Global chip shortage may soon turn into an oversupply crisis

Digital FETs are CMOS made with fins or whatever to switch as fast as possible. Analog FETs are something else to make clean predictable signals from mature manufacturing processes. Power FETs are big arrays of trenches to not destroy themselves. You can't really compare them. That would be like comparing a racecar to a passenger van to a rock hauler. They're all vehicles, but they have different purposes and success metrics.

If people made purely rational decisions when purchasing a car, the only manufactures left would be Toyota and Honda.

You seem to be getting upset about a situation that exists only in your (or someone else's) imagination.

I’d love for them to not, but I don’t think it’s going to change. Tesla, their primary EV competition, charges for software-only features.

I'd absolutely kill for something like the K5 Blazer-E, but without the connectivity likely built into eCrate.

They remain priced at $837B market cap (even after a dramatic recent rout where Elon sold the top and is now under SEC investigation for doing so), while Toyota has a $300B market cap. Toyota makes ~8M cars per year [1]. Tesla made 400K cars last year [2].

Toyota made 20X more cars and has a market cap just 36% of TSLA.

There's a few ways cultists (err, sorry, investors) justify this valuation gap.

1. Self driving cars.

2. High margins.

If you give up on self-driving and you start making lower-margin cars, you start to look an awful lot like a car company, which would mean you'd have to reduce their stock price to just 10-20% of where it's at right now. From $800 to $80-160. And that's generous, leaving room for some of their fun pet projects like the always-next-year solar roof tile [3].

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/267272/worldwide-vehicle...

[2] https://backlinko.com/tesla-stats

[3] https://electrek.co/2022/02/02/tesla-supply-chain-issues-ext...

IMO the key competitive advantage they have in the us/can market is their supercharger network and how they are ahead tech wise, making them %20 better cars than current competitors.

I know Tesla was able to pivot to different MPUs during the shortage, because the code is pretty much decently layered; so only the Low Level code to wrap the peripherals needed to change.

It's true, it's hard to replace MOSFETs when you have 1KV / hundreds of amps needs --- however, it is possible to make MOSFET arrays using lower-capable parts.

Obviously, infotainment and AI-ish tasks are not what I'm talking about.

I guess I am also part of the problem. I hate the idea of a scalper but I bought one from a high school student who is scouting them out and buying them then reselling them at a $100 markup over MSRP to make money for college. They learned to code for this. I figured it was the right kind of entrepreneurship to support even if the entire supply chain issues we face are allowing less scrupulous people to profit akin to how this student is.

Or maybe you're overwhelmed by choice, between Steam sales, Game Pass, indie games, F2P, Epic Store freebies, and more, there's always something new you can try out whithout spending much money at all.

Although I suppose it can still be hard to find something really enjoyable to play if you were obsessed with a genre that's effectively dead these days (RTS? MMOs? Shmups?). But even then, there's usually indie devs out to fill every niche they can spot

This is the exact forum to discuss this.

I can't wait till your kind of vitriol has no legs to stand on.

False dilemma.

They are proper nouns.

Beacon chain is simply the name of the network launched a bit over a year ago. It is likely intended to be named as an aspirational thing to move toward.

Mainnet is the network launched 7 years ago. Usually distinct from "test networks", testnet, and seen far beyond ethereum into all cryptocurrency networks, and inherited from the idea of test, development, staging and production environments seen in the best practices of all web projects in the broader tech sector.

This is an article about them merging.

What is "weird pretentious verbiage" about that? If there was anything odd it would be "the docking" and that article immediately says that was a former name, making it a moot point.

The chain names (e.g. "Beacon") are basically version codenames - think of them like the "Buster" in "Debian Buster".

"The Merge" is the (arbitrary) name they gave to a specific future event, because people like to be able to easily refer to things they're talking about. I assume the previous name was discarded due to political correctness.

Ridiculous. Price is determined by how much people are willing to buy or sell it at, which they decide based on speculation. The amount of GPUs that will be put to the task of mining is dependent on price. Not the other way around.

I could create an alt coin that requires some arbitrarily large number of hashes to mine a single block and receive 1 coin as reward. Yet I cannot command a higher price for it, because no one wants to buy my coin.

First, you are ignoring that difficulty adjustments can happen downward too.

Second, you flipped the actually dynamic - the price swings dictate how much mining ends up being profitable, not the other way around.

You might have also confused the difficulty adjustments with the reward decreasing over time.

Thus, a coin that issues $50k worth of coin per day will have $50k/day worth of hash power. If difficulty goes above that, mining becomes unprofitable.

PoS security relies on the integrity of the stake — and the integrity of the stake relies on the “security” of the PoS system. It’s an intractible circularity problem.

Yes, a large sample of recent altcoins have shipped PoS, but this is no more relevant to a PoW v PoS security debate than a modern top 40 “hit songs” chart is to a debate over Beethoven v Bach.

Why sell a GPU for a fraction of the price, when you can just switch over to another coin and make 50-90% of the money you were making still.

> These smaller coins do not have the capability to automatically or naturally grow bigger market caps, trading volumes, and buy-side demand just because ETH switches to PoS.

What would they need to cross that barrier? For example, don't all coins have the ability to manipulate trade volume by sending money between owned wallets?

Now I think it needs to allow for exceptions for events like now with Russia invading Ukraine.

I haven't watched the news for years, or read the newspapers. I do real articles from magazines and newspapers and books and such (from HN, among other places), which are far more useful. I don't really know what's going on in Ukraine right this moment, but most will have forgotten that in two weeks time anyway, so what's the point? Instead I spent some time reading up on the context a few weeks ago.

The news is also strongly biased towards negative events. The classic example is that "plane crashed" is big news, but that planes are actually very safe. "Man spills pint and gets punched" is news. "Man spills pint and it's all fine" is not. etc. It's not a particularly good reflection of reality.

Perhaps a more reasonable approach is reading the news once a week. You stay informed, but it's not something you worry about daily.

Yeah! Imagine being so privileged you’re allowed to turn off the news and feel happier without mom and dad grounding you from the internet or the government aiming a nuke at you in response, which would thereby prevent you from typing words into a text box and clicking the Reply button when you’re done writing your thoughts.

That would suck because then someone else wouldn’t be able to come along and not actually provide a counterpoint to your comments, but instead just write “what a privileged thing to say”, undoubtedly smirking while simultaneously sipping a latte and clicking Reply to submit their effortless snarky reply from their $5K/month apartment located in the heart of some tech city.

I think CS Lewis explained it well when the atomic bomb was created:

> In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. “How are we to live in an atomic age?” I am tempted to reply: “Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.”

Because we can completely fill our days with what's going on in Ukraine and yet be able to do very little about it at an individual level and I'm really not sure that's good for someone's sanity.

For me personally, I find the war to be incredibly distracting, because my attention was almost constantly drawn to it. But throughout the past few days I learned a few thing:

The situation on the ground does not change that quickly, fresh reports are often wrong or fabricated. But most importantly: I've gotten myself to be constantly obsessed over a distant war which made me forget what I actually wanted to do over the past few days.

I'll continue to follow the news, but not every hour and minute, and I'm just thankful a place like this exist.

However, what the article is talking about is the risk of a longer term oversupply situation at the foundry level. If that happens the result will likely be even more consolidation. The downside to you as a consumer would be lack of innovation and flat to higher prices over time.[1] Once you get below a handful of players in a market, the worse your options as a consumer get.

[1] see Intel CPUs for much of the 201X's

It's arguable that they've been doing a bit of this over the past couple of generations... it would get far worse in a chronic oversupply situation.

Only if they can afford them and can justify the purchase. People want many things that for various reasons they don't acquire. It may be cost (units would have to be sold at a loss to get down to consumer-comfortable pricing), it may be that it's part of a larger system. For me to get a new AMD CPU I'd also need a compatible motherboard and, possibly, different RAM (either for physical compatibility or to get an actual performance improvement, even if my old RAM "works" if it's sufficiently slow it's a bottleneck that makes the purchase not worthwhile to me).

Consolidation is a fairly easy bet to place though from a 2022 POV, so I guess GP (and I) are predicting cold during winter.

Though it will still increase cost to Russia with another middle man involved.