8 ms·

I'd bet $50 in 18 months "the crunch" will still be in full swing (and Raspberry Pi will still be "bringing huge volumes to the market any week now"). There is

I'd bet $50 in 18 months "the crunch" will still be in full swing (and Raspberry Pi will still be "bringing huge volumes to the market any week now"). There is no way in hell all these expensive fabs will pay for themselves if chips are too cheap. So no one (especially not TSMC) will risk oversupply by building too many fabs.

pclmulqdq 3y ago
The Raspberry Pi wouldn't have issues if not for the fact that they are explicitly an outlet for Broadcom's excess chips, and they have never paid full price for their CPUs. If they doubled the price of the boards, they would be able to get the parts.
- selfhoster11 3y ago
  If they doubled the price of their boards, they would simply die to the entire hobbyist market.
- Miraste 3y ago
  Why don't they? The current market price is 3 or 4 times the MSRP and has been for years--the Raspberry Pi has lost its place as the affordable hobbyist board. I suppose it would be admitting defeat, but if they'd actually pay for parts and make new Pis again, I'm sure they could at least bring the market prices down.
  - nsteel 3y ago
    The price in my market is back to normal for the versions I want. Has been for a month or so now. I don't see why the other versions won't follow soon enough, exactly as was promised at the start of the year.
  - sangnoir 3y ago
    > the Raspberry Pi has lost its place as the affordable hobbyist board I keep hearing this - but I've seen no evidence of any successor board. Which board would you say is now the go-to board for hobbyists?
    - selfhoster11 3y ago
      There isn't a successor board, not really. But people have started to buy ultra small form factor (USFF) x86 computers and thin clients that got cycled out by corporations and leasing companies, with great success I might add. The price/performance (+size) is about the same as for the Pi, the power draw is not as bad as with older Intel/AMD machines, and your I/O options and x86 software compatibility is vastly better. The only drawback is that you're buying used instead of new, and that your starting price for a small home lab (albeit one that starts at 2-3x the power of a single Pi) is larger, which harms students and other makers on a shoestring budget.
    - Miraste 3y ago
      There isn't one, that's what's so annoying. There are a lot of Pi-likes, but nothing with the same level of support and enthusiasm the Pi used to have. The community has just withered.
      - harshitaneja 3y ago
        It's incredibly sad. I was in the hobbyist community as a younger teen since the beginning of pi till 2016-17. When I stopped at that time ESP8266 had just so much potential as the cheap microcontroller with wifi and RPi Zero W as the cheap microcontroller with wifi as well. The development environment had improved so much over the years and things seemed great. The alternative pi clones also were building their own identity and figuring out their software. Over the years I felt guilty for not experimenting given that Rpi4 had 8 gigs of ram! and surely the competition would be better. I bought a bunch of Zeros, ESPs and 4s when I couldn't find other alternatives much but surely that was because I was out of the community and didn't know what to buy. And surely there would have been ESP alternative in all these years with lower power alternatives now that IOT is going to be a bigger thing finally. Alas, last year I came back to the hobbyist scene finally! Excited! And it was all a major disappointment. All my favourite hobbyist stores in my country had shut down or increased prices for basically everything by a huge margin. It all seemed more polished but so much more void of the vibrancy of the earlier scene. All the experimental boards sort of failing. And I can't even buy the boards anymore. Thankfully I could retrieve all the boards I had bought in past so didn't have to chase boards in flash sales as everyone else I knew had to. But it's so sad.
ksec 3y ago
>There is no way in hell all these expensive fabs will pay for themselves if chips are too cheap. While this isn't exactly the case here since it is Hi-End packaging that is the problem. But I am still happy to read the statement on HN as I have been ranting about 99% of comments giving little to zero credit to current state of art chip manufacturing and cost.
cinntaile 3y ago
RPi's are freely available nowadays. https://rpilocator.com/ https://rpilocator.com/
- guiambros 3y ago
  More available than before, yes. But still heavily constrained. In the US, there's no CM4 anywhere, and spotty availability of RPi4. CM4s are still being sold for hundreds of dollars on eBay.
  - cinntaile 3y ago
    Fair point, I only thought about the regular ones.
mschuster91 3y ago
> So no one (especially not TSMC) will risk oversupply by building too many fabs. Everyone and their dog is investing like crazy. Intel and TSMC are both setting up fabs in Silicon Saxony (although the question remains on how productive these will be, given the issues with the far-right in Saxony), TSMC is also expanding capacity in Arizona, and Samsung is building one in Texas. There will be no oversupply, not for the next few years. Demand from automotive, hyperscalers, AI and pent-up consumer demand is ludicrous.
- mikrl 3y ago
  >given the issues with the far-right in Saxony What does that have to do with anything? California has plenty of neonazis itself. The western world in general has no lack of far right extremists.
  - ARandomerDude 3y ago
    Or far-left ones, for that matter.
    - mschuster91 3y ago
      Far left ones don't go and shout "Ausländer raus" while marching in the thousands, which was a common occurrence during the high days of the weekly "Pegida" nazi marches in Dresden. Nor do they randomly beat up random people (not to mention protesters) that are just standing around [1]. [1] https://www.zeit.de/gesellschaft/zeitgeschehen/2018-10/rechtsextremismus-pegida-demonstration-ermittlungsverfahren-justiz https://www.zeit.de/gesellschaft/zeitgeschehen/2018-10/recht...
      - trashtester 3y ago
        While far left violence is currently a smaller problem in Germany than far right violence, it certainly exists. This article [1] claims that there were 399 reported assaults associated with left-wing extremists, compared to 1013 associated with right-wing extremists. Edit: and when it comes to property damage and arson, the far left is worse than the far right by about 3:1 [2]. This may be particularily relevant for companies who want to start new businesses. [1] https://www.dw.com/en/left-wing-extremism-in-germany-how-much-of-a-threat-is-it/a-65807817 https://www.dw.com/en/left-wing-extremism-in-germany-how-muc... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/963069/right-wing-left-wing-crimes-by-type-germany/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/963069/right-wing-left-w...
YetAnotherNick 3y ago
Increasing supply is not an issue if there is demand. As long as building more fabs brings more profit(even if at smaller margin), I can't see any reason why they won't be building it. It's economics 101. Also as moore's law is coming to end, the number of fabs has no way to go but up. Also I don't think manufacturing cost is the biggest of issue, because the margins are significantly higher than consumer GPUs which are in oversupply now for Nvidia. It's that Nvidia has to commit years in advance for the capacity.
- SilverBirch 3y ago
  The problem is the bull whip effect. Yes there’s loads of demand now, but are we really saying that the AI boom is a permanent uptick in demand for silicon, or is it more likely that the hype dies down? By the time capacity comes online demand may well gave peaked and dropped. Suddenly these massive sunk cost fabs will be taking any business they can to amortise the costs.
  - ethbr1 3y ago
    It seems more likely that efficiency gains decrease aggregate compute requirements than people stop using AI tools altogether. At minimum, LLMs work as a better human-software interface medium, which means they're going to be infused in almost everything non-technical consumer-facing. Even absent any other breakthroughs, that seems like a huge consumer of AI hardware capacity.
_ea1k 3y ago
Pi availability has been improving steadily since the beginning of the year.

pclmulqdq 3y ago

The Raspberry Pi wouldn't have issues if not for the fact that they are explicitly an outlet for Broadcom's excess chips, and they have never paid full price for their CPUs. If they doubled the price of the boards, they would be able to get the parts.

selfhoster11 3y ago
If they doubled the price of their boards, they would simply die to the entire hobbyist market.
Miraste 3y ago
Why don't they? The current market price is 3 or 4 times the MSRP and has been for years--the Raspberry Pi has lost its place as the affordable hobbyist board. I suppose it would be admitting defeat, but if they'd actually pay for parts and make new Pis again, I'm sure they could at least bring the market prices down.
- nsteel 3y ago
  The price in my market is back to normal for the versions I want. Has been for a month or so now. I don't see why the other versions won't follow soon enough, exactly as was promised at the start of the year.
- sangnoir 3y ago
  > the Raspberry Pi has lost its place as the affordable hobbyist board I keep hearing this - but I've seen no evidence of any successor board. Which board would you say is now the go-to board for hobbyists?
  - selfhoster11 3y ago
    There isn't a successor board, not really. But people have started to buy ultra small form factor (USFF) x86 computers and thin clients that got cycled out by corporations and leasing companies, with great success I might add. The price/performance (+size) is about the same as for the Pi, the power draw is not as bad as with older Intel/AMD machines, and your I/O options and x86 software compatibility is vastly better. The only drawback is that you're buying used instead of new, and that your starting price for a small home lab (albeit one that starts at 2-3x the power of a single Pi) is larger, which harms students and other makers on a shoestring budget.
  - Miraste 3y ago
    There isn't one, that's what's so annoying. There are a lot of Pi-likes, but nothing with the same level of support and enthusiasm the Pi used to have. The community has just withered.
    - harshitaneja 3y ago
      It's incredibly sad. I was in the hobbyist community as a younger teen since the beginning of pi till 2016-17. When I stopped at that time ESP8266 had just so much potential as the cheap microcontroller with wifi and RPi Zero W as the cheap microcontroller with wifi as well. The development environment had improved so much over the years and things seemed great. The alternative pi clones also were building their own identity and figuring out their software. Over the years I felt guilty for not experimenting given that Rpi4 had 8 gigs of ram! and surely the competition would be better. I bought a bunch of Zeros, ESPs and 4s when I couldn't find other alternatives much but surely that was because I was out of the community and didn't know what to buy. And surely there would have been ESP alternative in all these years with lower power alternatives now that IOT is going to be a bigger thing finally. Alas, last year I came back to the hobbyist scene finally! Excited! And it was all a major disappointment. All my favourite hobbyist stores in my country had shut down or increased prices for basically everything by a huge margin. It all seemed more polished but so much more void of the vibrancy of the earlier scene. All the experimental boards sort of failing. And I can't even buy the boards anymore. Thankfully I could retrieve all the boards I had bought in past so didn't have to chase boards in flash sales as everyone else I knew had to. But it's so sad.

ksec 3y ago

>There is no way in hell all these expensive fabs will pay for themselves if chips are too cheap. While this isn't exactly the case here since it is Hi-End packaging that is the problem. But I am still happy to read the statement on HN as I have been ranting about 99% of comments giving little to zero credit to current state of art chip manufacturing and cost.

cinntaile 3y ago

RPi's are freely available nowadays. https://rpilocator.com/ https://rpilocator.com/

guiambros 3y ago
More available than before, yes. But still heavily constrained. In the US, there's no CM4 anywhere, and spotty availability of RPi4. CM4s are still being sold for hundreds of dollars on eBay.
- cinntaile 3y ago
  Fair point, I only thought about the regular ones.

mschuster91 3y ago

> So no one (especially not TSMC) will risk oversupply by building too many fabs. Everyone and their dog is investing like crazy. Intel and TSMC are both setting up fabs in Silicon Saxony (although the question remains on how productive these will be, given the issues with the far-right in Saxony), TSMC is also expanding capacity in Arizona, and Samsung is building one in Texas. There will be no oversupply, not for the next few years. Demand from automotive, hyperscalers, AI and pent-up consumer demand is ludicrous.

mikrl 3y ago
>given the issues with the far-right in Saxony What does that have to do with anything? California has plenty of neonazis itself. The western world in general has no lack of far right extremists.
- ARandomerDude 3y ago
  Or far-left ones, for that matter.
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    Far left ones don't go and shout "Ausländer raus" while marching in the thousands, which was a common occurrence during the high days of the weekly "Pegida" nazi marches in Dresden. Nor do they randomly beat up random people (not to mention protesters) that are just standing around [1]. [1] https://www.zeit.de/gesellschaft/zeitgeschehen/2018-10/rechtsextremismus-pegida-demonstration-ermittlungsverfahren-justiz https://www.zeit.de/gesellschaft/zeitgeschehen/2018-10/recht...
    - trashtester 3y ago
      While far left violence is currently a smaller problem in Germany than far right violence, it certainly exists. This article [1] claims that there were 399 reported assaults associated with left-wing extremists, compared to 1013 associated with right-wing extremists. Edit: and when it comes to property damage and arson, the far left is worse than the far right by about 3:1 [2]. This may be particularily relevant for companies who want to start new businesses. [1] https://www.dw.com/en/left-wing-extremism-in-germany-how-much-of-a-threat-is-it/a-65807817 https://www.dw.com/en/left-wing-extremism-in-germany-how-muc... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/963069/right-wing-left-wing-crimes-by-type-germany/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/963069/right-wing-left-w...

YetAnotherNick 3y ago

Increasing supply is not an issue if there is demand. As long as building more fabs brings more profit(even if at smaller margin), I can't see any reason why they won't be building it. It's economics 101. Also as moore's law is coming to end, the number of fabs has no way to go but up. Also I don't think manufacturing cost is the biggest of issue, because the margins are significantly higher than consumer GPUs which are in oversupply now for Nvidia. It's that Nvidia has to commit years in advance for the capacity.

SilverBirch 3y ago
The problem is the bull whip effect. Yes there’s loads of demand now, but are we really saying that the AI boom is a permanent uptick in demand for silicon, or is it more likely that the hype dies down? By the time capacity comes online demand may well gave peaked and dropped. Suddenly these massive sunk cost fabs will be taking any business they can to amortise the costs.
- ethbr1 3y ago
  It seems more likely that efficiency gains decrease aggregate compute requirements than people stop using AI tools altogether. At minimum, LLMs work as a better human-software interface medium, which means they're going to be infused in almost everything non-technical consumer-facing. Even absent any other breakthroughs, that seems like a huge consumer of AI hardware capacity.

_ea1k 3y ago

Pi availability has been improving steadily since the beginning of the year.