5 ms·
Switches and raspberries got really hard to find for a while too
by savant_penguin 4y ago
Switches and raspberries got really hard to find for a while too
- reissbaker 4y agoRaspberry Pis are still widely out of stock. And not just Pis! The car industry has been facing chip shortages, Fujifilm's flagship digital cameras and lenses are still impossible to find and have been for years since the chip shortage started... Two years after Nvidia released their flagship GPUs they're finally able to be purchased, but they're only six months away from releasing the next generation, which will also likely be sold out immediately. No one has been able to use TSMC's latest fab tech other than Apple, because just Apple's demand for chips maxed out their entire production capacity. This is the largest chip shortage in my lifetime certainly, and possibly since the invention of the semiconductor. Predicting an oversupply any time soon when chips in the leading, middle, and trailing edges are in an unprecedented shortage is like predicting that someday California will have too much housing. I mean, on a long enough timescale, maybe... But that's well into the "being too early is the same as being wrong" territory.
- jorl17 4y agoWe desperately need raspberry pis for our product! Does anyone happen to know where we can find more? We are currently drifting back to x86 to deal with the immense shortage of Pis!
- bschwindHN 4y agoJust curious, what's your product?
- jorl17 4y agoThe product I'm working on is in the smart locker space
- bschwindHN 4y agoIs that something you could get away with using an ESP8266 or ESP32 for? If so, that might solve your supply issue.
- jorl17 4y agoDefinitely not. But thanks for the suggestion. We really would need raspberry pis, and the alternative is just moving over to x86. We need to run a real linux distribution, with chromium or similar, as well as serial, canbus, wifi, modem... :)
- silisili 4y agoNot to sound nationalistic, but the fact that we(USA) are not setting up fabs like crazy makes me feel like it's temporary. The same way Georgia Pacific and friends didn't set up tons of TP factories during the pandemic. I figure someone much smarter than me ran the numbers and decided it's not worth the cost. And chips being in such shortage for many years would likely be worth the cost. All of that said, I wish the US gov would sponsor in some way new fabs in the US. It's nearly a national security risk at this point.
- whichquestion 4y agoThe US Government did precisely that with the CHIPS Act (2021). It allocated something like $40B for US manufacturing of semiconductors and $10B for R&D [1]. Intel is planning a megafab in Ohio that is estimated will cost $100B when it’s completed. The State of Ohio is giving $2B for the first two plants that are estimated to cost $20B [2]. Chip companies are making new fabs in the US and the US gov is helping to sponsor them. [1] https://www.nist.gov/semiconductors/chips-act https://www.nist.gov/semiconductors/chips-act [2] https://www.usatoday.com/story/business/2022/04/14/intel-negotiations-being-finalized-jobsohio-executive-says/7282513001/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/business/2022/04/14/intel-neg...
- silisili 4y agoExcellent, thank you! I suppose I should have researched more recently before commenting. The fact that this doesn't make front page national news is mind boggling to me.
- johnwalkr 4y agoEven for Apple stuff, it takes 4+ weeks to order anything outside of base models and a few other configurations. Normally It’s about 1 week.