The Next President is...

[Banzai]

Can you guys please go ahead and explain this one:

https://www.pcmag.com/news/trump-to-tariff-chips-made-in-taiwan-targeting-tsmc

Is this not exactly what China and Russia would want the US to do?

[Smokin]

China and Russia want the US to produce more chips?  Taxes can and should be looked at as the government incentivizing behavior as soon as you get past standard income and sales tax.  Trump wants to increase US chip production, which would make us less reliant on foreign producers.  His fastest and easiest way to do that is to artificially increase the price of foreign chips to make the market more desirable for US companies to enter/expand.  Clearly there will be second and third order consequences, but he must think those are worth the desired effects.

[SurelySerious]

Can you guys please go ahead and explain this one:
https://www.pcmag.com/news/trump-to-tariff-chips-made-in-taiwan-targeting-tsmc
Is this not exactly what China and Russia would want the US to do?

That’s some dumb shit, especially when Intel can’t get their act together.

[M2]

32 minutes ago, SurelySerious said:

That’s some dumb shit, especially when Intel can’t get their act together.

Not really, you can't trust chips made in China...

[Boomer6]

38 minutes ago, Smokin said:

His fastest and easiest way to do that is to artificially increase the price of foreign chips to make the market more desirable for US companies to enter/expand.  Clearly there will be second and third order consequences, but he must think those are worth the desired effects.

Idk if I agree or disagree with the proposed policy yet. With that being said, do you realize how much a chip fab costs? They're upwards of $20 billion and like most building projects in the US take several years to construct. Idk that there is going to be anything fast about this.

8 minutes ago, M2 said:

Not really, you can't trust chips made in China...

The high end chips we use for AI, military applications, etc. are made by TSMC. They're made by TSMC because Intel is several years behind TSMC technologically. They bet wrong awhile back and have a lot of catching up to do.

I get the point about using taxes to incentivize companies to move production to the US, but it was the CHIPS Act that helped TSMC begin construction on 3 high end fabs in the US. It'll be interesting to see how TSMC reacts.

[ClearedHot]

54 minutes ago, Boomer6 said:

Idk if I agree or disagree with the proposed policy yet. With that being said, do you realize how much a chip fab costs? They're upwards of $20 billion and like most building projects in the US take several years to construct. Idk that there is going to be anything fast about this.

Shack on the cost...time can be up to five years, large scale clean room production is not cheap or fast to set up.  That being said I thought Samsung invest a crap ton a few years ago when the shortage was at its peak and they were building new factories in South Korea.  I though at similar effort was underway to build a factory here in the states as of two years ago.

56 minutes ago, Boomer6 said:

The high end chips we use for AI, military applications, etc. are made by TSMC. They're made by TSMC because Intel is several years behind TSMC technologically. They bet wrong awhile back and have a lot of catching up to do.

That was the big news yesterday that crushed NVdia and tech stocks.  China "claims" to have found a way to have a better working AI model that does not require TSMC chips...AND it can be trained for pennies on the dollar.  Supposedly they use a technique that uses on demand processing modules versus always on, which dramatically reduces the requirements on both the processor and power consumption.  Interestingly the new DeepSeek Model has already been trained to ignore questions about Chinese leadership and government. 

Between AI and Quantum things are really moving fast and it will be interesting to see how chip production is impacted.

[Banzai]

Chip fabs aren’t spun up in years, they take literal decades to build infrastructure and have talent. The free market doesn’t just solve this quickly. Also, we already lost on the free market - it’s why almost all US fabs shut down during the 1970s-1990s. We are at a significant disadvantage to China 🇨🇳 in this competition…

The only thing that could make this worse is if he follows through with his stated desire to abandon the CHIPS act because he for some reason sees it as partisan.

https://breakingdefense.com/2024/12/trumps-threat-to-abandon-chips-act-horrific-idea-raimundo-says/

[uhhello]

They are dumping heaps of money into the PHX area chip plant.  It's biggest issue was finding qualified folks to do the work.  Got years behind but apparently is spinning up much faster now. 

 

https://restofworld.org/2024/tsmc-arizona-expansion/

Edited Tuesday at 05:51 PM by uhhello

[Banzai]

10 minutes ago, uhhello said:

They are dumping heaps of money into the PHX area chip plant.  It's biggest issue was finding qualified folks to do the work.  Got years behind but apparently is spinning up much faster now. 

 

https://restofworld.org/2024/tsmc-arizona-expansion/

To be clear, that is happening because of the CHIPS act, which is potentially being considered for cancellation because it is seen as a Dem thing.

https://www.commerce.gov/news/press-releases/2024/11/biden-harris-administration-announces-chips-incentives-award-tsmc

And for some reason the Trump admin is taking aim at TSMC? 

Is defending Taiwan’s semiconductor trade with the Western world from China not one of the major reasons the US military has been spun up about Great Power competition?

I don’t see how these policies could be better in the short, medium, or long term. Unless the play is to disengage, become more isolationist, and take the hit on the chin that China can run that part of the world.

Edited Tuesday at 05:59 PM by Banzai

[SurelySerious]

Not really, you can't trust chips made in China...

Taiwan isn’t China. Also, Intel’s fab work has been failing left and right lately, so you can’t trust their work.

[SurelySerious]

They are dumping heaps of money into the PHX area chip plant.  It's biggest issue was finding qualified folks to do the work.  Got years behind but apparently is spinning up much faster now. 
 
https://restofworld.org/2024/tsmc-arizona-expansion/

Edit: My mistake, yes TSMC is having trouble finding the staff for their Phoenix fab.

Intel is also dumping tons of money into US fab facilities, but their quality control with existing fab right now is garbage and as referenced they got complacent and didn’t continue developing new processes 5-10 years ago.

[busdriver]

8 hours ago, SurelySerious said:

Taiwan isn’t China. Also, Intel’s fab work has been failing left and right lately, so you can’t trust their work.

I'm aware of the fab contamination thing in early Raptor Lake, beyond that what fab fails?

Design fails abound though. 

[Boomer6]

31 minutes ago, busdriver said:

I'm aware of the fab contamination thing in early Raptor Lake, beyond that what fab fails?

Design fails abound though. 

One reason is Intel held off on employing EUV lithography while TSMC embraced it. EUVs cost $300-700mil. There are several other reasons as well, that's just one.

Source: Chip War and google 

[busdriver]

13 minutes ago, Boomer6 said:

One reason is Intel held off on employing EUV lithography while TSMC embraced it. EUVs cost $300-700mil. There are several other reasons as well, that's just one.

Source: Chip War and google 

I got that.

Surely mentioned actual fab fails and quality control problems.

What I know:   In the early portion of 13th generation Core i production, a summer monsoon fucked up one of the Chandler fab's HVACs and seriously fucked up a bunch of stuff (corrosion, etc).

Other than that, they have been having one problem after another with their designs. But I'm not aware of chronic QC problems in the fabs themselves.

[Boomer6]

32 minutes ago, busdriver said:

I got that.

Surely mentioned actual fab fails and quality control problems.

What I know:   In the early portion of 13th generation Core i production, a summer monsoon fucked up one of the Chandler fab's HVACs and seriously fucked up a bunch of stuff (corrosion, etc).

Other than that, they have been having one problem after another with their designs. But I'm not aware of chronic QC problems in the fabs themselves.

Most recently there have been several articles claiming that 1 in 10 of their new 1.8nm chips are failing quality control inspection.

[busdriver]

Thanks,  I did read that, forgot.  There was some back and forth about what yield level represents production ready.  Still, not production.  More like "it turns out jumping past TSMC isn't as simple as buying the latest Dutch wonder printer.

[Lord Ratner]

23 hours ago, Sua Sponte said:

Damn

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/dr-philip-low-b742ba_i-have-known-elon-musk-at-a-deep-level-for-activity-7288439915485315072-29fb?utm_medium=ios_app&utm_source=social_share_sheet&utm_campaign=copy_link

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/dr-philip-low-b742ba_elon-musk-ignites-online-speculation-over-activity-7287360170349805569-DTTy?utm_medium=ios_app&utm_source=social_share_sheet&utm_campaign=copy_link

Retarded. 

He starts the article by telling us that he *used to* talk to Elon all the time, then provides an analysis that has zero insider insight or connection to his experiences with Elon. But he hopes the reader will assume that his five reasons are somehow informed by something Elon told him. Point 2 is a perfect example. He should have written "I believe he was upset..." But instead he makes it seem like Elon told him this personally. Point 3 is even more retarded. 

 

Lot of people out there who are upset they didn't get to ride the elevator to the top with him.

[SurelySerious]

I got that.
Surely mentioned actual fab fails and quality control problems.
What I know:   In the early portion of 13th generation Core i production, a summer monsoon ed up one of the Chandler fab's HVACs and seriously ed up a bunch of stuff (corrosion, etc).
Other than that, they have been having one problem after another with their designs. But I'm not aware of chronic QC problems in the fabs themselves.

Most recently there have been several articles claiming that 1 in 10 of their new 1.8nm chips are failing quality control inspection.

Thanks,  I did read that, forgot.  There was some back and forth about what yield level represents production ready.  Still, not production.  More like "it turns out jumping past TSMC isn't as simple as buying the latest Dutch wonder printer.

If not being able to produce the product and meet quality targets doesn’t meet the criteria of a production problem, not sure what does. Seem to be doing ok with their graphics cards, though.

[busdriver]

1 minute ago, SurelySerious said:

If not being able to produce the product and meet quality targets doesn’t meet the criteria of a production problem, not sure what does. Seem to be doing ok with their graphics cards, though.

Your original words do not match your later point.

18 hours ago, SurelySerious said:

Intel is also dumping tons of money into US fab facilities, but their quality control with existing fab right now is garbage and as referenced they got complacent and didn’t continue developing new processes 5-10 years ago.

QC problems in existing fabs is not the same thing as behind schedule with their new process node development.

Neither is particularly good, but they're not the same thing.  I was unsure if you knew something else that I didn't know.

[ClearedHot]

$600B in NVida Market cap vaporized in one day (while punishing tech stocks across the board), and it turns out the Chinese likely stole the data to train their model.

Microsoft Probing If DeepSeek-Linked Group Improperly Obtained OpenAI Data

[Lord Ratner]

6 hours ago, ClearedHot said:

$600B in NVida Market cap vaporized in one day (while punishing tech stocks across the board), and it turns out the Chinese likely stole the data to train their model.

Microsoft Probing If DeepSeek-Linked Group Improperly Obtained OpenAI Data

During WWII there were scientists in the Manhattan project leaking research to the Soviets. They thought the technology was too powerful and too dangerous to be in the hands of one nation. And the technical, socially awkward, autistic-adjacent minds of the world's top brainiacs had an uncomfortable appreciation for a communist system that "solved" a lot of the messiness associated with a free democratic system. Sound familiar?

I can't imagine how the Chinese got their hands on that data when nearly every originating member of the OpenAI team has resigned with very public protests regarding the safeguards in place for the advent of AGI.

[Boomer6]

34 minutes ago, Lord Ratner said:

I can't imagine how the Chinese got their hands on that data when nearly every originating member of the OpenAI team has resigned with very public protests regarding the safeguards in place for the advent of AGI.

Well we all know the chicoms are too proud to steal intellectual property..

[Lawman]

Well we all know the chicoms are too proud to steal intellectual property..

They have a solution for that. They just claim then invented whatever it is first.


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