a hospital ER, where you would find out that semiconductors are not the only critical shortage going on.
m4x 5y ago
Just as an aside, a CPU from 2022 will generally be much faster and efficient than one from 2014, even if the clock speed is similar, due to architecture improvements.

by jdrc 5y ago

jeromegv 5y ago

It's not rumoured, it's thousands of articles that explain how this is a big deal and how many industries have had to slow down because of it. Chips are used in everything, your personal laptop is really irrelevant in the equation.

kataklasm 5y ago

How exactly does your old laptop have anything to do with a global shortage?

gambiting 5y ago
I haven't been to the hospital in years, so clearly the news about long wait times at the ER are bogus.
jdrc 5y ago
Well a lot of the demand that creates this shortage is for replacement of 'old' phones or laptops which are not truly old
- yourusername 5y ago
  There are multiple shortages going on. For leading edge chips going into phones and GPU's maybe we wait for our game console or new phone a few months. But there are also shortages for automotive sensors, microcontrollers, power delivery controllers. Not buying a new phone isn't going to solve the IC shortage for cars or white goods.
- zinekeller 5y ago
  The short explanation is that phone and computer chips are incompatible with cars (except in Tesla cars where they do use some, and even then Tesla cars still use chips that are literally have no comparison with computer chips). The long explanation is that the "node" of the process used in phones and computers are different from those used in cars. Most computers can tolerate errors and correct them a bit later, but in cars that scenario can result to injury or even death. Car chips are built to totally different standards, and to borrow a terminology in software, written in assembly and not C. You cannot just reuse the processes intended for computer chips and apply them in cars, you need to manually check that everything still works out.
vultour 5y ago
Their point was that most people already have the technology they need, and getting the latest shiniest thing isn't as much of an issue.

speeder 5y ago

Someone crashed my car recently. I had to buy another one (the other was impossible to repair). I ended buying a used base model Mitsibishi Lancer, for the same price a new Mitsibishi Lancer EVO used to cost 3 years ago. And I only bought that car specifically, because it was the cheapest sedan I could find, a Honda Civic or a Toyota Corolla was literally double the price. The reason for that? The chip shortage. While shopping for cars I even found a guy that sold his Lancer dashboard and put in its place a crappy one. Then when checking if I should buy a new HB20, I found out they are coming with crappy dashboards and the ones from 2019 are not avaialble anymore... The reason for that, again is the chip shortage, coloured dashboards with complex functions require more chips, so in case of new cars, the manufacturers are shipping them with simpler monochromatic dashboards with less functions, and some used car owners have been literally selling their dashboards to richer people, because they now are crazy expensive. Meanwhile the government of my country has been terrified of truckers, the truckers been giving them a hard time, specially because of the prices of trucks, both used and new, they are saying that trucking is not profitable anymore and want the government to give them money. Know why trucking is not profitable anymore? Well... the chip shortage made trucks get crazy expensive. The government also was going to switch the machines used for voting, to make election more secure and fair (the new machines would allow better methods of recounting not vulnerable to hacking), but this was aborted, because new machines had their price skyrocket... because of the chip shortage. The list goes on, the chip shortage is not just causing inflation or making people not afford a new laptop, it is literally disrupting production, changing products, changing people behaviour, causing social changes, causing LEGAL changes... The chip shortage literally is affecting how the leader of 250 million people is chosen!

jdrc 5y ago
And major crisis, including energy, does that.
- chaosite 5y ago
  So this is a major crisis, i.e., a big problem, right?
op00to 5y ago

dylan604 5y ago

I used to think that about my 2011 laptop as just looking at the CPU speeds were not really much faster. however, CPU is only a part of the system. GPU/RAM/SSD/etc have seen several generational leaps ahead and all add up to an improved experience. Also, even though the CPU speeds aren't much faster, the transistors in the chips are drastically changing. So some bits of code run faster because now they are on the chip.

gruturo 5y ago

Indeed a laptop built in 2014 is unaffected by a chip shortage in 2020-22. Until it's accidentally dropped and you need a replacement. Or you want to buy a webcam for it. Or a car, a TV, an oven, a dishwasher. Or you interact with any service which is itself impacted, and then you suffer longer wait times, higher prices or are denied service. Maybe your ISP can't ship you a replacement if your router just got fried by lightning. And let's hope you don't need a hospital ER, where you would find out that semiconductors are not the only critical shortage going on.

m4x 5y ago

Just as an aside, a CPU from 2022 will generally be much faster and efficient than one from 2014, even if the clock speed is similar, due to architecture improvements.