Decoder: eine Podcast-Stunde über die anhaltende Chip-Knappheit
Wie es zur Chip-Knappheit kam, warum sie anhält und wie die komplizierte Lieferkette aussieht, erfährt man in der aktuellen Episode des Decoder-Podcasts (oder aus seinem Transkript).
Well, I think you highlighted a very important point: there are really two different worlds. There is the leading edge, as you described. And that is mostly chips that go into smartphones, computers, data-center stuff, and high-performance chips. A large part of the world uses older process technologies. Sometimes they’re five or six generations older than what you find in your Apple iPhone. And so those chips are much cheaper to make because the technology is less demanding and the equipment is already fully depreciated. It’s already paid for. So those are much more commodity chips.
Now, even in your iPhone, you will have commodity chips like a power management chip or a display driver chip. In an iPhone it will be a little bit different, but your TV set will use display driver chips. Or there’s a category of chips which have been around for as long as integrated circuits have been around, called timer counter chips. I tried to buy some for a design exercise we do at the Harvard Business School this past year. I buy them every year. I never had trouble getting them until this year. So a lot of those old chips are older technology and they are commodities. They’re cheap. Sometimes they’re as little as 50 cents for a chip, or a dollar. And they’re a commodity and they’re not very profitable.
Apple fehlen laut Tim Cook exakt diese „legacy“ (low-performance) Chips.
Most of our issue is on legacy nodes, and so on legacy nodes, there are many different people, not only in the same industry, but across other industries that are using legacy nodes. And so in order to really answer that question accurately, we would need to know the true demand from each of these players and how that’s going to change over the next few months. And so it’s very, very difficult to give you a good answer. I think we have a good handle on our demand, but you know, what everybody else is doing, I don’t know. And so we will do our best. That’s what I can tell you.