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Comment by nemothekid | Hacker News Reader

>If you're willing to pay 10x 2019 prices you can probably get whatever chips you need. Many companies are deciding that's not worthwhile.

The problem as I understand it is a company like TSMC sells capacity for the some time period - like a year. The automakers thought people wouldn't buy cars, so they relinquished their slots. Turns out car demand exploded, so they went back to TSMC and said "hey we need those slots" and TSMC said "sorry your slot already got sold to nvidia".

Chrsyler could offer to pay TSMC 10x more, but that that ultimately wouldn't do much, the slot is gone and they would have to buy the capacity from nvidia. nvidia is in no position to sell because they are also facing extreme demand. How would it look to nvidia if, while gamers across the world can't get their hands on 3080s, they sold their fab capacity to Chrysler for $$$$?.

So money isn't solely the issue here.

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I think your simplifications could change the logic here.

Chrysler does not directly buy from TSMC, they buy from i.e. TI, Renesas, Microchip, NXP, ...

Many of those companies do still have fabs, and even if not, they are not competing with Nvidia. They are producing on the old, old fabs, at 40, even 80nm. We would need better numbers on where these microcontrollers are fabbed to be able to tell how this interferes with i.e. Nvidia and Apple on TSMC 5nm.

I think there is also a substrate shortage https://www.semi.org/en/blogs/business-markets/the-substrate...

And an Air Freight shortage even if you do pay 10x to jump the production queue https://www.wsj.com/articles/snarled-supply-chain-trips-up-s...

I'm not even sure it's strictly speaking still true that automotive only uses outdated fabs. Tesla seems to have disrupted the use of low-end chips at least in high end cars, like Jaguar Land Rover.

I think they have a pretty wide spectrum - your ABS controller will probably be on older node than the processor for the entertainment system.

Change "probably" to "definitely" and I'm with you. Automotive chips need to be a lot more reliable than a PS5 GPU, and that kind of reliability takes time to test and prove. Not to mention that automakers try not to change parts unnecessarily because their economies of scale are only as useful as their ability to use one component across several models and years. If you care little about thermal efficiency and power consumption, and you're not doing extremely abstract computations, there's no reason whatsoever to spend tons of money on a smaller lithography. I was looking into this recently, and the price difference between some of the equipment involved is around two orders of magnitude from the leading edge to the trailing edge.

Not even 80nm. Most stuff in that space is 130nm+, some extremely old, but still produced ICs from early nineties are on 300nm+ for use on equally old automotive parts.

Not to detract from what you're saying but gamers aren't getting the cards anyway; they're going to bitcoin miners.

No, they're not going to Bitcoin miners. Ethereum miners, sure.

It seems inevitable that "bitcoin" (as opposed to "Bitcoin") is destined to become the "kleenex" (as opposed to "Kleenex") of crypto.

Etherium fits the bill: it's a digital (bit) currency (coin).

There's already a generic word: crypto/virtual currency. But Bitcoin itself isn't mined with GPUs. You can blame other cryptos for that shortage.

There's a generic word for facial tissues, too. Language doesn't care about the semantics.

I've never heard of other crypto currencies referred to as Bitcoin by anyone other than noobs. It's like calling the Mexican Peso a Dollar. The semantics are important - i.e. for doing something like currency conversions.

That's exactly my point.

The "noobs" will always outnumber the knowledgeable in-crowd. They are the ones who will—ahem—coin the generic term.

Are we noobs here or is this a tech forum where people might reasonably be expected to know the difference between Bitcoin and Ethereum? I'd argue it's the latter.

You can't say that Bitcoin is responsible in a discussion about GPU shortages. It's flat-out wrong and obfuscates the actual problem. It's Ethereum that's mostly responsible for said shortage, and seeing as how Ethereum is moving to proof of stake soon that problem might be alleviated. Bitcoin uses all custom hardware for mining and is not affecting the GPU shortage. The problem with Bitcoin mining is power consumption, not chip contention.

I was making a parallel point about language. Your "well aaaackshually" derailed it.

The generic word for non Bitcoin crypto is alt(ernative)coin. People are mining altcoins with GPUs.

Nope. That's still an in-context word.

The generic word will be whatever John Q. Public with zero knowledge or care calls it.

That will be actually fun. Make a company invest in some random crypto coins, presents movements. Just call all of them bitcoin... Argue that at this point it is generic name... Skim your fees from top.

If you look at the concurrent user numbers on Steam, it seems like there's overwhelming engagement in the gaming space right now. I thought the same as you until I looked into it a bit more.

(Also, bitcoin is mined on ASICs nowadays, but I get what you mean.)

People are gaming but they do it on old hardware. Barely anyone I know has bought new hardware in years but they still game more than ever.

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