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how competitive will american made cpu's be? will american consumers just end up paying n * more for same product that the rest of the world gets from taiwan?
by fungi 1y ago
how competitive will american made cpu's be? will american consumers just end up paying n * more for same product that the rest of the world gets from taiwan?
- bee_rider 1y agoI don’t think the mix of engineers we’ve been producing is right for this. We need a whole generation of folks at a higher hardware:software ratio. Check back in a decade to see if we’ve seriously started.
- edverma2 1y agoDoes America need to produce the talent or can they import it?
- epistasis 1y agoThe talent is already here, the employers just need to pay better.
- __MatrixMan__ 1y agoAnd attract them away from what? What are these skilled people doing? Does a photolithography skill set enable you to moonlight at some other gig such that they're here and keeping their skills fresh and we're just not noticing?
- georgeburdell 1y agoI was a fab tool owner. My last paycheck in a semiconductor position was in the mid-200s. I went into software and make double that in the same metro. Same level of responsibility. I don’t even work in machine learning. To take your photolithography example though, I know someone who went litho tool owner -> camera team at Apple -> Meta reality labs. FAANGs want semiconductor process engineers just so they can spend all day yelling at underpaid Asian vendor semiconductor process engineers who are doing the actual work.
- epistasis 1y agoSoftware. Talk to anybody in the hardware space, and compare their experience to software. Hell, the only two people I see in this thread that claim hardware experience are saying that it's a better career move to switch to software. Software is easier, pays better, and has far better employers. Until hardware companies realize the situation they've created, they will lose their workforce to greener pastures.
- nickff 1y agoSoftware has also benefitted from a massive tax subsidy relative to hardware, as the latter requires a massive capital investment. Hardware requires expensive real estate, and benefits from saving the spending, whereas software can exist on debt and small footprints.
- __MatrixMan__ 1y agoThat may have been the case prior to section 174, when you could invest massively in something, write it off as a loss, and then pivot to reusing it profitably, but now I think that all R&D efforts are equally discouraged.
- nickff 1y agoYou're right that the delta has been reduced, but producing physical goods still requires much more capital outlay (which is still disadvantaged).
- standardUser 1y agoA lot of highly skilled people are perfectly happy to stay at their job earing 60% of what they "could" be making because they have other priorities that don't involve increasing shareholder value.
- oceanplexian 1y agoSeems like everyone forgets that the USA literally invented all these things. In fact some of the Americans who invented these technologies and processes are probably still alive, if not a bit older and retired. Photolithographic semiconductor fabrication was invented in the United States. Americans invented the transistor. Americans invented the integrated circuit. I’m pretty sure the USA would do fine in the semiconductor industry in a short while if it was economical (i.e it stops being profitable to undermine American workers with cheap overseas labor).
- rangestransform 1y agoAmerica could import it if the current administration wasn’t so hell bent on repelling global talent through inflicting great cost and uncertainty upon the talent
- nickff 1y agoEven this forum can’t decide whether skilled personnel are a boon because they positively contribute to the local economy, or a negative because they undermine employment prospects for locals.
- bee_rider 1y agoI think the policy is “immigrate your complement.”
- raw_anon_1111 1y agoThere really is a big difference betwwwn needing to import engineers to create high end chips and WITCH companies using h1B to get cheap contractors to do enterprise dev or any software development except something really specialized
- eru 1y agoI don't know about this forum, but mainstream economics (and quite a few of the more niche approaches, too) is pretty much all in favour of open immigration for all skill levels.
- nosianu 1y agoI don't think you can say that. They are neither for or against, they make (or try to make) predictions what happens in either case. Who benefits and who loses is not the same in those cases, it's not linear. If you wan to be "for" or "against" you have to take a side. Doesn't mean they don't have opinions too, but two economists that each favor different outcomes may still agree on the methods of their field.
- 1y ago
- chris_wot 1y agoWell, they can't import it any more.
- coliveira 1y agoThey cannot produce it (in large quantities) and it's getting harder and harder to import talent.
- Spooky23 1y agoI worked at a US college that had a big semiconductor engineering and manufacturing engineering program. They were about 20-30% international, but the program wasn’t huge. Frankly, it’s shitty work. Software is where it’s at. Hardware people get paid peanuts and work really hard. When you’re a master of a particular technology, you get discarded when the next thing comes along. Ask the people at Intel or IBM. The best jobs are the execs and the tradesmen.
- FirmwareBurner 1y ago[dead]
- yieldcrv 1y agoHave you seen how much of a premium Americans are already paying for chips in the face of constrained supply? Gamers are still buying them and so is everyone else Given that this is the same curiosity and question since pre-pandemic and now we have many examples of a premium, I think its not a real worry as long as the chips perform
- walsh404 1y agoGet ready for your 8 year repayment plan with TMOBILE!
- coliveira 1y agoOf course cost is an issue. If costs are higher than in Asia, everybody else in the world is going to buy Asian chips, not American ones.
- nebula8804 1y agoI keep seeing this in every industry. "We can't give up America because they buy so much" "China needs the American market because they can't make up the numbers for the rest of the world combined in the short term" Can people here help answer where the heck does everyone have the money to buy all this stuff? Especially post COVID with all the layoffs? The US is only 5% of the world population. Europe isn't that poor and many chunks of Asia have a lot of wealth now. Yet America's appetite and more importantly capability of absorbing all manner of goods remains unimpaired...how?!
- yieldcrv 1y agoIts pretty impressive and brings you into macroeconomics and monetary policy Its a long answer but there are many winners in every financial environment in America, while the short answer is that nobody knows how they have money en masse to buy stuff and the whole system is based on incentivizing them to move that money around the economy, as opposed to collect and save it in a bank account
- WillPostForFood 1y agoYes there have been post-Covid layoffs, but unemployment is 4.3%, roughly at the "full employment" level, and only up 1 point from the post-Covid low. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE
- ojbyrne 1y agoI am guessing that it’s a highly automated process, so per unit costs are not going to be affected much by the cost of labor.
- numpad0 1y agoNo one will be until US gives couple nukes to Taiwan so that they no longer need the killswitch for the entire global semiconductor supply chain merely as the substitute. TSMC is going to just keep undercutting everyone else till then. They can compensate for that by lowering living standards and simultaneously raising expectations in the country. Everyone was competitive against TSMC until just 10 or 20 years ago. Then they all lost to TSMC one by one. Even IBM was competitive in price against others back in 2000s.
- christkv 1y agoWhy would they not be competitive?. Intel makes state of the art cpus in the us and they are competitive on price. It's weird that we seem to forget Intel when this issue comes up.