[Kliment]

I work in this industry. Nobody is producing significantly more as a result of covid or anything else. Aggregate demand for electronics products has increased a bit, but it's not a significant change. The "skyrocketing demand" mentioned in this paper is not for electronics products, but for their components, and it's happening entirely due to a lack of visibility into future availability and demand, or, to put it more simply, a lack of confidence in the market. Device manufacturers are buying as much as they can because they don't know when they'll be able to buy again. Component manufacturers are not expanding production because they don't know when the rush buying will end and everyone will produce from stockpiled material. This is primarily a confidence problem (caused primarily by automotive manufacturers being absolute shits to their suppliers). The total production volumes of electronic devices have not increased by any significant amount. Many manufacturers are actually producing less now than pre-pandemic, simply because they can't produce more due to shortages.

[ramshanker]

This is also my suspicion. Further, since ALL the GPUs are being eaten up by crypto miners, people are calling it Unpresented demand. As for when It shall end? My take is when Ethernum switches to Proof of Stake model. By keeping the switch 6 months away forever, they hare in a way hindering the creation of ASIC miners, forcing everyone to use GPUs..... Once all those crypto GUPs reinter the gaming market, half the computer side supply problems would be gone.

[irthomasthomas]

How do crypto miners make use of the GPU's now? I did the sums some weeks ago, and even assuming free electric, the inflated price of the cards made it very difficult to become profitable. Best case, it's like 2 years before you break even

[svnt]

When markets only go up they bank on appreciation of the underlying cryptocurrency, and the ability to resell hardware into a scalped market when done.

[terafo]

It is definitely not only crypto miners. Gaming market exploded like crazy. PS5 is somewhere in 800$ price range, for example.

[gilbetron]

The toilet paper shortage writ in silicon.

[rocqua]

I have read, regarding the GPU shortage, that silicon wafers are in short supply. Is that true? If so, how does it square with actual component production not rising? Are people that high in the supply-chain stockpiling silicon?

[Kliment]

Component production cannot profitably increase because there is no increased total demand. Everyone is buying everything they can just to make sure they can produce, but they're not actually producing more. Component producers know this and that at some point this artificial demand due to stockpiling will fall off a cliff, and they'll be left sitting on underutilized massively expensive production equipment if they increase volumes. Besides, with the current stockpile-driven demand they can ask higher prices. This is why component production is not, and will not, rise.

GPU shortages are driven by a number of factors, and almost none of them are to do with component production (or wafers). There's a big scalper problem for GPUs, where some assholes will buy every GPU they can find and then resell them at a huge markup to either (increasingly desperate) end users and system integrators, or, increasingly, to cryptofuckers who will pay much more than legitimate users to ride their bubble. This means that even if there's plenty of production, unless the production can outspend the scalpers' total capital, it's all going to be swallowed up.

There's no general wafer shortage, but the highest grade wafers that get used in the highest end production have long lead times (because the fabs that use them reserve them way ahead of time). Wafer availability is not a bottleneck since the smallest nodes have such low capacity to start with. What has happened is that wafers have gone up in price in response to the general stockpiling behavior, but the high end stuff (including high-end GPUs) don't care as the wafer cost is basically negligible to them compared to all the process costs.

[raxxorrax]

Or production is on forced holiday because we are lacking µC (ST) for our devices. So it is not only future demand or high tech components, part of it is already here.

[Kliment]

If you need help with redesigning your devices to be manufacturable with what's available now, poke me, maybe I can help. I've been doing this sort of shit for over a year now. It's not fun, but it's saved a number of products.

[raxxorrax]

Thank you for the offer. We were just starting to work on that and we have enough engineering power. We though that chips would become available again sooner and it is more about production planning and not wanting to start another model series.

Business is good otherwise we are not in danger of going out of business. But for people in production this is a cut of their income. We did get some supplies though and are expected to restart full production the week after next. Still crazy it happened at all. We never had a supply problem like this. We certainly will try to eliminate the bottleneck though.