Global Chip Shortage Threatens Production of Laptops, Smartphones and More


Crown? That implies a supreme chipmaker. I would think diversification of supply chains might be desirable.

Korea will probably be able to compete. They copied the Trinitron with great success. Their labor might be getting expensive though.
 
“Now I have some bad news. Pinebook Pro production will be placed temporarily on halt. The current component shortages make it very difficult to source the necessary parts to continue with the manufacture. The production team has done a lot of research in an effort to pump out another batch in late Q2 or early Q3, but ultimately chose against proceeding. In short, even if we resorted to work-arounds and use alternative parts and electronics, the end-result would be one of many compromises, which simply wouldn’t be fair to our community. On top of this we would have to significantly increase the asking price for the Pinebook Pro. I know that this is disappointing news but ultimately it is also the right call.

If you are on a fence whether you want to pick up a Pinebook Pro, then I strongly suggest you make a decision fast: the Pinebook Pro stock will last no longer than a few days. At present time I cannot say with confidence how long the Pinebook Pros hiatus will be, but I suspect it will be no less than 3 months before we can even start considering spinning up production again. Mind you, this statement is based on the current market situation. The component availability situation is presently very volatile and highly dynamic. The outlook may change at any time, quite literally. Rest assured that as soon as production becomes viable again, I’ll make sure to let everyone know.” - https://www.pine64.org/2021/05/15/may-update-connection-established/
 
I agree with the slashdot comments. Take money from the poor... give (not lending, giving) it to the rich.
 
“Now I have some bad news. Pinebook Pro production will be placed temporarily on halt. The current component shortages make it very difficult to source the necessary parts to continue with the manufacture. The production team has done a lot of research in an effort to pump out another batch in late Q2 or early Q3, but ultimately chose against proceeding. In short, even if we resorted to work-arounds and use alternative parts and electronics, the end-result would be one of many compromises, which simply wouldn’t be fair to our community. On top of this we would have to significantly increase the asking price for the Pinebook Pro. I know that this is disappointing news but ultimately it is also the right call.

If you are on a fence whether you want to pick up a Pinebook Pro, then I strongly suggest you make a decision fast: the Pinebook Pro stock will last no longer than a few days. At present time I cannot say with confidence how long the Pinebook Pros hiatus will be, but I suspect it will be no less than 3 months before we can even start considering spinning up production again. Mind you, this statement is based on the current market situation. The component availability situation is presently very volatile and highly dynamic. The outlook may change at any time, quite literally. Rest assured that as soon as production becomes viable again, I’ll make sure to let everyone know.” - https://www.pine64.org/2021/05/15/may-update-connection-established/

Maybe an alternative Laptop option for the future?


Linux support ist worked on I've read. I overall like the modular concept...except the glossy screen with only one display option so far. 3:2 aspect ratio though.
 
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Mph. We already know, that's what this thread is about. But today I tried to buy some flash chips and no way, everywhere I tried said availability in half a year. :(
Last time I tried, 10 years ago, it was just not so many places sold single units, some sold bulk, but still no problem. Now 0 stock in digikey, mouser and futureelectronics.
 
Lots of stuff at mouser are now in restricted availability, like this ridiculous Simon DIY kit:
SparkFun_Simon_Says_-_Through-Hole_Soldering_Kit-03.jpg

"Due to government regulations, Mouser is unable to sell this product in your country."
 
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I welcome globalization backfiring.

My reasoning is simple: in any geographic area of a certain size there will be many different types of people. Different types of people gravitate to different types of work. Some people like to cook. Some people like to draw. Some people like to build things. Then there are people who have no passion so they opt to make as much money as possible and become bankers. The situation I see is passionate people being forced into banking to make ends meet. I personally cannot thrive in a bank. They don't understand me. I hate them. I would be much happier soldering children's toys, if only that were viable.
 
"Due to government regulations, Mouser is unable to sell this product in your country."
How is it different from a Cuban or Venezuelan or North Korean that want to buy things online and get's the same message?

@netcat That reminds me of assignment day in the book "City of Ember".
 
Honduras and Paraguay say they’ve been offered COVID-19 vaccines by China in exchange for cutting diplomatic ties with Taiwan.


Wasn’t quite sure whether to put this here or in the COVID-19 thread. Certainly this is part of an attempt by China to gain control of the chip supply.
 
If Paraguy and Honduras were to drop diplomatic support for the independent nation of Taiwan and just treat is as part of China as the Chinese want, it wouldn't mean an immediate problem for TSMC, even if they were a big consumer of chips (I don't think they are), but it's certainly not a promising direction of travel.
 
And no fish without ships, so a chips shortage leads to a fish&chips shortage and famine. We're all gonna die !!!:p
Oh, never mind. Turns out the famine will come from ransomware, not chip shortage.
I'm joking, people can eat vegetables to their hearts content. I guess farm animals just got lucky. Attacking hospitals was way worse.
I can't help thinking this shows how long and overcomplicated supply chains are and the problems of having few huge corporations doing everything.
If people sourced their meat from a nearby farm they wouldn't notice.
 
Fuck meat

Welcome to the better meat:
 
Back to chips: They already sell partially working chips. So if a core if faulty (tested in the factory), it is disabled and sold as having less cores.
This way of working was already being used for the production of the ZX Spectrum, they used half-bad RAM chips where some 64K chips had the high and some had the low RAM faulty, which was disabled. So 64/2=32K + 16K = 48k

This is a good read about that ZX era (it was only a brief time):

Note that the comments of that article might have a fallacy in respect to the 486sx being an 486dx with defective FPU.

The problem with the half-bad method is that it is risky, but if the shortage continues, it might give us extra chips what would have ended scrapped.

IBM does it the other way around, they sell you the machine with 64 cores, and only the ones you pay for are being enabled (so if you pay more, more are enabled by remote management).

Let's talk datacenters. The virtual machines do not use CPU's but timeslices of cores's, so you can assign a quarter of a core and run many machines on a single core. However, that's not all too efficient because each one of these has a separate OS running, which also requires some CPU time.

So the big solution for DataCenters, is to run containers. For example: Docker and Kubernetes. These increase some dependencies and make things more entangled. For example, upgrading the OS. And most Linux patches strongly recommend a reboot, so that's a lot of containers that need to go down. As containers do not have a v-motion style move-to-another-hardware-while-still-running, some of it is faked by making the application run multiple instances and putting a loadbalancer in front. The loadbalancer can then redirect al requests to the "other" node, while you reboot.

However, not all is perfect. Many applications can not be sliced up. Many applications require so much IO that they actually run better on dedicated hardware. Containers require a new way of making software; which is not available yet. Sure, the frontend of the application is webbased and easy to containerize. But the backend, that thing that connects to the database. That database requires so much IO that you are left with spare RAM and CPU, but your machines crawl slowly. There are some solutions, like a distributed database, where one node is used to read-only, and the other to read+write. Or use a RAM cache, but those are quite un-intelligent at the moment, unable to auto-optimize what to keep (no intelligent connection with dba_tab_modifications), what to pre-cache based on expected. This of course makes the software bigger and slower.

And that takes us to the second problem, that software is slower than in the past. It does too much redundant things. (Just try Ansible on the Pandora, loading the Python takes 15 seconds; and this has to be done for each command you input). Efficiency is not paramount anymore. Just try to create an Oracle table with "hello world" and see how much RAM and diskspace it requires to handle it. Otoh, these softwares, like say DB2, have auto-analizers that measure all incoming queries and is able to help create the required index files (which make queries much faster) for your particular case.

So from that side, the business market, there is no relieve coming. And it's worse in the consumer market, where we now have been Pavlov'ed into buying a new phone every 2 years. Because they sell you the phone plans with bundled mobile that way to maximize profit. Ah, so that means that we can expect that market to shrink and prices to go up.

Ok, this is longer than I wanted, and I'm too lazy to condense the info and delete parts to stay on-topic. Sorry for that.
 
And it's worse in the consumer market, where we now have been Pavlov'ed into buying a new phone every 2 years. Because they sell you the phone plans with bundled mobile that way to maximize profit. Ah, so that means that we can expect that market to shrink and prices to go up.

Depends on the country but I think many more people are buying unlocked phone + cheap SIM only plan nowadays. Software update for Android phone is still an issue but overall it's getting better. No disagreeing with phone likely still getting replaced every 2/3 years in most cases.
 
Whining for kickbacks.

@FBnil you are totally right in that cloud is basically a scam.
 
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