"The rip-offs of common powertrain control module 4 units relate to the ongoing shortage of microchips"
So how long does the microchip shortage continue?
So how long does the microchip shortage continue?
Probably at least a couple years.
Imagine if a shipment of 100K Raspberry Pi 2 W Zero came in today. "Everybody knows" if you buy direct you can pay $5, and the lowest price for scalpers on Amazon for a 2 W Zero is currently $149 so you can probably actually sell for $130-ish and clear $125 of scalping profit per unit shipped.
Note there's not much risk... Put $500 of Pi on the credit card, get 100 units, if you can scalp FOUR at hyperinflated prices you broke even, even if the price craters to $5 tomorrow and you're sitting on 96 unsold units.
There's just too much money floating around for the shortage to go away. The only way for a manufacturer to crack the scalper market is to get financing so cheap they can out-finance the entire scalper "industry". But no cross-planet exporter can out-finance the consumer sector credit card printing press of cash, so the scalpers are semi-permanent and some technologies are essentially dead now.
Now personally I've written off the Pi and STM32 ecosystems. Everything in resale is either fake or falsely marked ("8GB" but its actually 2G, etc) or marked up to insane prices so those technologies are dead to me. Unfortunately there's still people trying to use those legacy technologies so prices on Amazon are $149 for a $5 product, but eventually those techs will be widely regarded as dead and then the market can clear and go back to normal. Overall I'm "enjoying" ESP32 products, at least those can still be purchased at a reasonable price...
In my humble opinion, there is no shortage. There is however a huge priorization and a control of the production to elevate the prices.
I guess some people in far east asia figured out they have power the same way as the founders of OPEP did in the 70's. Look at all the microchips based shit you can buy on aliexpress. Doesn't seem they are affected much by shortage.
Since then the industry has been in a cycle of: - Manufacturer finishes a batch of popular chip - Everybody who uses that chip tries to buy next 3-5 year demand - Popular chip is out of stock again
Its classic hyperinflation market. Too much money chasing too little product. The only way to crack the hyperinflation would be to boost interest rates on credit cards over 2600% making speculation unprofitable or for the endusers to abandon the marketplace and let the price crash or boost the manufacturers production until they flood the market down. The CC interest rate thing would not sell well in an election year LOL. The manufacturers cannot outproduce the demands of the entire financial industry money printing press. The only option is market abandonment.
Nominally, the Federal Reserve is politically independent...
Warning: Paid Pessimist point of view (I've done computer security for far, far too long).
Indefinitely. It doesn't recover. Because (modern, leading process) microchips are the sort of globe spanning supply chain problem that works great, right up until it doesn't. Coolant for some laser is made in this country that's at war. Some critical surface processing chemical is made by that company that had a major power outage and their facility caked up with goo that has to be scraped out. Some semiconductor fab has a worker shortage. Or a water shortage. Or got blown to pieces when some other country tried to invade (TSMC would be nuts if they weren't wired with demolition charges and quietly sure China knew it).
There will always be "something" that interferes with the smooth generation of chips. And there will be some supply, but not as much as people hope for, and they'll be rough around the edges, and, besides, you can't get those surface mount resistors in any quantity right now for your design. And eventually, this starts impacting the funding of the companies working on the newest, latest and greatest process tech, and they don't have the money to continue pushing forward.
We're long past the point when anyone but the most well funded multinationals can even consider a leading process tech foundry - and there are only a few companies on the planet who can make the hardware for it. The supply chain for foundries is just as bad as anything else, if you have a couple billion to drop on one.
And at some point, enough people will find workarounds that don't involve modern silicon that (at least in my arc of the future) demand will drop, so you won't be able to justify the investment in a leading edge fab much beyond the current stuff. Throw a solid recession/depression in, and consumer electronics spending is likely to drop substantially - so there goes a lot of the leading edge demand for some while.
The question, "How much damage can an efficient, just in time optimized global economy take before it fails?" has been discussed for many, many years, and the pessimistic point of view as of now would be, "Less than it's taken and is going to take in the next few years." And at some point, things like "food" and "basic energy" are more important to keep working than the latest consumer toys.
I'm entirely aware this doesn't paint a pretty picture of the future, and it certainly doesn't involve us going to the stars in any quantities, outside perhaps some token boots on Mars. But it's the sort of ragged decline we've seen throughout history, and, I'd argue, that we're firmly in the middle of right now. "Rattling down the backside of the arc of empire, undergoing catabolic collapse" seems to better predict things than a lot of other mental models lately.
Maybe just need to reuse more hardware. Standardize and commodify replacement parts for mobile devices like framework/fairphone. Reduce the amount of IoT crap in toasters/etc. Use multiseat instead of thin clients. Upcycle old computers.
Electron says, "Hold my beer!"
I would love to see lower software requirements, more long lived systems, etc.
Meanwhile, Microsoft is obsoleting... basically the last decade+ of hardware for Windows 11. It's an uphill fight.
Edit: of course, I'm running swaywm on linux, so my environment is generally pretty light as it is compared to Windows.
My massive, powerful, "Do absolutely everything!" computer in college was a dual Pentium III 866, with 768MB RAM. And a hex core, 2GHz ARM box with 4GB RAM can't do half as much, because of just how heavily bloated software is. I still write code, browse the web, chat with people... and I need radically more resources because that's what software development has decided is easy. Meanwhile, stuff like Hexchat for IRC just... uses no resources and works as wonderfully as ever.
Throwing slack / spotify / vscode / steam / whatever else on top of that could easily bump it up several more gb. VScode is pretty good, up until you start adding in language servers. The quality of the rest is really hit or miss.
Edit: Out of curiosity, I opened steam, and it immediately took up a little bit of ram, then by the time it finished "loading" it ballooned up to a gig- presumably because of all the fancy animated images and video players and what not the storefront needs. I could definitely do without those things, though I imagine they do correlate to more purchases (there's a name for it, I forget- something about moving images triggering a capture of attention going back to hunting / fight or flight response).
OTOH my battery is dying, and may not be worth replacing.
Maybe developers should take some responsibility and stop fucking writing code that's slow as shit and unusable on anything past their company-paid for macbook pros.
In an ideal society programmers would be sat down and given a seven year old mid-range laptop and threatened that if their program lags in the slightest they would be fired and blacklisted from the industry.
It is absolutely adequate to do a lot of things one wants to do. But it will show when you've done something stupid with CPU.
I'm still bitter that Google ruined the Blogger editor interface. Fancy, shiny new interface... that lagged horribly if you had a low power CPU and a bunch of photos in a post. The old interface handled it perfectly, because I wrote an awful lot of blog posts on an old Atom netbook with a nice keyboard.
But, yes, any new hardware performance is more than chewed up by new software abstractions.
That’s what React does: Instead of showing a table of 200 rows, the performance of React is so poor that it’s a design trend to make you paginate through 10-line pages. So, soon 6, “for better performance”.
The reason it is not happening is because market forces don’t favour those solutions. But since you seem to care enough to threaten, fire, and backlist them surely you care enough to pay for the craftmanship required to get what you desire.
The auto industry buys bolts and makes pistons because the marketplace can't make pistons, roughly. They have the know how if the bolt marketplace collapsed to turn steel rod into bolts, maybe not as easily and cheaply as it can be done now, but if the bolt market died they'd make their own bolts.
The commodity microcontroller is dead. My guess is crappy "homemade" older-gen FPGAs made by GM for GM products will be the future of automotive ECUs and other automotive apps.
In 1980, $100M built you an entire fab. It costs GM about $300M to remodel an old assembly plant. They can either go out of business because 2022 chips are unavailable or build their own fab. Hmm I wonder what they'll do?
The nice part about building an older gen FPGA is it quite accurately emulates an older gen chip, usually using a lot more power and requiring a lot more silicon, but at least it works better than "next estimated shipping date 2024"
I don't think GM will open a fab on their own. Too expensive for what they need. However a joint GM/Ford/Toyota venture seems possible (if it can get past anti-trust laws!), and that would find customers in the likes of Honda.
Most of our current supply chain problem is on trailing nodes.
Sure, there's not quite enough capacity on the leading nodes: there never is. It's a bit worse now than usual, but...
The big thing that's new here is increased demand plus some disruption on production has shown how little excess production exists for microcontrollers and various low-end ICs in consumer and industrial goods. It's difficult to justify building additional production on mid-end nodes, as margins are likely to fall back down in the future... but one can imagine various ways this nets out OK (e.g. countries deciding domestic production of these items is critical for national security reasons and supplying subsidy).
I made a mistake in a post above, I thought Raspberry PI 2 W were still retail priced at $5, like the old days of the zero (of course those were unobtainable by most people at $5 even in good economic times).
So the Pi foundation is selling for $15 and the market on Amazon has cleared everything for sale below $149.
It would be fair to claim, with some hand waving, that the manufacturer of the Pi boosted the price 200% from $5 to $15, but the scalpers are boosting the price from $15 to maybe $130 will sell and clear the market, so the scalpers are making (150-15)/15*100 = 766% lets round that to 800%.
So for every hyperinflated price dollar, about 20 cents goes to the mfgr and about 80 cents goes to the scalper.
In the long run this destroys middlemen-as-a-service. No matter how inefficient "big corporate" is, its gotta be cheaper than the scalpers, so people are eventually going to buy Pi 2 W zeros from raspi themselves for maybe $40 to $50. Onesie-twosie shipping is expensive for inefficient big corporate so thats maybe even a fair price. Then the scalpers and middlemen will die out with their $130 prices if raspi sells direct for $50.