There is no way in hell all these expensive fabs will pay for themselves if chips are too cheap. So no one (especially not TSMC) will risk oversupply by building too many fabs.
I keep hearing this - but I've seen no evidence of any successor board. Which board would you say is now the go-to board for hobbyists?
The price/performance (+size) is about the same as for the Pi, the power draw is not as bad as with older Intel/AMD machines, and your I/O options and x86 software compatibility is vastly better.
The only drawback is that you're buying used instead of new, and that your starting price for a small home lab (albeit one that starts at 2-3x the power of a single Pi) is larger, which harms students and other makers on a shoestring budget.
Also I don't think manufacturing cost is the biggest of issue, because the margins are significantly higher than consumer GPUs which are in oversupply now for Nvidia. It's that Nvidia has to commit years in advance for the capacity.
At minimum, LLMs work as a better human-software interface medium, which means they're going to be infused in almost everything non-technical consumer-facing.
Even absent any other breakthroughs, that seems like a huge consumer of AI hardware capacity.
CM4s are still being sold for hundreds of dollars on eBay.
While this isn't exactly the case here since it is Hi-End packaging that is the problem. But I am still happy to read the statement on HN as I have been ranting about 99% of comments giving little to zero credit to current state of art chip manufacturing and cost.
Everyone and their dog is investing like crazy. Intel and TSMC are both setting up fabs in Silicon Saxony (although the question remains on how productive these will be, given the issues with the far-right in Saxony), TSMC is also expanding capacity in Arizona, and Samsung is building one in Texas.
There will be no oversupply, not for the next few years. Demand from automotive, hyperscalers, AI and pent-up consumer demand is ludicrous.
What does that have to do with anything?
California has plenty of neonazis itself. The western world in general has no lack of far right extremists.
[1] https://www.zeit.de/gesellschaft/zeitgeschehen/2018-10/recht...
This article [1] claims that there were 399 reported assaults associated with left-wing extremists, compared to 1013 associated with right-wing extremists.
Edit: and when it comes to property damage and arson, the far left is worse than the far right by about 3:1 [2]. This may be particularily relevant for companies who want to start new businesses.
[1] https://www.dw.com/en/left-wing-extremism-in-germany-how-muc...
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/963069/right-wing-left-w...
It seems like most of the US has this problem. And yet rural IT always seems to find a way. I’m in Lake Saint Louis with gigabit symmetric fiber, which is a dream. We were backwater for awhile, but post COVID a lot of talent can be sourced remotely, at least for software.
Is a fab really so regional? I could imagine them having a team in Taiwan who they work with remotely. But I know very little about fab plants, and it sounds like you have a better idea of their engineering and IT requirements.
I used to work at Groq, a hardware company, and we were fully remote. So I’ve seen this work in practice. (It’s a tossup whether Groq will succeed, but that’s a separate conversation.)
The US still benefits from latent good marketing/rep in the 80s/90s, and projection of military power in decades past. For example, until relatively recently (the Trump era and especially how it ended disillusioned many), South Koreans still looked to the US as their model of the developed world. If you'd send your children anywhere to get educated or marry, it would be there. Inner benchmarks were done against the US. The rose-tinted glasses were enough to convince many to move without checking too carefully what the place they'd be moving to would actually be like.
This is changing, and more recently more attention is being paid to Europe, partially because the national conversation has shifted more toward quality of life, birthrate problems, aging population, etc. and there's more interest in social systems, healthcare, family planning support and so on.
Still, Koreans have a lot of memes about this or that place in Europe being racist in this or that way (and of course, quite lot of it is true), so it remains a big impediment.
That seems like a 'slight' overstatement. Saxony is also full of crypto-communists (third highest polling state for Linke)...
> The main problem isn’t staffing the plant with human assembly and packaging
So why on earth are these companies building they are fabs there instead of some other place in Germany? I mean they can't be that stupid to not understand all of this?
[1] https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/fachkraeftemangel-bloss-ni...
Do they have the same issues?
I assume the open border facilitates travel somewhat.