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Comment by lovich | Hacker News Reader

Seems like the automotive industry is gonna be the one to have to blink here. I’m not intimately involved in the details of the industry but didn’t the automotive industry already try to pass their risk onto TSMC by cancelling contracts early on into covid and we’re already told to get to the back of the line when they wanted their chip orders again?

If TSMC has enough demand to sell everything they make, they don’t really need to take specific client needs into account

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What does blink mean? Does your chips work when it is -70c - cars are used in arctic environments and so automakers have special tests to ensure they work in cold temperatures most of us will never see. Do you chips work when it is +65c - the inside of a parked car will get that hot, and the car is expected to work. How long will you keep the new chips in production - the longer the better we need to provide spare parts for everything for at least 10 years, so if you go out of production we need to fill a warehouse with the final production run just in case the things start mass failing in a few years.

I think the auto industry is looking to see if they can bypass the whole above mess with their own fabs. They don't need fancy processes, they need something reliable that they can depend on for years. The cost to a fab though means they need to worry about anti-trust as they can't go alone.

I think OP is saying that TSMC is saying “Okay auto manufacturers, we don’t want to manufacture chips that meet all of your requirements when we have so much order volume, so you’ll have to drop the requirements or find a different fab.” So the auto industry making their own fabs is exactly what TSMC wants them to do.

And the automakers will likely balk at spending many dozens of billions of capital outside of their core competency.

Since all the other legacy fabs are also at capacity for the next few years.

It's rapidly becoming part of their core competency, no different than steel panel manufacturing.

If the auto manufacturers don’t want chips to be part of their core competencies, then they’ll probably need to go back to building cars like they did thirty years ago.

Legacy auto is screwed. They are getting smaller and have fixed costs and fixed cultures that are going to be hard to remove. At the same time this makes it hard to recruit the types of people you need to turn the ship around.

This thread is a good example of the legacy auto mentality of blaming a supplier, instead of taking responsibility for the situation they are in.

This is about all auto. Or you thing that EV won't experience cold climate?

Doubtful the story you heard is correct.

Too many mainstream articles on semiconductors are just vague, uncheckable facts combined with filler that seems to have been suggested by Intel's PR department, even when Intel is totally irrelevant. Intel needs delicious subsidies!

> Intel is totally irrelevant

Intel still has the fastest chip in the world with the i9-12900KS. They are also the second largest semiconductor company in the world by revenue, only just last year barely passed by Samsung. [1]

I know Intel is not hip, but to call them irrelevant is some serious reality distortion.

[1] https://www.eetasia.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/04/I...

Sorry. I was responding in the context of automotive. There have been so many articles about the automotive chip shortage mentioning Intel. It's seems like filler by uninformed journalists. Intel is not a top dog in auto and most of Intel's auto qualified parts are in the Altera line actually made by TSMC.

Intel is still very very relevant overall to server, networking, and consumer space. Huge revenues!

Oh yeah, I've noticed that as well. Mainstream media loves talking about the general chip shortage and investment into 5nm and 3nm fabs in the same article, whether it is Intel or TSMC. The media (and the general population) seems to be fully convinced that a chip is a chip.

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