Note that the shortage now is different than the past few years: it is not in fabricating any of the primary chips, it is entirely attributed to insufficient capacity in TSMC’s CoWoS packaging. This is only used for the highest-end accelerator products that use HBM (and a few other things that use full silicon interposers like Apple’s M-Ultras), they are scaling capacity, and there are increasing numbers of alternatives from other packaging vendors that chip designers could use if they had known TSMC’s packaging would be a bottleneck. Demand spiked a lot all of a sudden, and it just takes time to build factories – there are no obvious constraints.
Exactly. This is a different stage of the pipeline.
I can't wait for copackaged optics, which will have a very similar manufacturing pipeline issue, to turn the NPU manufacturing pipelines into hell, that's surely coming and will stall performance networking for a solid year or two if CPO takes off.
I'd bet $50 in 18 months "the crunch" will still be in full swing (and Raspberry Pi will still be "bringing huge volumes to the market any week now").
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.
The Raspberry Pi wouldn't have issues if not for the fact that they are explicitly an outlet for Broadcom's excess chips, and they have never paid full price for their CPUs. If they doubled the price of the boards, they would be able to get the parts.
Increasing supply is not an issue if there is demand. As long as building more fabs brings more profit(even if at smaller margin), I can't see any reason why they won't be building it. It's economics 101. Also as moore's law is coming to end, the number of fabs has no way to go but up.
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.
>There is no way in hell all these expensive fabs will pay for themselves if chips are too cheap.
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.
> So no one (especially not TSMC) will risk oversupply by building too many fabs.
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.
I wonder how this will impact consumer gpus? If nvidia can print money making h100's you have to wonder if they will continue to invest on the retail side or if they'll funnel most of their efforts to server and let desktop parts languish.
That would be foolish. A large part of their moat is that lots of people already have Nvidia cards in their computers, making development really smooth and allowing hobbyists to easily get started and contribute to the ecosystem.
If they were to give up their consumer gpu lead and let AMD overtake them that will lead to more AMD support in ML, enabling AMD to eventually compete in the server gpu space too.
I expect nvidia to sell or close down their consumer division. Their whole business reality has changed in a few short months. Investors want undivided attention from the ceo to the new b2b cash cow.
Everyone is buying up H100's (and A100's if they can't find H100's). Sure, in 18 month people may lose interest in buying H100's but then there will already be the next Nvidia model everyone wants to buy to get ahead of the competition in terms of compute capabilities.
Read Chip Wars [1]. The cost to stand up an advanced chip fab has reached tens of billions of dollars. It’s so capital intensive that even the US Department of Defense has exited the game.
This is exactly the kind of thing that will never be open source. Any entity with the extremely high level of resources to fabricate chips at this node have zero incentive to open source anything, and no number of amateurs with 3D printers can change that.
Semiconductor manufacturing requires a lot of capital expense just to open the doors, it also requires a staff of all levels to keep the machinery working and multiple suppliers for raw materials that require multi-thousand dollar minimum orders. The process these facilities implement are fairly well understood, it’s just cost prohibitive.
If you’re trying to draw parallels between this is and, say 3D printing, you will not find many similarities. PCB fabrication is also a a different beast but a lot of people think it’s as easy as finding a fab house that takes gerber files and creates a board for them.
If we want something that more closely resembles how we develop software, we probably will need to develop processes that enables us to flash FPGAs like MCUs, make them fully read only, and allow the customer to etch their own marking onto the chip. There facilities that produce ASICs like this already, but I can see something more standardized becoming more successful for general purpose. This does however require that we have a foundry create the original chips, the difference here is that they are producing the same standardized chip for everyone which would allow any foundry to make compatible alternatives.
[+] [-] jrk|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] foobiekr|2 years ago|reply
I can't wait for copackaged optics, which will have a very similar manufacturing pipeline issue, to turn the NPU manufacturing pipelines into hell, that's surely coming and will stall performance networking for a solid year or two if CPO takes off.
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tiahura|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Roark66|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pclmulqdq|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] YetAnotherNick|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] cinntaile|2 years ago|reply
https://rpilocator.com/
[+] [-] ksec|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] _ea1k|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mschuster91|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] TradingPlaces|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wing-_-nuts|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wongarsu|2 years ago|reply
If they were to give up their consumer gpu lead and let AMD overtake them that will lead to more AMD support in ML, enabling AMD to eventually compete in the server gpu space too.
[+] [-] 654wak654|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] siva7|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] boringg|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] motoboi|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sbbq|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baz00|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dwaltrip|2 years ago|reply
——
Being a bit more fair, yes a bubble did burst then, but it was a “too much, too quick” type of bursting, not a “this whole thing is a scam” type.
[+] [-] samstave|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] everdrive|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lofaszvanitt|2 years ago|reply
This whole fabrication thing is a biiig chokepoint.
[+] [-] sloreti|2 years ago|reply
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chip_War:_The_Fight_for_the_...
[+] [-] 0_____0|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HankB99|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] samtho|2 years ago|reply
If you’re trying to draw parallels between this is and, say 3D printing, you will not find many similarities. PCB fabrication is also a a different beast but a lot of people think it’s as easy as finding a fab house that takes gerber files and creates a board for them.
If we want something that more closely resembles how we develop software, we probably will need to develop processes that enables us to flash FPGAs like MCUs, make them fully read only, and allow the customer to etch their own marking onto the chip. There facilities that produce ASICs like this already, but I can see something more standardized becoming more successful for general purpose. This does however require that we have a foundry create the original chips, the difference here is that they are producing the same standardized chip for everyone which would allow any foundry to make compatible alternatives.
[+] [-] wincy|2 years ago|reply